Gérard Chastagnaret
This contribution comes not from a specialist in banking history but from a historian of the nineteenth-century Mediterranean economy, specifically oriented towards mining and metalworking. What I had been asked for was a general presentation of the economic evolution of the Mediterranean area in the course of the century. An overall answer ran the risk of dealing with platitudes and all too well-known generalities. That is why my chapter will deliberately avoid waymarked footpaths, with the sole concern of helping to broaden common reflection.
Prevailing representations of the financial history of the Mediterranean area favour two themes, linked together in some respects. The first is about public funds, with the structural imbalance between resources and necessities, debt in multiple forms and denominations but with shared consequences, the spiral of debt, that is to say the impossibility to face often drastic obligations, and, according to the degree of autonomy of the States, bankruptcy, elegantly termed conversion or debt consolidation, or the putting under supervision generally reserved to the East or the South of the Mediterranean. Spain was able to convert in 1851 and 1881. Greece, right at the end of the century, saw its public funds pass under international supervision.1
The second theme is great projects – or great programmes as they are called today. Two emblematic ones are the railway, mainly European until the Bagdadbahn idea, and of course the Suez Canal. In both cases, and in spite of certain illusions mainly in Spain, investments were out of proportion to the resources of the area concerned, and the outside capital brought into play was tied to an associated logic in terms of warranties, of mining concessions or of synergies with other activities. Both the railway and the Suez Canal were closely linked with Saint-Simonian ideas, the importance of which in the involvement of European capital throughout the Mediterranean area is well known. As an example, here is what Michel Chevalier wrote in 1832 about the ‘Système de la Méditerranée’, which was in fact an internal transport system in the Mediterranean, for uniting this area to the rest of Europe and mainly England:
Le plus haut avantage de cette communication (the railway between Le Havre and Marseilles) serait sans doute l’ouverture à l’Angleterre des rives de la Méditerranée. L’industrie jouera un beau rôle dans la régénération des peuples méditerranéens. La reine de l’industrie, l’Angleterre, ne saurait manquer d’apparaître avec éclat dans les pacifiques croisades qui s’ébranleront en Occident pour aller relever l’Orient à demi enseveli sous des monceaux de ruines. Le chemin de fer du Havre à Marseille sera comme un pont jeté au dessus de la France pour le passage de la puissante Albion, de ses ingénieurs et de ses trésors.2
My purpose is not to dispute the priority of these great themes, something well established for specialists in financial history. I am not even going to insist on the continuance of another Mediterranean, still today living, in its infinitely longer duration in the Braudelian sense, by the rhythm of the seasons, on land, river and sea. My terrain will be the anchoring of the Mediterranean in the movement of the international economy, as I attempt to underline other aspects, less spectacular but important in themselves. These aspects call for another view of the nineteenth century, as not only the period of great accomplishments and great episodes of debt, not just the second half or even the last quarter of the century, but a whole century’s span that furnishes the roots for the big business of modern times. My paper will therefore be voluntarily unbalanced in favour of the first half of the century, to the detriment of the major preoccupations of the financial historians of the nineteenth century. Taking my stand mainly on works I have been lucky to supervise in the course of the last 15 years, I will limit myself to the discussion of two points. I will first deal with the opportunities of that first nineteenth century, taking into consideration the setbacks compared with the preceding century and the emergence of new opportunities. Then, starting from a few examples, I will mention the capacity of some protagonists from inside or outside the area to take into account a new situation, different from the one prevailing at the end of the eighteenth century, but also different from the balance reached at the end of the nineteenth century. Fundamentally, I will try to show that there is no unique answer to a simple question: where and how to make a fortune in the Mediterranean in the nineteenth century?
The prosperity of the Mediterranean in the eighteenth century had been built mainly on trading foundations. Contrary to accepted opinion, the early nineteenth century does not make them disappear; but it brings about a broadening and a new hierarchy of opportunities.
