Document Type
Article
Publication Date
12-1-2024
Abstract
In this article, I offer a historical analysis of how bankers in Luxembourg came to be important service providers to borrowers in the Belgian Congo and Apartheid South Africa. I demonstrate how a series of unique political and cultural factors linking Luxembourg and these two (neo)colonial regimes account for the financial activities that developed between the three jurisdictions. As such, I show that officials in the Belgian Congo and Apartheid South Africa were able to count on their Luxembourg-based bankers for a variety of finance-related services, including the provision of Eurocurrency loans and the formation of offshore companies. In doing so, the article contributes to a body of literature in the social sciences of finance that has grown significantly in recent years: on the imperial and neocolonial basis of the contemporary global financial system.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Weeks, Samuel. 2024. “Financing White Rule: How Luxembourg Became a Banker for the Belgian Congo and Apartheid South Africa.” Finance and Society 10(3): 234-250.
Language
English
Comments
This article is the author's final published version in Finance and Society, Volume 10, Issue 3, December 2024, Pages 234-250.
The published version is available at https://doi.org/10.1017/fas.2024.12.
Copyright © The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Finance and Society Network.