Questioning American History

Not too long ago I finally finished Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now [1875] after what seemed like a million days on the train, and it asked me a question (yes, it talks): How much of the American enterprise was built with British (imperial) capital? The premise of Trollope’s (English) story is the rise and fall of a Nineteenth-century financier trying to make a quick buck under the table by pumping up stock in a North American railroad. Obviously parallel to (if not directly based on) the whole Credit Mobilier thing (i.e. the swindle that eventually turned into the trans-continental railroad,) it’s based on the willingness of investors from the home country to sink their money into high-yield schemes in the Wild West.

It occurred to me that I’d heard this story before. J.P. Morgan, the quintessential robber baron, made his money as the New York outpost of his father’s London banking house. In other words, the basic source of his business was channeling British investments into high-yield American industry. He, of course, was not alone. (Who was in Germany?) I haven’t been able to find good numbers, but it seems that much of the seed money for Messrs. Gould, Fisk, and Carnegie (how much Imperial interest was there in the Pennsylvania Railroad?) came from sources elsewhere, maybe even from the India trade. It’s kind of a new wrinkle in mythic history if the lords of the sanctimonious Union during Reconstruction were building their house with the proceeds of forced labor in Calcutta under the Raj.

There’s a modern parallel here somewhere. It might be all of the foreign investment capital that parks itself in the U.S. as a safe haven once it’s been stolen from its rightful owners in the less-politically-stable parts of the world. It could also be all of the Western capital pouring into the Far East with dubious oversight and no-questions-asked qualifications. Maybe it’s both.

If only my History were better.