The eighteenth-century Mediterranean had known a real trading peak, marked by the vitality of intra-Mediterranean trade and of the Atlantic commerce with the last great phase of Spain’s American Empire. Two ports symbolize that great period. One is Marseilles, with its merchants who succeed in giving it world importance and with the seamen of the region, including those of Saint Tropez so active on the ‘sea caravan’ of the Ottoman Empire. The other port is Cadiz, on the Atlantic of course, but so fundamental for the Mediterranean economy: incoming trade of precious metals, flow of goods, shipping business, brokerage and marine insurance, deals in negotiable instruments, arbitration on currency made Cadiz a major pole of world exchange even after the founding of free commerce in 1778.3 That trading prosperity was jeopardized by the crisis of the end of the century with the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars and at last by the Continental System. The fate of the Cadiz trade was sealed by the disappearance of the Spanish Empire of America, while the Marseilles trade could not regain its splendour, and sank into grieving mostly about its lost Colbertian exemption from custom duties.4 In Marseilles as in Cadiz, some recently powerful firms tried to survive on financial activities no longer founded on goods.
The setback was real, affecting at the same time the areas in the Mediterranean and Europe and the activities. However, this should not mask the progressive revitalizing of trading activities in particular regions of the Mediterranean as well as Europe. The start of colonization in Algeria helped create a southern route that often passed through Spanish ports. A new trade connected food products from cereals to raisins and products of the nascent industry in the ports of Mediterranean Europe. Commerce was no longer based on access to the important American trade and on the role of Cadiz but on the constitution or reconstitution of networks and on a real splitting of centres of interest in terms of routes and especially products. Starting from the 1830s, Cadiz even recovered a certain activity owing to its role as port of call and hub between three areas: the Mediterranean, North and South America and Northern Europe.
Public debt was not of course a novelty of the century. Thus, the Spanish monarchy of the Age of Enlightenment created the ‘vales reales’, refunding which was one of the problems bequeathed to the following century; but the nineteenth century brought about two novelties, apparently antagonistic, linked to political disturbances and ruptures. The first one was the rise of indebtedness which might be directly linked to national struggles – for example in the case of Greece – or made more patent by the creation of new States: unified Italy took upon itself all previous national debts. In addition, there were the effects of civil wars such as the First Carlist War in Spain from 1833 to 1840. Indebtedness was in fact more deeply linked to the gap between, on the one hand, the cost of building and running modern State machinery conceived on, for example, the French Napoleonic model, and on the other, the financial resources of each country. Hence a number of aberrations: the modern Spanish civil service, whose foundations were laid at the end of Ferdinand VII’s reign, lacked much of the basics, from teachers to tax collectors.5
In such cases, for lenders, risk increased in proportion with opportunity. It was heightened further by political factors and because a State could refuse to honour debts of the past: the loans of the Cortes in Spain and those for the independence of Greece plagued these countries’ financial relationships with European centres.6 Debt was an opportunity which was strongly marked regionally. One must avoid any form of anachronism: in the Mediterranean, until the middle of the century, debt concerned above all the European shores; the theme of Ottoman and Egyptian debt is of much later date.7 On the other hand, debt already showed a characteristic which was to be found in Egypt: it was a very selective opportunity, depending on guarantees or closeness to political leaders.
After underrating it for a long time or even ignoring it, historians have finally, in the last 15 years, come to apprise the movement of industrialization of the Mediterranean, in the complexities of its foundations, in the diversity of its realizations, in its rhythms and its geographical extensions.8 It concerned every field of activity: food, chemical, textile and metallurgical industries. Marseilles was often called ‘the city of metals and steam’ during the first half of the century.9 The new firms certainly took advantage of opportunities in labour and in terms of costs and know-how, but in fact they attached great importance to technical innovations, mainly due to the often lasting settlement of British technicians to be found from Seville to Salonica.10 Industry also rested upon opportunities in the circulation of raw materials or in access to markets with different features after conquering a national market – as in the case of Catalan textiles – up to a strategy of interlocked commercial areas, local, regional, national, and international, in this case inside or outside the Mediterranean. This can be seen in Marseilles with work done under the customs regime of the ‘fictitious wharf’ or, as early as the middle of the century, in the first industrialization of the island of Syros. Finally, in some cases, especially for metallurgy, in Genoa as early as the 1840s and in Piraeus during the 1860s, the State gave strong support to the emergence of new industries.
