Alex Cooper | University of Leicester
Businessmen in London opened their copies of The Morning Chronicle on the morning of 14 January 1817 to read that ‘The unfortunate catastrophe of the late Mr Abraham Gibbs […] still occupies the public attention, which is anxious to know what will be the final result of it’.
The scandal of Abraham Gibbs’ death on 16 July 1816 had shaken Palermo and London. The Bourbon king’s banker, Lord Nelson’s Sicilian estate manager and the British government’s paymaster in Sicily had shot himself, having discovered an enormous void of 285,000 ounces in his accounts. Moreover, Abraham was part of high society in Naples as well as being a cousin to the Lord Chief Justice Sir Vicary Gibbs and Antony Gibbs of the London merchant bank Antony Gibbs & Sons. So, Gibbs’ suicide had repercussions across the Mediterranean, providing many a reason for it to be hushed up as soon as the Gibbs family could.
However, Abraham Gibbs had also been a pioneer and forerunner of nineteenth-century commerce and finance in Sicily, envied by his competitors and admired by financiers of the calibre of Charles Mayer von Rothschild. Gibbs revolutionised British commerce and finance in Sicily and Ingham consolidated this transformation.
Abraham Gibbs’ prime competitor, Benjamin Ingham, was aware that Gibbs was borrowing money at usurious rates of interest, and that ‘a crash would one day take place’. Ingham informed a client in Bolton on 18 July ‘we did not expect so soon, thinking that they might go on for a year or two longer’ and bewailed the fact that ‘we live in critical times and scarcely know whom we should trust especially in the Mediterranean for the largest capitals are of little avail if not managed with extreme care…’. Yet Ingham himself had been one of the last straws to break Abraham, protesting a bill for 300 ounces on 15 July 1816 sensing the imminent crash of Gibbs ‘empire. That evening, Gibbs took his own life.
In the 1770s Gibbs was apprenticed to a firm in Leghorn. He quickly learnt his trade and moved to Naples, the fifth capital of Europe at the time, and home to the famous British ambassador, Sir William Hamilton. He joined the banking firm of Liquier and Falconnet and created the house of Falconnet, Gibbs & Noble with the British banking brothers Edmund and George Noble. When Napoleon seized Naples in 1799, the Bourbon court was evacuated and taken to Palermo with the aid of Horatio Nelson, who together with Gibbs, the Nobles and the Hamiltons all resided at Palazzo Palagonia. Gibbs rapidly developed a network of trading contacts to supply the British forces engaged in the Napoleonic conflict in the Mediterranean. For instance, Gibbs introduced Nelson to the Woodhouse family and soon the Royal Navy ordered its supplies of Marsala wine from Woodhouse’s winery. Gibbs also assured John Woodhouse of a trade monopoly for Marsala wine in America, and as American consul in Palermo he excluded competitors like Ingham from the market there.
When the Bourbons fled for the second time to Sicily in 1806 they stayed there for ten years, known as the ‘British Decade’. These ten years marked the rise and fall of Abraham Gibbs. In 1808 the British government agreed to pay the Bourbons an indemnity of £300,000 a year and maintained 27,000 troops on the island. This indemnity, later raised to £400,000, plus the court’s expenses, provisions for the armed forces, and grain for the Sicilian population was all business handled by Gibbs. The British elite in Palermo turned to Gibbs as financier and advisor. The Hamiltons and Gervais Van Kempen posthumously left him their debts, and Nelson the management of his castle in Bronte, while Gibbs ran Lord Bentinck's household accounts in his absence in Spain.
Gibbs’ network was unique. He set up the Commercial Society, a private club for top merchants, financiers, and Freemasons. Gibbs’ web of friendships and business contacts was the source of his control of the market linking the British business class in London to Sicily, Malta and Naples. Through his friendships Gibbs revolutionised business. In 1813 in response to Lloyds’ more conservative approach to marine insurance for shipping, Gibbs launched the First Insurance Company of Palermo with shareholders that reflected the business milieu of the city, as well as Gibbs’ innovative spirit. This First Insurance Company of Palermo envisaged the use of its revenue for discounting bills among trustworthy merchants and businessmen both British and Sicilian.
