Seventeenth century London formed a network of credit and information, necessary for the City to become a hub of international finance. Lacking a central exchange bank, London-based finance involved bankers and merchants monitoring overseas agents and enforcing international claims. Using archival sources, we show how London bankers employed merchants to channel funds around Europe. As merchants became stakeholders in the payments system, they developed incentives to monitor foreign agents and spread information of defaults. The resulting web of information flows encouraged market integration by facilitating arbitrage. Finally, the availability of instruments for formal legal enforcement assisted informal enforcement.

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.

The article discusses Italy's integration into the international capital market following the First World War. Abundant inflows of foreign capital subsequently clashed with the stringent monetary policy that accompanied the Lira revaluation and consequently were partially sterilised. During the aftermath of the world crisis, foreign funds withdrew from Italian firms as a consequence of the precarious equilibrium in which the gold bloc countries found themselves, once other currencies devalued or became prone to devaluation. The resulting isolation from the world financial market raised the need for a domestic solution to the liquidity crisis, and the creations of IMI and IRI are viewed as part of the resultant process of the Italian credit system's overall restructuring.

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.

Incorporated in 1872, Banque de Paris et des Pays-Bas – Paribas – inherited the European and international traditions of several well-established banking houses (Bischoffsheim & Goldschmidt and Goüin, among others). It then became a sort of model for French-style merchant banking and, as a result, swiftly aroused historians' subsequent curiosity. The bank's unusual character intrigued them. It was a hybrid, combining continental European private banking, then in decline, major retail or commercial banking, which was growing strongly, and British merchant and American investment banking that was already setting a trend.

Rondo Cameron died on the first day of the third millennium from a heart attack after a long illness. He was born in Linden, Texas, into a family of Scottish stock. He fought as a pilot during the Second World War and, thereafter, studied economics at Yale University thanks to a grant from the GI bill. After obtaining his M.A. degree in 1949, he went on to the University of Chicago, where he received his Ph.D. in 1952 with a dissertation on French investment abroad. His thesis director was Earl J. Hamilton and his research in Paris was made possible by a Fulbright grant. Rondo kept working on the themes of his dissertation, which in the end, polished and enlarged, became his celebrated France and the Economic Development of Europe, 1800–1914 (1st ed. Princeton University Press, 1961), later translated into several languages, French and Spanish among them. This monograph already exhibited what would be Cameron's trademarks: thorough research, intellectual ambition, excellent writing style, interest in banking history and in cultural factors of economic development, together with a fond love for the Old World, in particular France.