Far from being an area left aside from industrialization, the Mediterranean was a rather early advance post, but an advance post whose opportunities were hard to make out, between the illusions of easiness and virgin areas and the fear of outside competition, particularly British. Undertakings had simultaneously to bring together familiarity with the terrain, a certain financial capacity and a technical and commercial openness to the outside world.
I will close this quick survey on the theme generally considered as a preliminary to the analysis of an economy: raw materials. I have deliberately inverted the sequence because raw materials was the last theme to assert itself and above all because it was autonomous with regard to the theme of industry. The theme of raw materials is far from being restricted to Egyptian cotton, whose importance was enhanced by the euphoria of the early 1860s. Even before that date, the Mediterranean played its part on the scene of mineral raw materials in three different fields of activity:
• chemistry, with sulphur from Sicily and then from Huelva after the 1850s, and manganese peroxide, again from Huelva, for the bleaching of textiles;
• non-ferrous metals, with lead from the South-East of Spain, which ranked the country as second producer and first exporter in the world as early as the end of the 1820s, with zinc from the Cantabrian region from the 1850s;
• precious metals. The presence of the Mediterranean in this field was twofold: first it was indirect, with mercury from Idria and above all Almadén; it became direct with the discovery in 1838 and 1844 of two silver-bearing basins in Spain, one in the south-east, the other in the middle of the Castilian meseta. The 1840s were characterized by a real cycle of silver in the Mediterranean, modestly followed by silver obtained from silver-bearing lead as from the 1850s.11
These opportunities were at first commercial, with hazards of various kinds. Some of them depended on the overall economic situation and on the structure of the market: the example of zinc is quite revealing in this respect.12 Others were linked to access to the product itself: in that case, a distinction has to be drawn between the State producer, which was rigid, impecunious and susceptible to personal scheming – for mercury and lead until the 1820s, and even for Sicilian sulphur – and the private producer, often unable to finance the cycle of production. To enter into production might itself appear as a form of safety, even a necessity and a source of profit; above all, it was full of constraints, in terms of law, of knowledge of the raw material, of the local ground and of difficulties of transport.
Thus the Mediterranean did not wait for the railway, for Suez or for Egyptian cotton to emerge as an area of financial opportunity. But it is true that, despite the Saint-Simonian paeans, the Mediterranean terrain became less decipherable than in the eighteenth century, and that the diversification of opportunities went along with constraints which give evidence of a great change in the rules of the game.
How did the various protagonists, the traders, industrialists and financiers, interpret this new situation, and what decisions did they then make? I have no intention of giving a complete review of the thinking and of the trading, industrial and financial strategies in the Mediterranean area. I will just suggest an outline of the typology of the answers given then by a number of protagonists, without favouring any particular reading or decision-making profile in the whole range of ‘capitalistic’ behaviours of the time.
This attitude, which is a priori very hard to detect because it is expressed by a lack of initiative, is more widespread than is often thought. People give up business because they do not know how to go on doing business within structures they no longer understand. The most straightforward example is that of the trade linked with colonial America. The French colony of Cadiz did not understand that the world that allowed it to exist had ended.13 Its members tried in particular to find refuge in arbitrage on currencies, but this arbitrage could not replace an activity based on goods. After having vainly waited for a return to the former colonial order, some went back to France for good, while others spread out in the country they had settled in, often becoming landowners thanks to the first sales of entailed estates. No name of a trader from Cadiz appears in the south-east trade or in the mining industry, which was only a few hundred kilometres away.
