Curtain Call: All the Players Should Take a Bow

The main reason the historical literature has overlooked the important roles played by these two financiers during this historic period of transformation of international finance is likely because neither man wrote about it explicitly. Both had to deal with tenuous political environments: Alexander in Britain because of his obvious attachment to the economic interests of the United States, which discredited him in the eyes of the war-hawks in Britain, first because of the apparent financial support to Napoleon, and then because of the War of 1812 and the general popular enthusiasm of the British public to defeat the U.S. Pierre in Amsterdam had to deal with the frequently changing political tides in the Netherlands from 1787 to 1815, which led him to spend the remainder of his life as a country squire in England. Gallatin and Barbé-Marbois lived on to write substantial works afterward, but Gallatin’s were on the ethnography of Native Americans, after vainly defending, once again, the re-chartering of the Bank of the United States. Barbé-Marbois’s attention was focused more on the continuing efforts of while planters to regain control of Haiti, and it was only at the end of his life that he allowed an American translation of his History of Louisiana to appear. Vincent Nolte lived on to write a fascinating memoir after surviving several duels in New Orleans, but failed ultimately in the last crisis of 1837. David Parish, after losing out to the Rothschilds in the re-financing of Austrian finances after Waterloo, committed suicide by drowning in the Danube. Alexander and Pierre, prospering in their respective country estates in England, should be recognized now as successful pioneers in the development of international finance, based on marketable sovereign debt.