Sharks and Shylocks: Englishness and otherness in popular discourse on ‘the City’ 1870–1914

Abstract

Despite its hegemony as a financial centre, the City of London occupied a relatively minor place in the discourse of British imperialism. Periodic collapses and scandals made the City an inscrutable source of anxiety, engendering a need to distance it from the mainstream of national life. This distancing centred on doubts about the City’s national identity, stemming from its increasingly cosmopolitan interests and its contingent of prominent Jews, who were conventionally understood to have no nationality. Scrutiny of discourse on the City leads to a richer understanding of the role of ‘Semitic discourse’ in the construction of British national identity.

Keywords:

• City of London
• international finance
• anti-Semitism
• national identity
• cosmopolitanism

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Dr Eve Setch and Ms Miesje de Vogel for their invaluable assistance with aspects of the research for this article.

Notes on contributor

David Blaazer is an Associate Professor in History in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at UNSW Canberra, Australia, where he is also an Associate Dean (Education). He is the author of The Popular Front and the Progressive Tradition (Cambridge University Press, 1992), and is currently writing a book on the social and cultural history of money in the British Isles since the early modern period, a topic on which he has published a number of articles and delivered numerous conference papers.

Notes

1 One example of Cheyette’s exaggeration of his case is in his discussion of the rabidly anti-Semitic Catholic apologist Hilaire Belloc, discussed elsewhere in this article. Despite Belloc’s unhappy tenure as a Liberal MP 1906–1910, it is highly problematic to view Belloc as a Liberal and to incorporate his thought into an argument about the nature of liberalism. Rubinstein (1996) puts Belloc’s Liberal affiliation to work in the opposite direction: to show that Belloc’s anti-Semitism must somehow have been less virulent than it appears. Colin Holmes (1979, ch.7). offers a nuanced discussion of anti-Semitism and the English liberal tradition.

2 In relation to the sector globally, Baring Brothers in 1890 was a bigger concern than Lehman Brothers when the latter crashed in 2008.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a UNSW Canberra Special Research Grant.