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.

The international performance of the US reinsurance industry differed sharply from other segments of the US financial services sector in the latter half of the twentieth century. Trade imbalances and loss ratios in international reinsurance business indicate that the American reinsurance industry had pronounced difficulties in getting a foothold in international markets. The dominance of the established western European reinsurance centres, which prevailed throughout the early phases of American reinsurance, continued long into the post-war period. Moreover, bilateral trade with the world's foremost reinsurance centre, London, failed to compensate for American catastrophe losses, a task maintained by reinsurers to be the key function of their international activities. London's failure to perform adequately is described by analysing the underwriting results of the period before and after Hurricane Betsy, the major American catastrophe loss of the 1960s.

This article investigates the impact of bank consolidations promoted by government policy, using data from pre-war Japan when the Ministry of Finance promoted bank consolidations through the Bank Law of 1927. We argue that policy-promoted consolidation had a positive effect on deposit growth, especially in the period when the financial system was unstable. On the other hand, it had a negative effect on profitability, particularly when there was no dominant bank among the participants or when more than two banks participated in the consolidation. Policy-promoted consolidation in such cases was likely to be accompanied by large organisational cost.

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.

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.

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.

The riddle of why the Maria Theresa dollar issued by Vienna continued in circulation for over one and a half centuries in Africa and the Middle East has never been fully explained. Contrary to common belief, the popularity of this particular silver dollar did not depend on its intrinsic content. The Maria Theresa dollar complemented other monies so well that no authority could replace it with its own currency. The circuit of the coin functioned as a buffering interface between local markets, which collected products like coffee through fractional currencies, and the international market, in which the products were traded in terms of a standard currency like sterling. The complementary role of the Maria Theresa dollar resulted from a self-organising process by markets themselves in order to stabilise transactions.

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.