National debt and mines were the privileged fields of this type of behaviour, fields which were sometimes intermingled. Wheeler-dealers and financiers were mainly interested in the exploiting State. Thus, the Rothschilds made use of the financial needs of the Spanish State to get, as guarantee for loans, the monopoly of the largest mercury mine in the world, owned by the Crown, and thus control the production of precious metals.14 This was a no-risk loan with side advantages. Spain, too, experienced another way of limiting the risk of national debt: closeness with the government, to be extremely popular a few decades later in khedival Egypt. Alejandro Aguado, an exile ‘afrancesado’ in Paris at the time of the Restoration, established himself, thanks to his manoeuvring with some of the most reactionary people in Ferdinand VII’s entourage, as an indispensable mediator for finding funds abroad, and built up such a fortune as to make him a byword for wealth in 1830s Paris.15 A few years later, options in favour of floating debt and to the detriment of long-term debt gave rise to a Madrid financial circle made up, at first, of speculators linked to the Royal ‘camarilla’. Foreign lenders, especially French ones, bore the brunt of the Bravo Murillo debt conversion in 1851.16
In the case of mines, the privileged relationship with the State, highlighted through the 1830s by the resurgence of the old practices of the asiento, played the part of eliminating market rules, enabling ores to be acquired on exceptional terms and monopolies to be set up. Besides the example of mercury, there is another one: that of Luis Figueroa, ex Napoleonic officer and a ‘half-pay’ refugee in Marseilles. He was the founder of a family that was to become the most powerful financial and political dynasty in Spain in the early twentieth century. He started his dazzling career around 1820 with his largely fraudulent destocking of enormous quantities of lead ore which had been amassed in the Crown mines over several decades. The political and financial crisis encouraged a return to old practices.17 These were threatened, a few years later, by the creation of a legal framework for private enterprise in mining, and Figueroa was very annoyed by this introduction of a modest liberalism.18
The Mediterranean did not launch any really large operations towards the New World, but from Alexandria to Livorno, from Marseilles to Alicante, some people or families took up business – sometimes specialized but more often not. The East of the Mediterranean took an active part in this movement as early as the 1820s, with the diaspora of families from Chios towards the Black Sea, towards the new town of Hermoupolis on the island of Syros, towards Egypt, Marseilles, with, among others, the Rodocanachis, and, beyond the Mediterranean, towards Great Britain. During the 1840s, there was also the example of the settling in Alexandria of a family from Syrian Tripolitania.19 However, the example I wish to dwell on to illustrate what I mean about the attractiveness of the Mediterranean trade is a family that did not belong to the region, but whose commitment was most important on several accounts: the Rothschilds.
Recent research on the relationship, from 1843 to the beginning of the 1860s, between the Rothschilds from Paris and their correspondent in Cartagena, Hilarion Roux, son of the president of the Roux de Fraissinet bank, who was their main correspondent in Marseilles, shows how that young man was solicited far beyond the main objective of his settling in Cartagena, namely the purchase of silver metal, the south-east of Spain being then a new mining area. Indeed, for the Rothschilds, purchasing precious metals was essential, but they also demanded of their correspondent that he should look for lucrative commercial paper and inquire about all possible commercial transactions on every sort of goods. Thus, in 1846, they expressed their strong discontent because they had not been associated as partners in providing fodder and foodstuffs to the French Army in Algeria, even though supplier credits had been passed through their bank.
During the 1850s, the Rothschilds became, for Le Havre or the English market, important buyers of lead, which had replaced silver as the main metallurgical production in Cartagena; but they can be seen to be interested, even in minute details, in the most various trades. They insisted on having detailed information on sea links and cargo costs from the Mediterranean ports to London or the United States. One of the annual subjects of their correspondence, for example, was the export, in May and June, of a large part of the local barley crop to Britain.20 Trade did not bring exceptional business: except in the case of the metal industry, local needs for credit were not large and commercial transactions were somewhat sporadic, but on the other hand risks were limited, and thanks to the mere organization of a strategy of wakefulness in looking for opportunities, the Mediterranean appeared as a profitable region, always in progress and therefore worthy of interest.
During the second half of the century, transport became the privileged field of foreign investment. But was this really a move of capitalist interests from some previous industrial investment? The answer must be subtle. The prospect of immobilizing capital in mines or industries in fact brought several sorts of reaction.
