Towards 1840 the City of London was the leading financial centre in the world, ahead of Paris, itself followed by a group of important but secondary centres, including Amsterdam, Brussels, Frankfurt and Geneva. In all of these centres the most prominent merchants and bankers ran their international businesses like private firms and within the framework of highly personal and family contacts. And the House of Rothschild held sway over the world of international finance thanks to its immense resources and to its key position in issuing loans on behalf of foreign governments. Things were not fundamentally different around 1875; the City of London still ranked top in the world, followed by Paris, private bankers retained control over large international financial transactions, and the House of Rothschild was still the largest bank in Europe. This did not mean that inaction was the dominant feature of these thirty-five years, far from it. Two major changes occurred during the second third of the nineteenth century. The first was the increased concentration of capital; the second was the strong growth in capital exports.

The concentration of capital was a fundamental shift, whose effects profoundly transformed the life of the financial centres. They were already noticeable in the 1830s even though, on the face of it, the old order barely seemed to have changed. The first big businesses of the industrial era were the railway companies and the joint-stock banks.