The Baring Crisis Revisited

Abstract

Several accounts of the Baring crisis, 1890–7, are available.1Among these is my own, chapter xiv ofBritain and Argentina in the Nineteenth Century(Oxford, 1960), based upon the Foreign Office papers in the Public Record Office, contemporary periodical literature and secondary works such as the now little-noticed classic, J. H. Williams,Argentine International Trade under Inconvertible Paper Money, 1880–1900(Cambridge, Mass., 1920). My first purpose in exploring beyond the sources used forty years ago, in the archives of the Bank of England, Baring Brothers & Co., N. M. Rothschild, W. H. Smith and the Marquis of Salisbury, is to correct at least one error in my original work, and this unfortunately repeated by others. My second is to discover whether or not further study of archival material confirms, modifies or denies any of my first conclusions about the role of the Argentine government in the solution of the Baring crisis. The principal error corrected concerns the form of Barings' involvement in Argentine affairs in the late 1880s. They did not get into difficulties because they underwrote a large loan to the Argentine government for the purpose of expanding the water supply and sewage system of Buenos Aires. The fact is that they promoted a private enterprise which took over the water and sewage system of Buenos Aires, and this failed for a number of reasons set out below. As to my original conclusions about the Baring crisis, they have been confirmed by the archival material considered. The solution of the Baring crisis was made possible by the policies devised and enforced by the Argentine government.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 65 citations exist upstream.