In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, international observers praised the stability of Canada's banks. When financial institutions in the United States and the United Kingdom collapsed, Canada did not experience any bank failures. The World Economic Forum's Global Competitiveness Report rated Canada's banking system as the most sound in the world. Historically, bank failures have been quite rare in Canada. Some authors argue that the stabilizing features of Canada's financial system were established in the first five years after the creation of the Canadian nation-state in 1867. This paper will examine the making of the Canadian banking law in 1871, an event widely regarded as a crucial turning point in Canadian financial history.

Why did subcontracting remain, well until the end of the nineteenth century, a viable way to organize metropolitan manufacturing? This article addresses historically and theoretically the reasons for the permanence of subcontracting as a viable alternative to centralized forms of production in London. It also questions the literature that equates the decline of subcontracting with the rise of sweating and argues for a reinterpretation of traditional explanations that saw the “sweater” as a central figure in the “degeneration” of the metropolitan productive system. The article concludes by proposing a reinterpretation of the “decline of subcontracting” and argues that the logic of flexibility of subcontracting was challenged by the increasing power of London wholesalers and retailers and the demands of fin-de-siècle mass consumption.

The relative importance of financial services in national economies varied over the course of the twentieth century. Rajan and Zingales note that “by most measures, countries were more financially developed in 1913 than in 1980 and only recently have they surpassed their 1913 levels” and that “indicators of financial development fell in all countries after 1929, reaching their nadir around 1980. Since then has been a revival of financial markets.” This revival of financial markets over the last thirty years has led to the study of “financialization” that is variously defined with differing uses, but here is understood as “the growing importance of financial markets as a source of profits in the economy.”

In the early twentieth century, progressive employers tried to turn recalcitrant workers into cooperative partners with a menu of corporate welfare programs. One of those employers, Henry A. Dix, took a leap that few contemplated. In 1922 he announced a plan to give his profitable $1 million business to his employees. Dix became famous as “the man who gave his business to his employees.” His ownership transfer scheme sought to make the welfare of the workforce the raison d'etre of a modern shareholder-owned corporation. It raised the possibility of building a capitalist society quite different from the one that emerged in the twentieth century. This paper connects the Dix plan to an understudied employer-based movement for industrial democracy and examines cultural, gender, and class dimensions of the Dix transfer from conception through the company's demise decades later.

Cinemagoing in the Netherlands during the 1930s appears to have been much less intense than in the English-speaking world. To support this assertion we examine film attendance and diffusion in the Dutch market by recourse to a new large dataset, and contrast it with observations drawn from recent research on the Anglo-Saxon countries (United States, United Kingdom, and Australia). In setting down the economic principles behind the organisation of the film industry that best describe the Anglo-Saxon model, we show how the Dutch experience differed in scale, but not in type. To investigate the reasons for this, we examine the idea that film consumption in the Netherlands was constrained through the operation of informal institutional pressures. In particular, we investigate the influence that the vertical stratification of Dutch society into distinct religious and ideological strands may have had on the filmgoing appetites of the Dutch people. A further investigation looks at the combination of exhibitors and distributors into a single industry cartel and its impact upon prices and cinema building. The paper concludes that a complex mixture of cultural, economic, institutional, and social factors were at play, causing the Dutch people to be an outlier as far as film provision and consumption was concerned.

In this paper I discuss a dramatic financial collapse and scandal in Denmark in the interwar period. I analyze the asset price bubble from 1914 to 1920 and the subsequent failure in 1922 of Scandinavia's largest bank, the Danish Landmandsbanken, as well as the downfall of its CEO Emil Glückstadt. I discuss the sense-making process, first during the bubble and then following Landmandsbanken's collapse and Glückstadt's fall from power in 1922, and finally until the introduction of a new bank act in 1930. I further argue that such crises and scandals force contemporaries to make sense of the dramatic fall from the top of society of these icons and of their role in the collapse of their banks. I view the sense-making process as centered on the construction of narratives that explain the crisis and enable or constrain institutional response to the crisis. To conclude, I argue that the process of sense-making in the case of Landmandsbanken can be generalized as the way in which society enforces norms and values in cases of dramatic financial crisis and scandal.