Industrial Revolution Biographies | J. P. Morgan Biography

Born April 17, 1837

Hartford, Connecticut

Died March 31, 1913

Rome, Italy

American financier

"If you have to ask how much it costs, you can't afford it."

J. P. Morgan built the largest private bank in the United States, and he used his enormous financial clout to assemble some of the largest corporations in the world. He demonstrated, perhaps more than any single individual, the power of finance in the economy of the Industrial Revolution, a period of fast-paced economic change that began in Great Britain in the middle of the eighteenth century.

It is widely believed in the United States that the president is the most powerful man in the country, elected by the people in the world's most powerful democracy. But in the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth century, Morgan, a banker, arguably...