My first book, The Infrastructures of Finance: The London Stock Exchange and the Making of the Modern Financial System 1801-1914, tells the history of the expansion of British financial capitalism over the course of the nineteenth century from the ground up. Spanning from the electrical engineers and telegraph operators who hardwired distant markets together, to the back office clerks who compiled and standardized price lists that were sent over the wires, to the messenger boys and stock exchange porters who facilitated the movement of information and messages in and out of key markets, The Infrastructures of Finance moves beyond the typical focus on gentlemanly capitalists striking deals on the trading floor and instead dives into the often hidden and unseen operational bowels of modern financial markets. 

In doing so, the book makes two arguments, one trans-historical and conceptual, one historically particular. First, The Infrastructures of Finance argues that power within the financial system resides not with the “great men” of high finance or in corporate boardrooms, but deep within the technical infrastructures that enable the system to function at all. The centrality of these infrastructures to the operations of modern finance—and the lower-class workers who built and maintained them—made control over financial infrastructure a critical goal of states and private financial institutions alike. Within particular financial markets, lower-class workers used their proximity to financial infrastructure as leverage against the upper-class financiers who traded on the exchange. As markets became more interconnected throughout the 19th century, these conflicts expanded. States and financial institutions battled each other over the design and implementation of the infrastructures that linked financial markets together. The results of these conflicts profoundly shaped the emergence of the global financial system we have today.

The second argument is about the historically particular role the London Stock Exchange played in the creation of this global financial infrastructure. During the first three quarters of the 19th century, the London Stock Exchange cemented its place at the heart of Britain’s financial empire through its influence over various financial infrastructures, including the construction of the global telecommunications network, the standardization and dissemination of financial information, and the disciplining of the new labor forces that operated these infrastructures. One commentator at the time noted that “the London Stock Exchange is the only really international market of the world. Its interests branch over all parts of our globe,” and it was the “centre to which the bulk of all investment and speculative business naturally flows.” By the turn of the 20th century, British efforts at constructing financial infrastructure had helped integrate global financial markets to an extent never before seen. But infrastructural power was fragile and infrastructural networks could be co-opted. As more and more markets were integrated into the global economy during the late 19th and early 20th century, British institutions exerted less and less control over the financial infrastructures that knitted them together. Britain and its financial institutions found themselves at the center of a globalized financial network they no longer controlled.

The Infrastructures of Finance is currently under advanced contract with the University of Chicago Press. Portions of the research for this book have been published at Enterprise and Societyand in the Cambridge Global Handbook of Financial Infrastructure.