the world of private banking

CHAPTER 13
Protestant Banking
Martin Körner †
The previous chapter has addressed Jewish private banks. This chapter will address
Protestant banks. The explicit choice of the two groups mentioned implies a special
sense given here to the term ‘minority.’ It is the affiliation to a distinct religious or
confessional minority that makes their exploration attractive and interesting. But
regarding these two particular minority groups, I would say that the second cannot
easily be compared with the first.
It seems undisputed that Jews were a minority in all the countries where they
lived during the medieval age and all over early modern and modern Europe.
The case of the Protestants is not so clear. In Lutheran and Calvinist countries,
Protestants undoubtedly became the majority during the sixteenth century and
even kept the position of an exclusive confessional group until the end of the
Ancien Régime. As regards economic activity, we may say that in most Protestant
countries there is no knowledge of Roman Catholic private bankers’ activities.
At least with regard to Switzerland, we do not find any of them in the Protestant
towns of Basel, Geneva, Bern or Zurich from the sixteenth to the end of the
eighteenth century.
With regard to the definition of private banking I wish in my chapter to discuss
the various forms of banking as generally related in the historiography of the
subject: merchant bankers, investment bankers, financiers. The important thing is
that during the whole early modern period bankers were generally merchants too,
and had at their disposal an international network for payment and capital transfer
as well as being able to export the sums entrusted to them by their clients and place
them at interest in public loans, industrial and colonial investments. In addition
to this, we should do well to remember that these special aspects of banking must
be seen as an almost exclusively urban phenomenon. First of all, we shall answer
J.-F. Bergier, Wirtschaftsgeschichte der Schweiz von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart
(Zurich, 1983, 1990), pp. 329–33.
J.-F. Bergier, ‘Le dynamisme de la banque privée (VIIe–XIXe siècles)’, in A. Vannini
Marx (ed.), Credito, banche e investimenti, secoli XIII–XX (Florence, 1985). For general and
specific information on economic history with regard to this chapter, see also P. Léon (ed.),
Histoire économique et sociale du monde, vols I–IV (Paris, 1977–8); F. Vittinghoff et al.
(eds), Handbuch der europäischen Wirtschafts- und Sozialgeschichte, vol. 3–4 (Frankfurt,
1986, 1993); L.H. Mottet, Geschichte der Schweizer Banken: Bankier-Persönlichkeiten aus
fünf Jahrhunderten (Zurich, 1987); A.-M. Piuz et al. (eds), L’Economie genevoise de la
Réforme à la fin de l’Ancien Régime, XVIe–XVIIIe siècles (Geneva, 1990).