The collapse of the ambitious and experimental Ayr Bank (Douglas, Heron & Co.) was the central episode of the 1772–3 British credit crisis and served as a direct influence on Adam Smith's monetary analysis in the Wealth of Nations. This article identifies the issuance of redeemable annuities in response to the bank's stop of payments in June 1772 and the distressed nature of its asset liquidations afterwards as the main reasons behind the size of its losses. It furthermore uses primary manuscript evidence to reconstruct and extend the existing narrative of this famous episode, from the planning stages in 1773 while the bank was still fighting for its survival, to the retirement of its banknotes by the Edinburgh public banks in 1773–4, the legal and political manoeuvring behind the redemption of the annuities by Act of Parliament in 1774, and the over 40 years of asset unwinding that followed.

In Switzerland, finance companies constituted the business group with the largest accumulation of capital of all joint-stock companies. This development began during the 1860s with respect to investment in gas, and accelerated from 1875 as a result of the activities of syndicates combining Swiss and foreign banks, first, in railways and, from the 1890s, in electricity. During the period 1910-14, domestic holding companies were established to aid the major Swiss industries of textiles, food and mechanical engineering. However, over the interwar years, international forces were once more dominant, leading to the establishment of both giant holding companies (related to the petrol and chemical industries), and small-scale companies, linked with capital flight to Switzerland.

Was nineteenth-century Japan an example of finance-led growth? Using a new panel data set of firms from the Meiji period (1868–1912), this article tests whether financial sector development influenced extensive firm activity across industries and locations. Results from a two-stage least squares first difference model suggest that financial intermediation is associated with additional net firm establishment, particularly in light manufacturing sectors like textiles. The overall effect is muted in the latter part of the period and among peripheral regions, which may underscore the respective roles of institutions and agglomeration economies in later stages of development.

Based on an extensive survey of French primary sources and a discussion of the recent literature on fiscal policy in France and Europe during Louis XIV's wars, this article revisits the rationale behind the first experiment with paper money undertaken by finance minister Michel Chamillart, comparing it to other belligerents’ strategies, in particular England's, to adjust their monetary regime to the challenges of funding long wars of attrition. The article shows how concerns about economic activity, coinage and the need to finance the war deficit led to a series of debasements of the French currency, the establishment of a bank in the form of a Caisse des emprunts and the introduction of mint bills, which became legal tender and caused the first experience of fiat money inflation in history. Whereas Chamillart's personal shortcomings have been recently suggested as the cause of Louis XIV's humbling in the War of the Spanish Succession, I argue on the contrary that the introduction of paper money in 1704 was key to the capacity of France to sustain its military effort, but that a succession of military defeats against a more powerful coalition led to inflation. I also argue that the introduction of paper money saved the Caisse des emprunts and its bonds which helped sustain the war effort up until the peace. By situating the use of paper money within the broader question of the exercise of power in the absolute monarchy, this article examines the formation of fiscal policy, paying attention to the ways in which government sought advice from experts. It concludes by calling for further studies on policy- and decision-making under Louis XIV.

This article deals with savings banks and the extent to which they encouraged workers to save. A study of probate inventories from three Swedish towns shows that just 20–30 per cent of workers had assets in savings banks during the second half of the nineteenth century. Saving patterns differed greatly among groups of workers. Savings banks were most important for unskilled, unmarried women, but married workers were more likely to invest in, for example, real estate (1870s) and insurance (1900s). Family considerations greatly affected saving decisions, which detracted from the appeal of savings banks. Their emphasis on individual saving was more suitable for those who needed a flexible alternative to use for different saving needs. This flexibility also made it easier for savings banks to meet growing competition and can explain why they continued to attract workers in the twentieth century. Although savings banks never dominated the workers' saving arena, they probably promoted unmarried workers' awareness of the advantages of saving. Consequently, since all married workers had previously been unmarried, savings banks most likely contributed to fostering saving habits among the working class.

Laura Stanciu, Italian multinational banking in interwar east central Europe

This article examines the interwar development of multinational investment undertaken by the most prominent Italian universal bank — Banca Commerciale Italiana — in Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland and Romania, referred to here as east central Europe. It analyses the extent to which considerations concerning universal banking's development are valid in the case of Italian multinational investment in this region. The article is neither a study of the 1930s financial crisis nor an analysis of the Italian universal banking per se. Instead, it questions the implicit relationship between the fate of the activities of Banca Commerciale Italiana in east central Europe and the general problems of the universal banking system during the early 1930s. Evidence seems to suggest that the bank's withdrawal from the region, beginning in the late 1920s, was more a result of managerial shortcomings and unsound investment decisions than the crisis.

