City Bankers, 1890-1914 is a major contribution to a controversial area of economic history and to the debate about the nature of British society in the late Victorian and Edwardian eras. It provides a detailed analysis of the banking community of London between 1890 and 1914 when the City of London was the undisputed financial centre of the world.

A week before the outbreak of the First World War, an acute financial crisis surged over London: the Stock Exchange closed; money markets worldwide were paralysed. Drawing on diaries, letters, memoirs, press reports, and official archives, this book tells the extraordinary, and largely unknown, story of the first true global financial crisis.

Sweeping changes have taken place in the financial sector during the twentieth century. Two of the most notable changes have been the growth of global markets and institutions, and the introduction of computerisation. This volume charts the course of concentration and internationalisation in banking and also examines the influence and implications of new technologies on the industry’s record-keeping practices. The exploration of concentration and internationalisation begins in the late nineteenth century and examines the effect of a wide range of factors, from macro-economic influences such as the liquidity crisis of the 1930s and the oil price rises of the 1970s, to the role of national regulation in the creation of financial markets and innovative products. The role of individual banks and their particular policies is also brought into focus. Some of Europe’s most eminent bankers provide a contemporary dimension by discussing possible future developments in continental banking.

`...useful reading for anyone interested in the antecedents of today's vibrant international financial markets.' --

This book addresses the divide that exists between the reality of finance and the image it projects. A functioning financial system is an essential feature of a modern economy, providing it with money, credit, capital, and investments. Conversely, those who provide this essential service are neither respected nor trusted. The causes and consequences of this divide is explored using the British experience from 1800 to the present, drawing upon a mixture of factual evidence and contemporary fiction. Nothing of this scale has been attempted before and this is the product of 50 years of research.

Today, states’ ability to borrow private capital depends on stringent evaluations of their creditworthiness. While many presume that this has long been the case, Quentin Bruneau argues that it is a surprisingly recent phenomenon—the outcome of a pivotal shift in the social composition of financial markets. Investigating the financiers involved in lending capital to sovereigns over the past two centuries, Bruneau identifies profound changes in their identities, goals, and forms of knowledge. He shows how an old world made up of merchant banking families pursuing both profit and status gradually gave way to a new one dominated by large companies, such as joint stock banks and credit rating agencies, exclusively pursuing profit. Lacking the web of personal ties to sovereigns across the world that their established rivals possessed, these financial institutions began relying on a different form of knowledge created to describe and compare states through quantifiable data: statistics. Over the course of this epochal shift, which only came to an end a few decades ago, financial markets thus reconceptualized states. Instead of a set of individuals to be known in person, they became numbers on a page. Raising new questions about the history of sovereign lending, this book illuminates the nature of the relationship between states and financial markets today—and suggests that it may be on the cusp of another major transformation.

The world's largest market is that for foreign exchange with a turnover running into trillions per day. The mystery is why this market is dominated by trading in London when the US dollar is the main currency in use. What role is played by this market? To many it is a speculator's paradise, exposed to manipulation and contributing to currency volatility. For others it plays a central role in in the operation of the global banking system and a mechanism for maintaining currency stability. In Forex Forever, Ranald C. Michie seeks to provide answers to these and other questions by examining how the foreign exchange market has developed in the City of London over the past 150 years and uncovers its secret existence in London before the First World War. Michie explores how the City of London became the centre of the global foreign exchange market before 1914 through the international banking network, trading on the floor of the Stock Exchange, and the communications revolution that began with the telegraph. He investigates how that position was sufficient to make London the centre of a new foreign exchange market that emerged between the wars, survived the era of fixed exchange rates after the Second World War, and then flourished from 1970 onwards. This in-depth study helps to explain how and why the global monetary system has functioned since the middle of the nineteenth century.

Jack Simmons, perhaps more than any other single scholar, is responsible for the advancement of the academic study of transport history. As well as being a co-founder of the Journal of Transport History, he wrote extensively on a variety of transport-related topics and was instrumental in developing the London Transport and the National Railway museums. Whilst his death in September 2000 at the age of 85 was a sad loss to the world of transport history, the achievements of his life, celebrated in this festschrift, remain a lasting legacy to succeeding generations of scholars in many fields. Concentrating on the theme of the railways, and how they dramatically affected the development of Britain and her society, this collection touches on numerous issues first highlighted by Professor Simmons which are now central to academic study. These include the men who built the railways, those who financed the enterprise, how the railways affected such everyday issues as tourism, the arts, and politics, as well as the lasting legacy of the railways in a country now dominated by the private car. This volume written by former friends, students and colleagues of Professor Simmons reflects these interests, and provides a fitting tribute to one of the truly great British historians of the twentieth century.

The financial crisis of 2008 aroused widespread interest in banking and financial history among policy makers, academics, journalists, and even bankers, in addition to the wider public. References in the press to the term 'Great Depression' spiked after the failure of Lehman Brothers in November 2008, with similar surges in references to 'economic history' at various times during the financial turbulence. In an attempt to better understand the magnitude of the shock, there was a demand for historical parallels. How severe was the financial crash? Was it, in fact, the most severe financial crisis since the Great Depression? Were its causes unique or part of a well-known historical pattern? And have financial crises always led to severe depressions? Historical reflection on the recent financial crises and the long-term development of the financial system go hand in hand. This volume provides the material for such a reflection by presenting the state of the art in banking and financial history. Nineteen highly regarded experts present chapters on the economic and financial side of banking and financial activities, primarily though not solely in advanced economies, in a long-term comparative perspective. In addition to paying attention to general issues, not least those related to theoretical and methodological aspects of the discipline, the volume approaches the banking and financial world from four distinct but interrelated angles: financial institutions, financial markets, financial regulation, and financial crises.

This book is devoted to a difficult period in the history of the securities market between the First and the Second World Wars. It was then when collapse of the global financial system began. Financial relationships set in the late XIX – early XX centuries around British Empire and London, the main financial centre of the “first globalization” era, were breaking. This long and painful process, complicated by the collapse of the gold standard system, created global imbalances of the 1920s, associated with huge war debts and overflowing gold from Europe to the United States. Those imbalances spawned not only the “Great Crash” in 1929, but also the “Great Depression” of the 1930s, in many ways resembling the “Great Recession” at the beginning of the XXI century.