However, this network of friends and business associates was also to be the source of Gibbs’ downfall. On the eve of his retirement, Gibbs discovered the chasm created by his nephew’s incompetent bookkeeping or wilful deceit: he was bankrupt. This had haunted him at the start of his career when his cousin, Antony, had gone bankrupt in 1789 and nearly ruined the whole Gibbs family. In his suicide note Gibbs sadly reflected on his misplaced trust:
‘I have been too indulgent to those who have been ungrateful to me – and the real state of my affairs, I have not been able to discover ‘till now, from the multiplicity thereof – I was in the hopes of regaining my losses; I cannot pardon myself, nor do I find myself able to remain another moment in existence’.
On Gibbs’ death recorded in Ingham’s commercial correspondence, his creditors were left incredulous - his known debts amounted to £450,000 (£18 million today). A quarter of this money was owed to Gibbs by the government- although it is impossible to establish which government, whether British or Sicilian - to pay for the cost of war. With Gibbs’ death, his firms were liquidated, and only some initial repayments were made to those who appealed to the Sicilian Tribunal of Commerce. Others kept conveniently quiet, as debtors and ex-partners took advantage of Gibbs’ habit of memorising his accounts and not writing them down. Meanwhile London bankers and businessmen were astonished at the lengthy litigation they were faced with in Sicily to regain their losses.
Ingham seized the opportunity to grasp Gibbs’ share of the Sicilian market. Ingham stepped in as attorney for Gibbs’ creditors in London, Liverpool and Sicily. While Gibbs’ friends and Freemason brothers of the First Insurance Company of Palermo resolved their debts cordially, others scrambled to recover their money from the Tribunal of Commerce on a first-come-first-served basis. Even Ingham was appalled when Mendham of Messina, a British banker, made no qualms about taking the lion’s share of repayments for himself.
For many years Ingham had studied Gibbs’ model carefully and implanted his own network of agents and representatives throughout Sicily, Malta and Naples keeping a close circuit of banking houses to finance his business. Ingham, like Gibbs, was tied to London’s Heath & Co. and Baring Brothers throughout his whole career, using these two banks to finance his trade and investments. Charles Mayer von Rothschild saw the potential of Gibb’s legacy in 1821 when he chose Gibbs’ ex-partner Falconnet for a syndicated loan to the Bourbons, specifically for the network of contacts in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies - contacts that Gibbs had so meticulously constructed.
Ingham was no newcomer to commerce, his father having a textile firm William Ingham & Co. and a bank in Leeds. Like Gibbs, Ingham’s family were gentrified, and like Gibbs, Benjamin’s exodus was caused by his father’s unexpected death and the need to find new business for the family firm under the economic adversities of the Continental Blockade and the British Orders of Council.
On arriving in Palermo in 1806, Benjamin and his brother Joshua traded Ingham Brothers & Co’s goods, but Benjamin immediately saw the potential Sicily offered. He travelled to Marsala and decided to copy the wineries of John Woodhouse, and George Wood. Based in Palermo, he set up his house and from his earliest surviving books he mixed and traded with the most important merchants in Palermo, Messina, Malta and Naples. Gibbs was a business acquaintance, a role model, but also an obstacle to Ingham’s ambitions. Gibbs’ death left Ingham in an enviable position which he was quick to exploit taking Gibbs’ creditors as new business ties and strengthening his position on the market and in the British community.
Over the next two decades, Ingham invested in his shipping fleet and captains, in sulphur, Marsala, and chemicals, scaling the commodity market while spreading his risks in insurance companies and new partnerships. By 1839 Ingham had a noble Sicilian title, was married to a Sicilian Duchess, had received a knighthood from Ferdinand II for his business investments and had opened up new markets for the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies in Sumatra. Moreover, Ingham had entered into business with his neighbour and friend in Palermo, Vincenzo Florio. Florio emulated Ingham’s business strategies. Together they set up insurance, shipping and chemical companies, as well as tuna-fisheries. Ingham and Florio sat on the most important public Boards: from the Chamber of Commerce and the Stock Exchange to the Bank of Sicily; part of an oligarchy of the most influential Sicilian businessmen of the times.