Unlike recent contributions in the field, which discuss the geography of British overseas investments, this article focuses on the growth of capital exports from Great Britain during the period 1870–1913. Using a broader concept of foreign investments, which includes foreign direct investments (FDIs), and refocusing on the push and pull factors emphasised in earlier literature, we propose a framework able to capture the long-run determinants of British capital exports. Moreover, the framework includes elements suggested by early and recent works such as the institutional setup of the international economy and the evolution of world trade. The most relevant result, in an error correction model environment, is that the timing of British overseas investments in the long run seems to be related to the evolution of world trade, domestic growth and to the role of India as a colony. On the other hand, the attraction elements of the borrowing countries, captured by the risk-adjusted realised rates of return abroad, have been proven to matter in the short run.

Geneva is host to the most ancient and venerable private banks of Switzerland, but not much is known about the circumstances in which the city allegedly developed an early competitive advantage in wealth management. Using an extraordinary qualitative source (Jacques Mirabaud's papers, and especially his memoirs), this article outlines the microstructure of Genevan private banking at the time of its emergence in the early nineteenth century. It finds that in those years, wealth managers’ ‘raw material’ did not consist of foreign capital, but of a remarkably abundant stock of domestic capital. Financial and social factors were intertwined in producing a very hierarchical division of labour in the origination and distribution of international sovereign loans.

The English law reform movement produced numerous proposals for land registries during the Interregnum, but the idea of land registration took on economic connotations only after the Restoration, when controversy arose over the role of registration as a settled and reliable basis of credit. While the discourse of law reform was confined to the context of English law, the debate over whether and how land registries should be established extended to the economic field, and to international arenas in which England competed with, and sometimes imitated, her rivals in trade, particularly Holland. On one side of the debate, advocates of land registration insisted that registries would clarify the ownership of land, offer a firm foundation for credit, and consequently, improve English trade. On the other side, opponents of registration argued that such excessive openness of information would be hazardous to credit. For both advocates and opponents alike, the central issue was the role of registration in creating more reliable credit.

The article evaluates finance-led growth as an explanation for regional divergence in Italy over the years 1890–1910. Regional banking disparities are documented and the hypothesis developed that the financial crisis of the early 1890s struck the fledgling Southern Italian banking system at a vulnerable moment, distorting its subsequent development and handicapping the region's economy. The South is revealed to have been a chronically (over the entire period) and comprehensively (on every indicator) unhealthy environment for banks. Further evidence indicates that regional divergence in bank assets was largely due to the South's failure to develop the entire range of large banks. Size-class transition matrix analysis reveals that the typical Southern bank failed to reach a large size because it was born smaller (and less frequently) than in the North, suffered a higher mortality rate, especially in the smaller classes, and had lower growth probabilities, especially in the larger categories. The salience of deposits on the liability side and government securities on the asset side suggests that they reflected more than directly caused the development of their local economies.

Until 1935 there was no national legislation governing banking in Switzerland and hence no banking secrecy codified at national level. Over the centuries a distinctive relationship of trust had arisen between the Swiss banks and their customers which made banking secrecy an unwritten law. Even before the First World War a number of banks had failed in Switzerland and the first specific calls for government supervision of the banks were made, unsuccessfully, as early as 1916. In the early 1930s major Swiss banks had been severely affected by the 1931 German banking crisis. There was also during the 1930s a great fear of civil disruption, a breakdown of order and of espionage and infringements of sovereignty in the context of an increasingly threatening international situation. Banks throughout Europe were spied upon to prevent the evasion of the war taxes that had been introduced in many countries. Swiss banks had been the target of French and German investigations since 1931. The debacle over Volksbank in 1933 was in some ways the catalyst that finally accelerated a political settlement over banking legislation.

Economists have been blamed for their inability to forecast and address crises. This article attributes this inability to intertwined factors: the lack of a coherent definition of crises, the reference-class problem, the lack of imagination regarding the nature of future crises and sample-selection biases. Specifically, economists tend to adapt their views on crises to recent episodes, and omit averted and potential crises. Threshold-based definitions of crises run the risk of being ad hoc. Using historical examples, this article highlights some epistemological shortcomings of the current approach.

