The paper will examine the temporalities of 19th-century merchant banking, situating prominent firms such as Barings within the contradictory temporal logics of global capitalism. It will demonstrate how merchant bankers functioned as temporal brokers and coordinators, synchronizing heterogeneous time scales: the short maturities of bills of exchange, the extended negotiations and repayments of sovereign loans, the cyclical rhythms of commodity markets, and the unpredictable disruptions of wars, bankruptcies, fiscal crises, and natural disasters. It will trace how, through networks stretching from Europe to the Americas and East Asia, merchant bankers managed temporal disjunctures across geographies, utilizing networks of intelligence to transform uncertain events into structured financial cycles and opportunities for accumulation. 

The paper will argue that by coordinating syndicates of partner firms and agents across leading financial hubs and mobilizing widely dispersed correspondent networks, houses like Barings connected the “eventful temporality” of trade, politics, and finance with the repetitive logic of accumulation. It will further contend that merchant banking networks exemplify how global capitalism’s contradictory temporalities were made operational while smoothing shocks into routine repayment schedules and supply chains. Merchant bankers will thus be portrayed as key agents in creating the temporal infrastructures of early globalization, as institutions that made the uneven rhythms of states, markets, and empires comparable within a broader capitalist temporality, one in which uncertain historical processes were absorbed into periodic business cycles and the long-term dynamics of accumulation.

Hadar Hoter-Ishay ist Praedoc am Institut für Wirtschafts- und Sozialgeschichte (ÖAW-Doc Fellow) und beschäftigt sich in seiner Dissertation mit staatlicher Kreditvergabe und internationalem Handel im Haus Baring, 1828–1890.