The first reaction, which is difficult to perceive, was refusal to invest. It often came from speculators who did not want to bet on the long or even short term. It might also come from a wrong assessment of the situation. For instance, the Rothschilds from Paris, who founded the MZA rail network of 1855, were able in previous decades to totally oppose the idea of immobilizing funds in an industrial activity in the peninsula, even producing silver. They took no action concerning the suggestion jointly made by their young agent in Cartagena, Hilarion Roux, and their correspondent in Madrid, Weisweiller, to become metal founders in Cartagena by foreclosing on a mortgage, for a loan which had not been paid back, the collateral being an important and modern silver foundry created by a bold but under-capitalized company from Lyon.21 This cautious policy was undoubtedly because of a contemporary failure in the same activity in the town of Alicante, but in this case the Parisian company was particularly short-sighted: the Rothschilds would have to wait until 1913 to control, through the Peñarroya society, a plant which during the second half of the century became one of the most important lead plants in the Mediterranean.22
Quite opposite was the second attitude: it was commitment, despite gross errors of estimation on the prospects or the means to implement them. This situation was not, of course, specific to the early nineteenth-century Mediterranean, but it seems to me that it was here favoured by two phenomena. The first was the above-mentioned difficulty in understanding the Mediterranean area; the second was a sort of sensitivity – mainly found among young engineers – to a certain Mediterranean dream of a romantic or Saint-Simonian type. I will here give just two examples, taken from the field I am most familiar with: mining and metallurgy. The first example is Belgian: it is the one of the Real Compañía Asturiana de Minas de carbón, created in 1834 by businessmen from Liège. The foundation of this company was based on a triple illusion: the quality of Asturias coal, the dynamism of Mediterranean demand and the possibility of competing with English coal thanks to a relative maritime proximity.23 The second example is French: the Société française des pyrites de Huelva. The founder, Deligny, a young railway engineer, very enthusiastic over discovering the masses of pyrites praised by Lord Byron, in 1853 created an ambitious company, which was nevertheless doomed to fail because it was unaware of the main problem: transport.24
Beside these behaviours of refusal, dismissal or error, other practices combined industrial commitment and clear-mindedness. At the end of the 1830s, the rising metallurgy in Marseilles aroused the interest of local and foreign capitalists in industrial investment. If self-financing was important, limited-partnership companies owed a lot to local and Parisian capitalism: in 1839, Louis Benet was thus able, with Joseph Roux, Paulin Talabot and James de Rothschild, to create a partnership for his plants in Marseilles and La Ciotat with a capital of 900,000 F, eligible to be increased by 50 per cent.25 In Cartagena in 1846, the Marseilles company Roux de Fraissinet did not let slip an opportunity similar to the one refused by the Rothschilds two years before: thanks to a mortgage loan – not paid back – for a sum certainly worth less than a quarter of the value of the collateral, the company became the owner of a lead foundry built by another company, from Lyon.26 To a lesser degree, the Eastern Mediterranean offers similar examples from the early industry of Hermoupolis, Piraeus or Alexandria, in such cases as the tanning, flour-milling and textile industries.27
The Mediterranean area of the first two thirds of the century was no longer that of big trade and not yet that of big financial business, but it was still – or was again – a dynamic area in several sectors, from trade to finance and industry. In each of these fields, the part played by local or regional partners must not be underestimated: in all parts of the Mediterranean, there was not only commercial and financial know-how, but also great business astuteness, abridged plans to accumulate capital by speculating, and the proximity of the government. True watching practices on various opportunities can be seen happening everywhere. The best-known examples come from the Mediterranean East, but the phenomenon was in fact widespread. Differences from one region to another were the basis for initiatives, the stuff of ambition: trade was indeed found everywhere, but Spain, with the loss of its colonies, had lost pre-eminence, replaced by speculation with the State – desamortizaciones and national debt – but also by mines and, especially in Catalonia, by industry.
