This volume brings together leading business and banking historians to examine the role and development of banks in Asia in the 19th and 20th centuries. It discusses both the overseas operations of European banks and the development of Asian (notably Japanese and Hong Kong) banks.

London and Paris, the world's two leading financial centres in the nineteenth century, experienced differing fortunes during the twentieth century. While London remained an international financial centre, Paris' influence declined. Yet over the last twenty years deregulation, internationalization, and the advent of the single currency have reactivated their competition in ways reminiscent of their old rivalry before the First World War. This book provides a long-term perspective on the development of each centre, with special attention devoted to the pre-1914 years and to the last decades of the twentieth century, in order to contrast these two eras of globalization. The chapters include both archive-based and synthetic surveys and are written by the leading specialists of the field. This comparison between Europe's two leading capital cities will also provide new insights into two important subjects: the political economy of Britain and France in the twentieth century, and the history of international financial centres. As much as a comparison between London and Paris as international financial centres, this book is an Anglo-French comparison; in other words, it considers, through the prism of finance, several aspects of the two countries' economic, business, social, and political histories. It includes contributions from leading banking, financial, and economic historians, and will be of interest to academics, researchers, and students of Financial and Economic History, and the role of London and Paris in particular.

An account of the rise of banking since the Middle Ages and its place in the modern international economy, first published in 1997.

This book examines the history of what became one of Portugal’s largest banks, the Caixa Geral de Depósitos. The bank was founded in 1876 by the state to run public deposits, and evolved into a savings bank, catering for both public and private deposits. Its history goes beyond the history of banking, as it ties in with the role of the state in the banking sector and financial markets. The book weaves in and out of different political and international contexts, following the many changes of the Portuguese political regime and of its interactions with the national and international economy. The most important lesson from the study is that publicly owned institutions can compete successfully with the private sector when they simultaneously cater for the interests of policy makers as well as those of the public, in this case, the depositors. The history of the Caixa Geral de Depósitos therefore shows how the state of a peripheral economy is capable of successfully managing a large financial institution when the right set of incentives is in place. This work will be a valuable resource for researchers and students of financial and economic history at both the advanced undergraduate and postgraduate levels. It will also provide interesting insights for practitioners in the financial sector.

This open access book is the first attempt to elaborate the formalization phase of banking supervision in eight developed countries—USA, Japan, Sweden, Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, France, and UK. This innovative study in the field of banking supervision history identifies why national histories of banking supervision share similarities, but also remain different and are heavily path dependent. This book will be of great interest not only to financial/economic historians but also to general readers interested in banking supervision, i.e., students, bankers, supervisors, and international officials.

This paper examines the impact of the Hungarian banking system on regional and urban development in the early 20th century, when local banks were important territorial elements of the financial space developing close links to regional economic structures. The basic concept of the study is that there is closer connection not only between the banking sector and the economy as a whole, but between the banking sector and urban development as well. This is coincided with the argument of the American Historical Geographical school (Conzen, 1977) says that the features of the urban network are in strong correlation with the spatial structure of banking system and the diffusion of financial innovations. We considered the spatial breakdown of capital flows are one of the most important indicators of the regional and urban transformation (Gál, 2005). The Hungarian banking system looks back to a history of more than 160 years. Examining the impact of the banking system on regional and urban development is reasonable in the second half of the 19th century, since in Hungary developed an extensive financial system with a well researchable statistical database (Vargha, 1913). The Hungarian banking system was well developed in comparison to international standards by the first decade of the 20th century (Kövér, 1991; Tomka, 1996). Moreover, it became one of the most rapidly growing sectors of the domestic economy of that time ...