Henry Hope

Henry Hope (1735–1811) was an Amsterdam merchant banker born in Braintree, Province of Massachusetts Bay. He emigrated to the Netherlands to join the family business Hope & Co. at a young age. From 1779, Henry became the manager of Hope & Co. and he participated in the firm for about a third from 1782. He is considered to be as great a genius as his uncle Thomas Hope. In 1786 Adam Smith dedicated the fourth edition of his book The Wealth of Nations to Henry Hope in hopes of increasing his readership: Early years His father, Henry, was a Rotterdam merchant of Scottish lineage who left for the "new world" after experiencing financial difficulties in the economic bubble of 1720. Though born in Rotterdam, he was considered Scottish because his father and brothers were members of the Scottish Church in Rotterdam. Henry the elder settled near Boston and became a Freemason and merchant. When his son Henry the younger was 13, he sent him to London for schooling, and six years later in 1754 he became apprenticed there to Henry Hoare of the well-known banking firm called Gurnell, Hoare, & Harman. In 1762, he accompanied his only sister, Henrietta Maria (aka Harriet), to Dutch Republic when she married the son of a Rotterdam merchant and business associate, John Goddard. Henry went to work for his uncles, Thomas and Adrian, together with his cousin, Jan Hope (who at 26 opted to be baptized a second time as "John"), in the family business in Amsterdam. Eighteenth-century Amsterdam was the largest port in Europe and the continent's center of commerce and merchant banking. By that time, the Hope brothers were already established as leading merchants in the Netherlands, but when the younger Hopes joined the Amsterdam branch, the name was changed from Hope Brothers (more familiarly, "the Hopes") to Hope & Co. Hope & Co. soon played a major part in the finances of the Dutch East India Company (VOC). Career as a merchant