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An Eagle Eye: Africa in the 20th Century as viewed through the archives of Barclays Bank

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 April 2022

Maria Sienkiewicz  and
Billy Frank
Maria Sienkiewicz
Affiliation:
Barclays Group Archives
Billy Frank
Affiliation:
University of Central Lancashire
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Extract

Barclays’ international business was founded in 1925 as Barclays Bank (Dominion, Colonial and Overseas). The roots of the business lay in three 19th century banks: the Anglo-Egyptian, the Colonial, and the National Bank of South Africa. It had long been the dream of Barclays Chairman, Frederick Goodenough, to create an ‘Empire Bank’, and, by buying these three and merging them, that is precisely what he achieved. This article sets out to provide an overview of the collection and suggest avenues of future research.

Type
Articles
Information
African Research and Documentation , Volume 125: African Trajectories: Travel and the Archive: papers from the 2014 Scolma Conference , 2014 , pp. 29 - 44
Copyright
Copyright © International African Institute 2014

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Footnotes

1

This article is based on a paper delivered at the 2014 SCOLMA Conference ‘African Trajectories: Travel and the Archive’ held at the University of Birmingham, 2nd July 2014.

References

This would later be shortened to Barclays DCO, before becoming Barclays Bank International or BBI.Google Scholar
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See for example Hodge, Joseph, Hödl, Gerald and Kopf, Martina (Eds), Developing Africa. Development Discourse(s) in Late Colonialism (Manchester University Press, 2014), and C. A. Bayly, Vijayendra Rao, Simon Szerter, and Michael Woolcock (Eds), History, Historians and Development Policy: A necessary dialogue (Manchester University Press, 2011)Google Scholar
Julian Crossley, unpublished diaries, 16 August 1943. (Barclays Group Archives) Goodenough was already a member of the Colonial Research Council at this time and would later be appointed to the Colonial Economic Advisory Council, established within the Colonial Office in 1946. Although the CRC was primarily concerned with research into agriculture in the colonies, Barclays were included as financial advisors. At one meeting of the CRC Crossley (DCO's General Manager) noted in his diary that Professor J. F. R. Hill (Chairing the Committee in Lord Hailey's absence) was “quite prepared to turn over all questions of the control of expenditure” to the Barclays representative as the “financial member of the committee”. See Julian Crossley, unpublished diaries. 12 January 1943. (BGA)Google Scholar
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