This article explains the problem of adjustment to the challenges of globalization in terms of the logic underpinning four distinct policy constraints, or trilemmas, and their interrelationship, and in particular the disturbances that arise from capital flows. The analysis of a policy trilemma was developed first as a diagnosis of exchange rate problems (the incompatibility of free capital flows with monetary policy autonomy and a fixed exchange rate regime); but the approach can be extended. The second trilemma we describe is the incompatibility between financial stability, capital mobility and national policy choice over exchange rates. The third example extends the analysis to politics, and looks at the strains in reconciling democratic politics with monetary autonomy and capital movements. Finally, we examine the security aspect and look at the interactions of democracy with capital flows and international order. The trilemmas, in short, depict the way that domestic monetary, financial, economic and political systems are interconnected with the international order, or the impossible policy choices at the heart of globalization. Frequently, the trilemmas conjure up countervailing anti-globalization tendencies and trends.

In this article we investigate supply and demand factors that have been put forward to explain the growth of fire insurance markets in Sweden during the financial revolution. We show that income growth and urbanisation fostered the demand for fire insurance. The supply of fire insurance, on the other hand, helps explain financial market development. Fire insurance assisted in mortgaging fixed assets, such as houses, through guaranteeing them as collateral. On both the supply side and the demand side, fire insurance was a key factor of the financial revolution in Sweden.

This article offers an architectural blueprint for the study of economic connections between warfare in the early modern period and the long-term growth of Europe's competing national economies. It surveys and critically investigates the concepts derived mainly from economic theory and the statistical evidence accessible in primary and secondary sources for the investigation of this meta-problem for students of economic theory.

This article examines Britain's temporary import surcharge introduced in October 1964, a largely overlooked but significant dimension of the 1964 sterling crisis. Import surcharges (temporary supplementary tariff) were illegal under GATT rules and aroused fury among trading partners. Britain's surcharge is placed in context by consideration of the use of import surcharges by other countries under Bretton Woods as currency crisis management and balance of payments measures, notably Canada's import surcharge of 1962–3 that inspired Britain's. Developed by the Conservative administration from 1963, a 15 per cent surcharge was introduced by the newly elected Wilson government as a radical alternative to deflation or devaluation to help correct the record balance of payments deficit and meet the gathering sterling crisis. As a currency crisis management measure the surcharge worked in Canada but in Britain it made matters worse and was soon supplanted by conventional measures. Deemed a failure and discredited, the surcharge was eventually lifted in November 1966 ‘unwept, unhonoured and unsung’ (Financial Times). Nevertheless, while in place the surcharge provided significant temporary assistance to the improvement of Britain's balance of payments.

The Spanish wording in the title is borrowed from a book by Joseph de la Vega published in Amsterdam in 1688. The book consists of a series of dialogues between a philosopher, a merchant and a shareholder, and is usually recognised as being one of the first analytical attempts to describe the different kinds of financial operations taking place in Amsterdam at the end of the seventeenth century. This paper tries to provide new textual evidence for a better understanding of the importance of Vega's book, both in the form of a detailed description of options and futures markets and as an appraisal of decision-making processes in a context of risk and uncertainty. It also considers some of the ethical implications of the individual strategies associated with the gambling and speculation activities taking place at that time on the Amsterdam Stock Exchange.

A project to build a comprehensive database of the Bank of France's published accounts covering its entire history was launched in 2001 with the support of the Bank's Mission Historique. This article introduces its main outcome: a dataset based on the weekly balance sheets – the so-called situations hebdomadaires – covering more than a century and a half of history from 1840 to 1998. After a brief outline of the historical evolution of the Bank's legal status and a description of the publication outlets for the data, the article pays special attention to the issues of transparency and accountability. For that purpose, it reconstructs on the basis of archival records the debate over the disclosure of the Bank's figures (what to publish, how frequently) that took place, both within the Bank and between the Bank and the government, at various turning points in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Finally, the article explains how the presentation of the situations changed over time, paying special attention to the impact of World Wars I and II. The full database with metadata information is attached to the electronic version of this article and downloadable as an Excel file from the FHR website, together with an extensive review of the literature on the history of the Bank of France.