The Forgotten Financiers of the Louisiana Purchase: European Bankers, the Us, and the Rise of International Finance

This book provides a comprehensive account of how the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 was financed. Where existing research has focused predominantly on the political and diplomatic significance of the Purchase, this book demonstrates the importance of the Purchase to global financial history.

The book provides context and background for the Louisiana Purchase and examines the role of key actors and companies, focusing particularly on the ’forgotten financiers’ of the Purchase - individuals from the US, France and the UK including Alexander Baring, Albert Gallatin, Pierre Cesar Labouchere and Francois Barbe-Marbois. Based on extensive, original archival research, the chapters will illuminate the role played by these individuals in bringing about financial innovation and facilitating a major transaction that doubled the size of the original United States and helped set the country on a path to global power. The book will be a valuable resource for historians of Europe and America, particularly those with interests in economic and financial history, as well as banking and finance scholars who are interested in the emergence of large-scale international finance in the 19th century.

Larry Neal is Emeritus Professor of Economics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and Fellow, Royal Historical Society, Cliometrics Society, and the Economic History Association. He has been the recipient of fellowships from the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung (1982) when he visited the University of Paderborn in Germany, as well as the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the Fulbright Commission (1996-97) when he visited The London School of Economics and Political Science. He was a visiting professor at the California Institute of Technology in 1998 and at UCLA in 2008. From 2005 to 2014, he was a Visiting Professor at the London School of Economics.