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.

The financial strains of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars had a significant impact on the Bank of England. In its position as banker to the state and manager of the state's debt, it experienced a significant increase in workload and thus was forced rapidly to expand its workforce. From a complement of around 300 in the mid 1780s, the number of clerks employed had increased to over 900 in 1815. Using a unique set of records preserved in the Bank's archives, this article investigates the backgrounds and skills of the men recruited during the expansion of the early nineteenth century. It finds a significant gap between the skills required by the Bank and the skills possessed by its potential workforce.

Analysing Curaçao as an offshore financial centre from its inception to its gradual decline, we find that it originated and evolved in close concert with the demand for such services from Western countries. Dutch banks and multinationals spearheaded the creation of institutions on the island facilitating tax avoidance. In this they were aided and abetted by their government, which firmly supported the Antilles in getting access to bilateral tax treaties, notably the one with the United States. Until the mid 1980s Curaçao flourished, but then found it increasingly difficult to keep a competitive advantage over other offshore centres. Meanwhile the Curaçao connection had enabled the Netherlands to turn itself into a hub for international revenue flows that today still feed both Dutch tax income and specialised financial, legal and accounting services.

Before the founding of the Federal Reserve, bank clearinghouse associations served as an emergency lending facility during the National Bank Era (1863–1913). This article clarifies the operation of clearinghouse loan certificates during panic periods. If clearinghouse loan certificates do not circulate among the general public, then they bear similarities to interbank loans among clearinghouse member banks. In general, the central clearinghouse organization does not act alone as a lender of last resort to make loans from the central clearinghouse to individual member banks.

German bankers are renowned for their central position in the German model of ‘coordinated capitalism’ and for their elevated social status. Over the last 130 years, no other part of the entrepreneurial elite in Germany has displayed more power and stability. This article uses the concepts of social and human capital to explain this success and how German banking changed its patterns of recruitment, training and careers in response to general political and social trends. It also applies these concepts to the transformation of German banking from personal to managerial and, after 1970, to global capitalism. A conservative approach prevailed that integrated new demands but did so very cautiously. At the end of the twentieth century these features began to operate against German banking and weaken its international competitiveness, as the stock of specific social capital had created an inward-looking mindset.

Hong Kong SAR is well known as one of the few economies to operate a form of currency board as the basis of its monetary system. This system arose out of colonial status and has been retained except for a period of floating from 1975-83 to the present day, with some amendments. This article explores the evolution of the Exchange Fund during a period of global exchange rate instability showing that the abandonment of the monetary anchor in 1975 was part of a series of innovations to the use of the Fund as the colonial government sought to manage the exchange rate risks posed by the collapse of the Bretton Woods system.

Continental pawnbroking institutions, Monts-de-Piété, were introduced in Ireland in the 1830s and 1840s but did not establish a permanent status. Irish social reformers believed that a Mont-de-Piété system would reduce the cost of borrowing for the poor and also fund a social welfare network, thus negating the need for an Irish Poor Law. This article explores the introduction of the Mont-de-Piété charitable pawnbroker in Ireland and outlines some reasons for its failure. It uses the market incumbents, private pawnbrokers, as a base group in a comparative study and asks why the Monts-de-Piété were the unsuccessful ones of the two. The article finds that the public nature and monopoly status of Monts-de-Piété on the Continent realised economies of scale and gave preferential interest rates on capital, as well as enabling the Mont-de-Piété loan book to be cross-subsidised. These conditions were not replicated in Ireland, hence the failure of the Monts-de-Piété there.

In its Asian operations the Dutch United East Indies Company (VOC) (1602–1798) acted both as a territorial ruler and as a trading company. The company shipped large amounts of precious metals to Asia, both in the form of bullion and as coins, to pay for its trade and to provide currency for the areas under its control. The Company faced the problem that silver coins rapidly disappeared from circulation, as demand for silver was high in Asia. The Company attempted to manage the problem with a monetary policy using a unit of account, modelled after the policy of the Dutch Republic. It turned out that the two purposes of the money of account system, viz., putting the bookkeeping on a systematic basis and managing the currency in circulation, were conflicting. The first demanded a fixed unit of account, the second demanded a flexible policy of linking and de-linking the unit of account to real coins. Although the Company managed to muddle through this dilemma, it only succeeded in finding temporary solutions.

