Commodities and the role of British capital in shaping the financial markets of Sicily 1816-1861.

In this post, Alex Cooper of the University of Leicester discusses his ongoing doctoral research, supported by the EHS Research Fund for Graduate Students.

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The study concerns the British Factory, or community, in Sicily in the years which correspond with the rise and fall of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. This period came immediately after the “British Decade”, ten years of British military occupation (1806-1815), British subsidies to the exiled Bourbon monarchy in Palermo and years of intense commodity trading between the UK and Sicily. This research project poses the question of what importance the British had in influencing the development of the economy of Sicily in pre-Unification Italy. By examining the role played by British merchants and bankers in Sicily, it focuses on the flow of capital between the UK, London and the provinces, and Sicily touching on domestic and international networks of trade in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies.

The British Decade marked the apex of British presence in Sicily with the British occupation of the island and Royal Navy’s patrolling of the seas, when British and foreign merchants and bankers, many of whom had fled from Naples, Leghorn or Malta to Palermo and Messina provided a boost to the island’s economy as well as permeating the political and cultural structure of the cities where they lived. It was the decade in which admiral Nelson lived in Palermo, together with the Hamiltons, the Nobles and Abraham Gibbs, gravitating around the Bourbon court exiled there.

There were complex economic, political, and sociocultural intersecting networks of interest in Sicily. This study focuses on the fortunes of Benjamin Ingham, the richest British merchant banker after Abraham Gibb’s death in 1816. Benjamin Ingham left England in 1806 to drum up trade for the family firm in Leeds, Ingham Brothers & Co. Ingham immediately saw the potential for commodities, besides textiles, such as Marsala wine, sulphur (used in the textile industry for bleaching), shumac (used in the tanning industry) and citrus fruit. Ingham was neither a pioneer in exporting Marsala wine nor the most successful merchant at first, but he quickly became the most important in terms of production and by 1826 had enlarged his winery there, using a vast network of agents throughout Sicily but also in Malta and Naples, contacts he continued to use during his career. From 1806, Benjamin Ingham engaged in finance, offering private banking and insurance services, participating in business ventures with the most successful and ambitious local entrepreneurs such as Vincenzio Florio. Ingham and Florio set up the chemical company Porry & Co, and the Sicilian Steamboat Company in 1840. Ingham, however, died in 1861 just before Italian Unification, a multimillionaire as well as the most influential member of the British community in Sicily.

Ingham’s success was built on his meticulous attention to his own financial stability and his choice of banks and managers. Like Gibbs, Ingham had his own private bank, used the banking services of the Two Sicilies and banked with Heath & Co and Baring Brothers in London. Ingham balanced his financial outlay between his banks in Britain and Palermo, spreading his risks and investments across a variety of concerns, and rapidly moving away smaller British provincial banks to strengthening his own commercial and banking house.

The grant will allow research to be carried out in the Baring Archives in London, specifically the House Collection concerning investments in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies.  Research conducted so far in the Bank of Sicily’s archives and the Ingham-Whitaker archives, has shed light on the function of capital and capital flows between local and foreign merchants and their use of the banking structure on the island. This has revealed the wider network of private bankers and entrepreneurs who used the local money market and the instruments it offered to transfer money as “fede di credito” from one city to another, or to agents of the haute banque in Naples: Rothschild & Sons and Meuricoffre & Sorvillo, through the agents Christian Fischer and Kaisser & Kresner respectively.

In sum, being able to analyse the correspondence with Baring Brothers in Sicily with merchants like Ingham should provide a clearer picture of the British community and its significance for the economy of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies from the point of view of the London money market. The role of Baring Brothers is significant in the case of Ingham as his business involved both branches of the bank, as Ingham’s trade became increasingly international in the 19^th century. Not only were Ingham’s American investments considerable, by 1840 his commerce stretched to Sumatra and the Far East. Thus, following these capital and commodity movements a fresh interpretation can be made of the role of British capital in moulding the Sicilian economy on the eve of Unification, and the historiographical north-south divide of modern Italy.

To contact the author:

Alex Cooper

ac832@le.ac.uk

University of Leicester