In the period from 1877 until the outbreak of World War I, Sweden, Denmark and Norway constituted a currency area – the Scandinavian Monetary Union (SMU). They shared the same unit of account, the gold krone. Both full-bodied gold coins and token coins of the three countries served as legal tender and circulated freely within the union. Initially set up to preserve the traditional circulation of neighbouring coins in the border regions, the central bank cooperation was extended to a mutual settlement mechanism (1885) and later reciprocal acceptance of notes at par (1901). A desire for economic integration was present under the surface of this practical approach, mirroring the predominant liberal worldview of the 1870s. For instance, the Norwegian government saw a common coinage as an instrument for ‘knitting together the three nations to a single commercial territory’. In the parliamentary debate on Norwegian entry into the union a supporter argued that ‘the real objective of unity in coin had to be to bring the countries closer together’. Thus, from the outset, the SMU was a combination of practical arrangements and lofty ambitions.

Self-sustaining, technologically based growth has always been accompanied by a process of financial transition which, as defined by Raymond Goldsmith, entails an increase in the financial superstructure to a status in the economy comparable to that in the leading countries of North America and Western Europe. The pattern of development along this transitional path may, of course, differ, as for example in the relative contribution of bank- or market-based financial systems. But all countries, Goldsmith observed, trace a similar transitional path in the increase in their superstructure of financial instruments and institutions relative to an infrastructure of output and wealth. Because of the close relationship between financial transition and modern economic growth as defined by Simon Kuznets, differences in speed at which countries traverse Goldsmith's transitional path are critical.

This article looks at the experience of management of technological innovation and mechanisation by British financial institutions. It highlights the indigenous assessment of technology, reflecting on local and American influences in two types of business organisations within the financial sector to demonstrate the nature of responses and the timing of the introduction of new methods and machinery. The adoption of Information Technology (IT) and computer applications in particular play a crucial role, though one that is intimately connected with a strategic expansion of corporate business, this growth being reflected in terms of size of business and also territorial expansion, as each of the institutions considered here constructed a national network of retail branch outlets. Discussion of established literature for the high street banks is combined with archivally informed analysis of similar, but previously undocumented, developments on the part of building societies. By taking a long-term view of these developments in the twentieth century, and by comparing the experiences of two different sets of institutions, the article highlights the strategic factors that influenced the decisions taken by senior managers in their transformation of British retail financial services.

As reflected in the April 2006 issue of the Financial History Review, monetary historians remain divided over the central features of the US monetary union and their contribution to US economic development. In that issue – which focused on the monetary union formed by the Constitution and early federal monetary legislation – Ronald Michener and Robert E. Wright focused on the creation of a uniform unit of account defined in terms of specie. The establishment of a uniform unit of account ‘simplified domestic and international transactions’ compared with the colonial period when ‘[e]conomic calculations across regions were complicated by the fact that people had to reckon with different units of account, without the aid of electronic calculators’. By contrast, Richard Sylla emphasised the role the Bank of the United States played in reducing the costs and risks of clearing and settling interregional payments. An institution, like the Bank, that operated on a national scale was particularly important in the United States because of the limited geographical scope of state bank operations. The Bank's notes and deposits became a truly national monetary standard, and the Bank helped to maintain the value of state bank notes, the principal means of cash payment in the antebellum economy, by enforcing par redemption.

This bibliography covers publications that appeared during 2005 and 2004 when they were not known before the deadline of last year's bibliography. In that case the year of publication is mentioned in the citation.