The State, the Financial System and Economic Modernization

by Edited by Richard Sylla , Richard Tilly , Gabriel Tortella

• ISBN13: 9780521591232
• ISBN10: 0521591236
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1999-03-28
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

Through an examination of a wide variety of financial systems in Europe, and North and South America over approximately 150 years of change, this book demonstrates the key role that finance has played in economic change, and in the development of diverse financial systems. Insights into the primacy of the state's role in the financial development of the pre-industrial era have not been carried over into the historiography of the industrial era itself, so the discoveries detailed in this book have never been brought together in a systematic manner. This book therefore aims to demonstrate through comparative historical analysis, the richness of the history of modern financial systems, and to restore the state to its primary role in the shaping of those systems. This book makes an unique contribution to financial historiography, thus will be of interest to economists and financial, economic and world historians.

Table of Contents

List of figures	ix	(1)
List of tables	x	(1)
List of contributors	xi	(2)
Preface	xiii
1 Introduction: comparative historical perspectives	1	(19)
RICHARD SYLLA
RICHARD TILLY
GABRIEL TORTELLA
2 Politics and banking in revolutionary and Napoleonic France	20	(33)
FRANCOIS CROUZET
3 Belgian banking in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: the Societe Generale and the Generale de Banque (1822-1997)	53	(22)
HERMAN VAN DER WEE
MONIQUE VAN DER WEE-VERBREYT
4 Banking liberalization in England and Wales, 1826-1844	75	(43)
P. L. COTTRELL
LUCY NEWTON
5 Banking in Europe in the nineteenth century: the role of the central bank	118	(16)
FORREST CAPIE
6 Public policy, capital markets and the supply of industrial finance in nineteenth-century Germany	134	(24)
RICHARD TILLY
7 The role of banks and government in Spanish economic development, 1850-1935	158	(24)
GABRIEL TORTELLA
8 Central banking and German-style mixed banking in Italy, 1893/5-1914: from coexistence to cooperation	182	(28)
PETER HERTNER
9 State power and finance in Russia, 1802-1917: the Credit Office of the Finance Ministry and governmental control over credit institutions	210	(14)
BORIS ANAN'ICH
10 The origins of banking in Argentina	224	(25)
ROBERTO CORTES CONDE
11 Shaping the US financial system, 1690-1913: the dominant role of public finance	249	(22)
RICHARD SYLLA
12 Cosmopolitan finance in the 1920s: New York's emergence as an international financial centre	271	(21)
MIRA WILKINS
Index	292