Mr Brooks and the Australian Trade

by Frank Broeze

Successful businessman by any yardstick, Robert Brooks was one of the leaders of trade between Britain and Australia from the 1820s to the 1870s. He was active in all its sectors - shipping, commerce, finance, banking, investment, migration. Brooks was the influential and longest-serving founding director of the Union Bank of Australia and one of the largest importers of wool in London. He managed his manifold business interests from a City counting-house with a handful of clerks, having only once ventured to Australia. This dynamic and innovative business biography looks afresh at the economic relationship between Britain and Australia. It breaks new ground in systematically studying the wool trade, the sailing-ship industry, Australia's import trade, the rise of the City of London and the financial services sector of the British economy, the relationship between business and government, private merchant financing and the connection between corporate and private finance. Parallels bet