Baring

Francis Baring (1740-1810), son of the Exeter cloth-merchant Johann Baring, moved to London in 1762 and founded the firm of Baring Brothers & Co (later Barings Bank), the first merchant bank in Britain. He served as a director of the East India Company and as its Chairman in 1792, and was created the 1st Baronet of Larkbeer in 1793. By the time of the Napoleonic Wars Barings had become the principal financier of the British war effort and the central organiser of the loans that funded the British alliance system across Europe; the Duc de Richelieu, the French ambassador to the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1818, reportedly named the six great powers of Europe as 'England, France, Russia, Austria, Prussia and Baring Brothers'.

Through the 19th century the family translated their banking weight into direct imperial governance. Thomas Baring, 1st Earl of Northbrook (1826-1904), served as Viceroy of India 1872-1876, modernising the Indian railway system and the administrative codes of the Raj. His cousin Evelyn Baring, 1st Earl of Cromer (1841-1917), was British Consul-General in Egypt for twenty-four years (1883-1907), governing the country as the de facto ruler through the figurehead Khedives, modernising the Egyptian financial system and laying the infrastructural foundations of modern Cairo. Multiple peerages were created across the family: Lords Ashburton, Howick of Glendale, Northbrook, Cromer, and Revelstoke.

In February 1995 the bank itself closed after unauthorised derivatives trading losses in its Singapore office and was sold to the Dutch ING Group for one pound. The closure of the bank, however, did not end the family: the broader Baring family wealth, the historic peerages, the stewardship of the bank's heritage and the philanthropy of the Baring Foundation all continued.

The current Earl of Cromer holds the senior peerage; the Baring family is the only entry on the English all-time leaderboard whose members directly governed parts of the British Empire as well as financed it.