Inside the Mediterranean area, geographical balances and imbalances were no longer those of the previous century, but they must not be confused with those of the following decades. Trade was indeed everywhere, but the Levant and especially Egypt were not yet attractive for the East of the Mediterranean: the Suez Canal still remained to be built. In the West, Cadiz could only display its baroque architecture as a testimony of its lost splendour, but Marseilles became industrialized, as did Barcelona and Genoa, and the colonization of Algeria was becoming quite important. Lastly, before the organization of mass mining extraction in the last third of the century, a first cycle of precious and non-ferrous metals made the Iberian peninsula a source of quick fortunes and a basis for national and foreign precursors: it did indeed attract fortune-seekers and crooks, but also intelligent and wealthy people. The Mediterranean remained a focused-upon area, but it still focused westwards. But the turn towards the East was not long in coming. It can be dated differently according to various indicators, but it was definitely prior to the opening of the Suez Canal, and certainly prior to the cotton boom of the American Civil War. If there is no precise date, there is an indicator, which is indeed too early but also meaningful for itself, since it comes from parental strategies to provide for a progeny’s future and fortune. In the middle of the century, two businessmen from Marseilles each sent one of their children to a Mediterranean port. At the end of 1842, Joseph Roux, president of the ‘Roux de Fraissinet’ bank and the Rothschilds’ correspondent in Marseilles, sent his son Julien Hilarion to Cartagena, on the maritime route to Algeria, and above all in the silver country. At the beginning of the following decade, Egypt was the target country for Edouard Dervieu.28
During the 1850s and 1860s, the Mediterranean, as we know, met with a new boost and a real revival of its dynamics in several fields: seaways, railways, mines, industrialization. Some protagonists of the previous period were, however, less responsive to the new promises than to the limits of the Mediterranean. One evening in May 1861, Hilarion Roux, who still had promising plans ahead, from Spain to Greece, wrote to the Rothschilds to tell them they should get interested in Cambodia, as though the Mediterranean area was to stop being promising.
The early nineteenth century was a more important time than usually believed for the economic importance of the Mediterranean; but it was also a limited time, rapidly outdated, as the whole of the Mediterranean nineteenth century would be a few decades later.
1 On Spain, see A. Broder, Le rôle des intérêts économiques étrangers dans la croissance économique de l’Espagne au XIXe siècle, thèse d’Etat, Paris I Sorbonne, 1981. For Greece, see K. Kostis, ‘Politiques financières, finances publiques et contrôle financier international en Grèce (1880-1898)’, in G. Chastagnaret (ed.), Crise espagnole et nouveau siècle en Méditerranée. Politiques publiques et mutations structurelles des économies dans l’Europe méditerranéenne (Aix en Provence, 2000), pp. 147-62.
2 M. Chevalier, ‘Le système de la Méditerranée’, series of articles published in Le Globe, 1832, p. 137.
3 On Marseille, see C. Carrière, Négociants marseillais au XVIIIe siècle. Contribution à l’étude des économies maritimes (Marseilles, 1973). About the Saint Tropez mariners’ role, see G. Buti, Activités maritimes et gens de mer à Saint Tropez (mi XVIIe-début XIXe). Contribution à l’étude des économies maritimes, thèse de doctorat d’histoire, Université de Provence, 2000. For Cadiz after 1778, see A. Bartolomei, La bourse et la vie. Destin collectif et trajectoires individuelles des marchands français de Cadix, de l’instauration du Comercio libre à la disparition de l’Empire espagnol (1778-1824), thèse d’histoire, Université de Provence, Aix en Provence, 2007.
4 See F. Demier, Nation, marché et développement dans la France de la Restauration, thèse d’Etat, Paris X Nanterre, 1992.
5 See J.-P. Luis, L’utopie réactionnaire. Epuration et modernisation de l’Etat dans l’Espagne de la fin de l’Ancien Régime, 1823-1834 (Madrid, 2003).
6 On the Spanish case, see J.-P. Luis, L’ivresse de la fortune. A. M. Aguado, un génie des affaires, Paris, Payot 2009. For Greece, see Kostis, ‘Politiques financières’.
7 See J. Thobie, Intérêts et impérialisme français dans l’Empire ottoman, 1895-1914 (Paris, 1977); and S. Saul, La France et l’Egypte de 1882 à 1914. Intérêts économiques et implications politiques (Paris, 1997).
8 See G. Chastagnaret, ‘La industria en el Mediterráneo. Una historia en construcción, in J. Nadal and A. Parejo (eds), Mediterráneo e historia económica (Almería, 2005), pp. 151-63.
