On the 28th of January, 2026, Professor Cornelius Torp — a Kratter Visiting Professor in European History at Stanford University — explored the history of two synchronised phenomena in his lecture,“The Blurred Line: Speculation and Gambling in Germany and Britain around 1900,” sponsored by the History Department of the German Historical Institute.
Professor Torp began his historical analysis with a relatively modern anecdote. He reminded the 20 attendees that after the 2008 financial crisis, bankers across the world (including within the United States) were described as gamblers — criticised for engaging in casino capitalism, and seen as responsible for the financial crisis. Professor Torp was quick to point out that, no matter how neologistic the term ‘casino capitalism’ may seem, the histories of gambling — the activities that take place in casinos, race-tracks, and lottery offices — and speculation — the activities of shareholder meetings, investment banks, and FOREX markets — are more intimately tied than one might originally imagine. To trace this relationship, Professor Torp examined two historical trends that occurred simultaneously in Germany and Victorian Britain.
Both states, Professor Torp argued, fought against lotteries and casino games, with the German states of the early 19th century acting quickly to ban casinos, effectively limiting European casino activity to the Casino de Monte-Carlo in Monaco. Professor Torp emphasized, however, that the fight against gambling was not ideologically homogeneous. Indeed, he explained that, rather than a single argument propelled by an interest group (as was the case with Prohibition in the United States), the fight against gambling was split. The Catholic and Protestant churches fought against gambling, but had different reasons to detest the activity than the rising bourgeois class, which saw the gambler as wasting time and money, the two most crucial resources for the bourgeois mind. 
Actors in both states insisted on the difference between speculation and gambling. This insistence, Professor Torp explained, was necessary because for many — and particularly for those who did not engage in either activity — gambling and speculation seemed to be quite similar: one risks their money on a seemingly chance-based activity, and prays for a better return. Even Adam Smith already described speculation as “luck,” opposed to his capitalist ideal of the manufacturer. Professor Torp continued to explain how elites in both countries attempted to draw a distinction between the two activities as gambling continued to be thrust into disrepute. Rather than dragging speculation down with it, the negative connotations of gambling were used as a negative foil to legitimize the act of speculation: there began to develop an epistemological difference between risk and uncertainty, and, as follows logically, between speculation and gambling.
Professor Torp then contrasted these parallels between the two nations by elucidating a divergence between Germany and Britain: the final outcomes of speculation. He explained that by the end of the 19th century, Great Britain, which had fallen into a liberal regime, accepted speculation, and chose not to regulate it — while continuing to regulate gambling. In the Great British Empire, the supposed distinction between the two activities was successfully sold to the masses. In Germany, however, this outcome never came to be. Instead, the German Empire, united by the end of the 19th century, regulated speculation heavily. They required registration for speculators in what was known as the “gambling registry”, leading to a massive degradation of the Berlin Stock Exchange, and a large migration of capital to London.
Professor Torp ended his intervention by proposing two possible hypotheses for this difference. The first, informed by the extreme weight of the speculation on the German wheat market during the 19th century, emphasises the immense pressure of the agrarian opposition to the stock exchanges in Germany. The second, meanwhile, highlights the strength and importance of betting culture in Great Britain, arguing that rather than differentiating between betting and speculation and only allowing the latter, the British took a more ‘laisse-faire’ approach, and turned a blind eye to both.
Once Professor Torp’s presentation concluded, Professor Steven Press — an Associate Professor of History at Stanford University, and the moderator of Professor Torp’s discussion — intervened, posing a series of questions to Professor Torp. Professor Press included a remark on the possible role of Belgium, another highly industrial nation in the 19th century, with ties to both Great Britain and Germany, as well as on the possible role of Otto von Bismarck, the infamous Iron Chancellor, who despised gambling while simultaneously promoting stock market investments.