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This chapter discusses Étienne Cleirac's commentary on the first article of the Guidon de la mer (The Standard of the Sea). In brief, he says that the Jews expelled from France invented marine insurance policies and bills of exchange in order to salvage their assets when fleeing to “Lombardy,” that is, to northern and central Italy. From there, Italian refugees exported the newly invented financial instruments north of the Alps, where bankers and moneylenders were called “Lombards,” a name eventually given to a public square in Amsterdam. Cleirac's merging of these spaces has the effect of tracing a direct line between fourteenth-century Lombards and seventeenth-century Amsterdam and makes pawnbroking appear contiguous with the most sophisticated forms of financial credit developed during the sixteenth century. This chronological compression is crucial to Cleirac's rhetorical strategy of making medieval Jewish moneylenders, the object of scorn and prejudice, interchangeable with the international merchant-bankers of the seventeenth century.

Although engaged in economic activity, the Christian elite continued to officially scorn those whose operations in the market violated Christ’s precept of fraternity among humans. These individuals remained sinners, because their earnings relied upon the exploitation of time, their goods and finances being valorized through deferral. This was a sacrilege: time belongs to God. This chapter follows the trajectory, within the Christian sensibility, whereby wealth appropriated by the rich slowly ceased to be scandalous. This became apparent between the eleventh and twelfth centuries, when in Europe money achieved some form of legitimacy and, despite the awareness of its dangerousness, of its being an obstacle on the way to Salvation, it found its place in the moral economy.

This chapter explores how postwar restrictions on the use of sterling prompted UK merchant bankers to develop an innovative method for financing international trade. They tapped into the large volume of offshore dollars that had accrued because of massive overseas US spending through military aid and the Marshall Plan, using these dollars to finance trade between third parties, leading to the birth of the offshore “Eurodollar market.” The development of the Euromarkets represented the foundational moment in the emergence of a qualitatively distinctive form of integrated Anglo-American financial development. Construing the Euromarkets as an embedding of US structural power in international finance, the chapter suggests that coconstitutive Anglo-American developmental processes were integral to their emergence. Dynamics generated in London circumscribed and structured US monetary policy in a way that US-centric approaches overlook. The agency of City merchant bankers in constructing the Eurodollar market infrastructure, as well as the adaptation of the Bank of England and UK Treasury, did lay the transatlantic foundations for the longer-term hegemony of the dollar. But they also generated policy dilemmas for US officials and critically undermined the fixed exchange rate system agreed at Bretton Woods by creating the institutional infrastructure for vast offshore financial markets and capital flows.