States and the Masters of Capital: Sovereign Lending, Old and New (Columbia Studies in International Order and Politics)

Today, states’ ability to borrow private capital depends on stringent evaluations of their creditworthiness. While many presume that this has long been the case, Quentin Bruneau argues that it is a surprisingly recent phenomenon―the outcome of a pivotal shift in the social composition of financial markets. Investigating the financiers involved in lending capital to sovereigns over the past two centuries, Bruneau identifies profound changes in their identities, goals, and forms of knowledge. He shows how an old world made up of merchant banking families pursuing both profit and status gradually gave way to a new one dominated by large companies, such as joint stock banks and credit rating agencies, exclusively pursuing profit. Lacking the web of personal ties to sovereigns across the world that their established rivals possessed, these financial institutions began relying on a different form of knowledge created to describe and compare states through quantifiable data: statistics. Over the course of this epochal shift, which only came to an end a few decades ago, financial markets thus reconceptualized states. Instead of a set of individuals to be known in person, they became numbers on a page. Raising new questions about the history of sovereign lending, this book illuminates the nature of the relationship between states and financial markets today―and suggests that it may be on the cusp of another major transformation. "The image of profit-seeking banks continually evaluating the creditworthiness of the states to whom they lend capital is a familiar one, frequently assumed to be as true now as it was three hundred years ago. Against this view, Sovereigns and the Masters of Capital argues that this description only corresponds to the last forty years, at best. The systematic assessment of sovereign borrowers with quantifiable data by exclusively profit-driven banks began in the early twentieth century among a restricted group of financiers. But it took until the 1970s, at the earliest, for this new approach to become dominant among lenders. Throughout the nineteenth century and until the interwar period, old merchant banking families dominated the business of sovereign lending--the practice of lending capital to sovereigns--pursuing both profit and status, and relying on personal relations rather than on statistical information, even as it became widespread and easily accessible. This only began to change with the rise of joint-stock banks, exclusively profit-driven lenders that lacked merchant bankers' connections and relied heavily on rankings based on statistical data to assess sovereign borrowers. By identifying and explaining this profound shift in terms of who sovereign lenders have been and how they have thought about the sovereigns to whom they lend capital, this book sheds new light on the peculiarity of our own time and provides a novel interpretation of the changing relationship between states and financial markets over the last two centuries"-- Provided by publisher