UC Berkeley

Between 1801, when the London Stock Exchange was re-constituted as new, formal entity, and 1914, when WWI brought the first age of globalization to a close, financial capitalism expanded dramatically. At the beginning of the century there were only 6 formal stock exchanges in the world. By the end of it, there were almost 90. Financial markets were linked together by global telecommunications networks that allowed capital to travel at faster speeds over greater distances. Finance assumed the commanding heights not just of the economy, but also of imperial policy, as states aggressively looked to expand their informal empires through the power of the financial sector. But rather than focusing on the subjects that typically populate the financial histories of this era—the great banking families of Baring and Rothschild who floated sovereign loans and bailed out troubled states, the stockbrokers who jostled for space and profits on trading floors throughout the world, or the ebbs and flows of capital and asset prices—this dissertation tells the story of the men, women, and things who made the actions of financiers possible. Whether it was the human infrastructures of the waiters, porters, and telegraph boys who facilitated the communications between financiers, the clerks, journalists, and statisticians who provided the information and data financiers needed to make investment decisions, or the material infrastructures of telegraphs, ticker tapes, telephones, electrical circuits, batteries, and cables through which those communications and data travelled, the act of exchange was always at the mercy of the infrastructures that underpinned it. Telling a financial history that focuses on infrastructures rather than the act of exchange, changes our understanding of financial power in two ways. First, this dissertation shows how certain, powerful institutions and firms, like the London Stock Exchange, gradually began to exercise infrastructural power over states and societies by co-opting the underlying infrastructures upon which financial exchange depended. The rise of financial capitalism depended not on a lifting out or abstraction of previously personal and traditional modes of exchange but was far more about the ways finance seized hold of mundane infrastructures—like the ostensibly public infrastructure of the telegraph—and co-opted them towards financialized logics. Second, an infrastructural history of finance also restores agency to our understanding of financial history, that all too often relies on myths of the power of great men or of efficient markets. Instead, this dissertation shows how even the smallest and seemingly least powerful actors could have outsized effects on the financial system through their control over the mechanics and operations of the infrastructures of finance.