Unlike Gibbs, however, Ingham was a tireless supervisor of his business empire. Ingham had one firm, Benjamin Ingham & Co., until his retirement in 1851 when he appointed Joseph Whitaker to run his Palermo office under the name Ingham & Whitaker. However, until his death, Ingham was the sole signatory and the sole person who moved capital between banks and nations and who decided upon the investments to be made in real estate and railways. By appointing family members in all his major firms, Ingham directly controlled the business and accounts of every firm. Although his nephews ran the firms in Marsala, Palermo, and America, Ingham had managers who supported them, and he wrote daily to all of them, sending detailed instructions concerning trade and finance. Until his death, he organised his clients, his investments, and his nephews’ lives.
As Gibbs and Ingham’s political context changed, they adapted their trade and financing to suit the times. Thus, their banking evolved to reflect the evolution of sovereign debt lending, real estate and railway investment in Europe and America. Gibbs was the pioneer in sovereign debt and insurance. Ingham worked closely with all the top private banks of Sicily: Verde, Raffo, Florio and the Rothschild’s Palermo agent Christian Fischer. By the 1840s Ingham’s trade was international and his banking associates were among the most powerful members of the haute banque.
On his death, Ingham left his heirs multimillionaires and investments throughout the world. His business associates had become wealthy too, through sulphur, Marsala wine and citrus fruit. The Chiaramonte Bordonaros had become princes, the Risos barons, and Florio a senator of the newly created Kingdom of Italy.
Gibbs and Ingham were the most successful businessmen of their time in Sicily. They left a blueprint for their successors - both British and Sicilian - and a legacy that lasted long beyond the nineteenth century. Gibbs ran a multiplicity of businesses, orchestrating a trade triangle between Britain, Sicily and Malta, and America. Ingham went further by branching out to the Far East and Latin America to consolidate his business interests. Who these men were and what they did is key to understanding the evolution of the economic and cultural ties between Britain, America and Sicily that have been eclipsed by more dramatic events such as Unification in 1861 or the rise of Mussolini in the 1920s.
Strangely, these two men have been largely forgotten by time and by history, their vestiges swept away by the rebuilding of Palermo in the 1960s, where only some of Ingham’s and the Whitakers’ villas remain. In contrast, the Florios led a more conspicuous lifestyle matched to their equally astounding downfall. Indeed, Vincenzo Florio copied Ingham’s business model and Florio’s heirs accumulated wealth and power, yet they lacked Ingham’s tenacity and far-sighted business acumen. Today, their sulphur mines have long been abandoned, while the legacy of the sulphur-producing areas has been tied to the rise of the phenomenon of the Sicilian Mafia. Other products such as Ingham-Whitaker’s Marsala and Florio’s Marsala are still produced, perhaps the only tangible sign of a once immense empire of shipping, commerce and finance that shaped the economy of both Sicily and modern-day Italy.
Further Reading:
Raleigh Trevelyan, Princes Under the Volcano (Orion, 2002)
Stefania Auci, The Florios of Sicily, vol 1 (Harpervia, 2021)
Elizabeth Neill, Fragile Fortunes: The Origins of a Great British Merchant Family (Ryelands, 2008)
Anne Bronté, Agnes Grey (Wordsworth Editions, 1994)
Tommasi di Lampedusa, The Leopard (Random UK, 2007)
Alex Cooper is a part-time DL PhD student at Leicester University at the Department of History, Politics and International Relations. Alex has a degree from Durham University in History (1988) and Master’s degrees in Applied Linguistics (2000) and Translation Studies (2018). Based in Sicily, she works at the University of Catania as an English teacher in the Department of Economics. Alex’s research project concerns commodities and capital flows between Sicily and the UK (1816-1861) and to date she has participated in several workshops including the European Association of Banking and Financial History (podcast on “The Bank Of Sicily”, 2023), the Italian Association of Accounting History in Naples in 2022 (Catalfo P and Cooper A, “The Bankruptcy of Abraham Gibbs and the Crises of British Merchant Banking in The Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and Britain” in Accounting and Cultures 2023 Issue 2 DOI 10.3280/CCA2023-002004), and the History Indoors Series on YouTube “The British in Sicily 1816-1861”.