This special issue of the Financial History Review contributes to the vast literature on the political economy of monetary unions. Inspired by the recent events in Europe, it reaches back in history to consider an earlier experiment in forming a monetary (as well as economic and political) union. In this historical case the pivotal event was the ratification of the United States Constitution in 1788, two centuries before the Maastricht Treaty. Between formal independence in 1781 and the implementation of the Constitution reforms in 1789, the fledgling country was organised politically into a loose confederation of thirteen, virtually sovereign states. Despite the nominal powers granted to the national government under the Articles of Confederation, it lacked the direct means to collect taxes and to enforce its policies. Consequently, during this brief period, state governments could and did pursue their own economic and monetary policies.

This article challenges the conventional view of the existence of a pure floating regime in France during the mid 1920s. Our study, based on the archives of the Bank of France and the French Ministry of Finance, as well as a thorough examination of the exchange rates (FRF/USD) and (FRF/GBP) during the 1920s, reveals that the French authorities did intervene on several occasions. From these first direct actions, as well as some other abortive attempts, several lessons can be drawn about the effectiveness of interventions on a ‘modern’ exchange rate market.

Until 2008, Ireland's banks had a solid reputation. Its two long-established banks could trace their origins back to the beginnings of joint-stock banking in 1825. Few banks of consequence had failed in the interim. The last such failure, the focus of this article, was that of the Munster Bank in 1885. That event tells us much about the history of Irish banking before recent events.

The British monetary authorities tried to encourage lower long-term interest rates through their government debt management operations between 1962 and 1964, following the Radcliffe report's recommendation that they should have an objective for long-term rates, and with the intention of supporting the government's pursuit of faster economic growth. The implementation of the policy was complicated by the Bank of England's role as a market maker in the government securities market, and beset by misunderstandings among the monetary authorities. The policy was abandoned when the conditions of strong market demand for bonds on which it depended changed. The article describes how the policy was developed and implemented, and the impact of political preferences on it.

By the mid nineteenth century, German miners relied on their own job-related social insurance scheme providing them with sickness, invalidity and survivorship insurance benefits. Addressing the period from 1867 to 1913, this article investigates whether the mineworkers' insurance funds, the Knappschaften, could effectively minimise their exposure to the actuarial risk inherent in their operations – and, in fact, inherent in all such insurance schemes – by increasing the scale of pooling. Contemporary observers of the Knappschaften tended to focus on whether financial stability could be improved by exploiting economies of scale, rather than by improving the pricing techniques themselves. Evidence suggests that actuarial risk was minimised at around 5,000 contributors in a Knappschaft's pension insurance section and at about 1,000 contributors in its sickness insurance section.

Previous studies of entry under New York's free banking law of 1838 have generated conflicting results. This article shows that different measures of entry lead to different conclusions about the competitive effects of the law. Measured by the entry of new banks, New York's free banking law led to increased rates of entry relative to other states. Free banking did not, however, lead to significant increases in capital accumulation in the industry. This paradoxical outcome resulted from the regulatory features of free banking, especially the bond security feature, which reduced profitability and incentives to invest in banking.

This article employs, for the first time, the private archive of one of the world's largest and oldest reinsurance companies, Swiss Re, founded in Zürich in 1863, in order to analyse the early development and internal workings of reinsurance – the insurer's insurance – in nineteenth-century Europe. In the course of overcoming existential crises during its early years, the company's management learned valuable lessons about the technical basis of reinsurance and the importance of information and communication. In the long run, this experience enabled Swiss Re to gain a greater autonomy of action for professional reinsurers within the insurance industry as a whole.

Indebted cities were a widespread phenomenon during the Ancien Régime. However, some found ways to innovate the management of their municipal debt, whilst others fell prey to over-indebtedness or default. In this article we have left the success stories aside and focused on the latter. Using early modern Antwerp as a case study, we have disentangled the underlying mechanisms that ultimately lead to over-indebtedness and (in some cases) default. Whilst the economic climate and the relationship between city and state have been rightly identified as major factors in the previous literature, our contribution brings another element to the table, namely, the inflexibility of long-established rent arrangements and the entanglement between the ruling elite and the rentiers. We show that there was a strong overlap between both groups, which had a huge impact on the financial policy of cities during the early modern period.