This is the first history of finance - broadly defined to include money, banking, capital markets, public and private finance, international transfers etc. - that covers Western Europe (with an occasional glance at the western hemisphere) and half a millennium. Charles Kindleberger highlights the development of financial institutions to meet emerging needs, and the similarities and contrasts in the handling of financial problems such as transferring resources from one country to another, stimulating investment, or financing war and cleaning up the resulting monetary mess. The first half of the book covers money, banking and finance from 1450 to 1913; the second deals in considerably finer detail with the twentieth century. This major work casts current issues in historical perspective and throws light on the fascinating, and far from orderly, evolution of financial institutions and the management of financial problems. Comprehensive, critical and cosmopolitan, this book is both an outstanding work of reference and essential reading for all those involved in the study and practice of finance, be they economic historians, financial experts, scholarly bankers or students of money and banking. This groundbreaking work was first published in 1984.

Revised and updated throughout, this brilliant survey of European financial history from the earliest times to the present by internationally renowned scholar and author Charles P. Kindleberger offers a comprehensive account of the evolution of money in Western Europe, bimetallism and theemergence of the gold standard, the banking systems of the Continent and the British Isles, and overviews of foreign investment, regional and global financial integration, and private and public finance in Western Europe. The new edition features expanded coverage of the sixteenth and seventeenthcenturies and important new material on recent developments in European monetary integration.

A comprehensive, concise--and unique--examination of the history of European monetary integration since the end of World War II, and how this fits into the anticipated economic and monetary union and closer political cooperation of European countries.

For full description, see Renaissance Europe: Age of Recovery and Reconciliation, 2/e.