9 See O. Raveux, Marseille, ville des métaux et de la vapeur (Paris, 1998).
10 O. Raveux, ‘El papel de los técnicos ingleses en la industria metalúrgica y mecánica del norte del Mediterráneo (1830-1875). Una primera aproximación’, Revista de historia industrial, 6, 1995, pp. 143-61.
11 For mining and metallurgy, see G. Chastagnaret, L’Espagne, puissance minière dans l’Europe du XIXe siècle (Madrid, 2001).
12 See G. Chastagnaret, ‘Une réussite dans l’exploitation des minerais non ferreux espagnols au XIXe siècle. La Compagnie Royale Asturienne des Mines’, in J. P. Amalric et al., Aux origines du retard économique de l’Espagne (Toulouse, 1983), pp. 81-113.
13 Bartolomei, La bourse.
14 See M. A. Lopez Morell, La Casa Rothschild en España (Madrid, 2005).
15 Luis, L’ivresse.
16 See Broder, Le rôle.
17 See G. Chastagnaret, ‘Voie paradoxale de la modernité? La résurgence de l’asiento d’établissements miniers de la Couronne à la fin de l’Ancien Régime’, in J. P. Amalric (ed.), Pouvoirs et société dans l’Espagne moderne. Hommage à Bartolomé Bennassar (Toulouse, 1993), pp. 271-82.
18 See G. Chastagnaret, ‘De Marseille à Madrid, du plomb au pouvoir d’Etat, la construction de la fortune de la Casa Figueroa’ and ‘Bourgeoisies et notables en Méditerranée (XVIIIe-XXe siècles)’, Cahiers de la Méditerranée, 46-7 (Nice, 1993), pp. 123-37.
19 See Saul, La France, pp. 5-10.
20 Information from the Rothschilds’ archives, deposited in the Centre des Archives du monde du travail de Roubaix (CAMT), dossier 132 AQ 6 P 15.
21 ‘Je pense, Monsieur, comme vous, que nous devons acheter la fonderie pour le montant de notre créance s’il ne se présente pas d’acheteurs à l’époque de l’enchère, ayant ensuite le temps de voir s’il convient aux intérêts de Messieurs de R. de faire suivre la fabrique pour leur compte ou bien de tâcher de la vendre au même prix que celui d’achat.’ Card from Hilarion Roux to Weisweiller (Madrid) on 30 April 1844, CAMT 132 AQ 6 P 15. This new foundry was built by Claude Pillet, from Lyon, in the suburb of Santa Lucía.
22 In 1843, the Rothschilds controlled two new-built silver foundries in Alicante, the Británica and the Alicantina. These bargains had been proposed to them by their local agent, Campos. Hilarion Roux was then commissioned to verify Campos’s information. See Lopez Morell, La Casa Rothschild, pp. 109-10.
23 Chastagnaret, ‘Une réussite’.
24 See S. G. Checkland, The Mines of Tharsis. Roman, French and British enterprise in Spain (London, 1967), pp. 63-111, and G. Chastagnaret, L’Espagne puissance minière dans l’Europe du XIXe siècle, Casa de Velázquez, Madrid, 2000, pp. 383-6.
25 Raveux, Marseille.
26 G. Chastagnaret, ‘Espace industriel et stratégie personnelle. Hilarion Roux et la construction d’une Méditerranée du plomb’, in P. Aubert et al. (eds), Construire des mondes. Elites et espaces en Méditerranée, XVIe-XXe siècles (Aix-en-Provence, 2005), pp. 269-87.
27 C. Agriantoni, Les débuts de l’industrialisation en Grèce (années 1870-1880), thèse d’histoire, Nanterre, 1984; and, from the same author, L’industrie grecque au XIXe siècle. Périodisation, problèmes d’intégration, in Economies méditerranéennes. Equilibres et intercommunications, XIIIe-XIXe siècles, Actes du 11e Colloque international d’histoire, Athens, 1983, vol. 2, pp. 333-42.
28 See D. Landes, Bankers and Pashas. International Finance and Economic Imperialism in Egypt (London, 1958), French translation: Banquiers et pachas. Finance internationale et impérialisme économique en Egypte (Paris, 1993).