Edward Bartels Banks (1 January 1836 – 22 May 1883) was a lawyer who became a politician and a member of the newly established Reichstag (German parliament) in 1871.
[1] His great grandfather, William Banks, was an English merchant who had relocated to Hamburg.
His father, Edward Banks (1795–1851), was a Hamburg Syndicus while his maternal grandfather, Johann Heinrich Bartels (1761–1851) had been a mayor of the city.
He attended school in Hamburg and Lübeck, before moving on to study Law at Tübingen and Göttingen.
In 1870 he served in the militia in the war against France, and following unification stood successfully for election to the new German Reichstag as a Progressive Party candidate, representing a Hamburg electoral district.