Crisis and Renewal in Twentieth Century Banking explores the behaviour of banks at times of war, revolution, civil war, social turmoil, and reconstruction. Analysing the history and archives of banks, it discovers examples of how banking is affected by political and social upheavals; how banks may influence the outcome of such events; how banking has recovered from periods of intense political and social stress; and how the archives of banks provide remarkable testimony to events in the wider world. By examining the setting of different banking markets in the last century, up to and including the transformation of Eastern and South Eastern Europe in the 1990s, this book marks a new direction for international discussion and research. Contributors include senior historians and archivists from Europe and the United States. Contributions include papers on Russia and foreign banks, 1917-30; depression and crisis in Central Europe in the 1930s; Civil War in Spain; post-war reconstruction in banking in Germany and the Far East; and crisis and renewal in South East Europe. The papers published in this collection were first presented at the twelfth Annual Conference of the European Association for Banking History, held in Ljubljana, Slovenia, in May 2001, and hosted by the Bank of Slovenia and the Nova Ljubljanska Banka.

This volume advances a better, more historical and contextual, manner to consider not only the present, but also the future of ‘crisis’ and ‘renewal’ as key concepts of our political language as well as fundamental categories of interpretation.

This book incorporates advances in financial and monetary history and theory and shows the relevance of Spain's story to modern banking, monetary and development theory. It studies the early development of banking and monetary institutions and shows how financial and monetary mismanagement contributed to the decline of Spain in the early modern era

This volume presents a panoramic picture of the many national and international trends and developments, factors, customs, and events that have characterised banking in the Mediterranean area over the past two centuries. During this period banking in the Mediterranean evolved distinct characteristics, several going well beyond the restricted realities of colonial relations. The range of issues covered by the book is extensive and includes both national banking evolution and pan-regional topics. The chapters touch upon various aspects of Iberian, Italian, French, Greek, Maltese, Moroccan, and Ottoman banking history, focusing particularly on issues relating to central banking, numismatics, archival recording, and pan-Mediterranean economic dynamics. The history of certain specific institutions is also considered, including the Imperial Ottoman Bank, The Ionian Bank, The Banque d'Etat du Maroc, and others. Bringing together papers by leading banking and finance historians which were first presented at the European Association for Banking History conference held in Malta in June 2007, this volume offers an invaluable insight towards a wider and more detailed understanding of the roles of banking and finance in Mediterranean economic history. Seen in a context of what has hitherto been something of a historical vacuum in terms of the coverage of much writing on European banking and financial history, and the importance given to the Mediterranean region's banking history in its own right, this is an innovative book that both contributes towards our knowledge the subject, and establishes a pattern for further work in this important area of European economic history.

From the late imperial period until 1922, the British and French made private and government loans to Russia, making it the foremost international debtor country in pre-World War I Europe. To finance the modernization of industry, the construction of public works projects, the building of railroads, and the development of the military-industrial complex, Russia's ministers of finance, municipal leaders, and nascent manufacturing class turned, time and time again, to foreign capital. From the forging of the Franco-Russian alliance onwards, Russia's needs were met, first and foremost, by France and Great Britain, its allies, and diplomatic partners in the developing Triple Entente. Russia's continued access to those ready lenders ensured that the empire of the Tsars would not be tempted away from its alliance and entente partners. This web of financial and political interdependence affected both foreign policy and domestic society in all three countries. The Russian state was so heavily indebted to its western creditors, rendering those western economies almost prisoners to this debt, that the debtor nation in many ways had the upper hand; the Russian government at times was actually able to dictate policy to its French and British counterparts. Those nations' investing classes-which, in France in particular, spanned not only the upper classes but the middle, rentier class, as well-had such a vast proportion of their savings wrapped up in Russian bonds that any default would have been catastrophic for their own economies. That default came not long after the Bolshevik Revolution brought to power a government who felt no responsibility, whatsoever, for the debts accrued by the tsars for the purpose of oppressing Russia's workers and peasants. The ensuing effect on allied morale, the Anglo-French relationship, and, ultimately, on international relations in the twentieth century, was grim and far-reaching. Jennifer Siegel narrates a classic tale of money and power in the modern era-an age of economic interconnectivity and great power interdependency-involving such figures as Lord Revelstoke, chairman of Baring Brothers, the British and French Rothschild cousins, and Sergei Witte, Russia's authoritative finance minister during much of this age of expansion. For Peace and Money highlights the importance of foreign capital in policymaking on the origins and conduct of World War I.

The Sociology of Greed examines crises in financial institutions such as banks from the vantage point of the greed of the people at their helm. It offers an intensive analysis of the banking crises under the conditions of colonial capitalism in early twentieth-century Bengal that led to institutional and social collapse. Breaking new ground, the book looks at the moral economy of capitalism and money culture by focusing on the victims of banking crises, hitherto unexplored in Western empirical research. Through sociological analyses of political economy, it seamlessly combines archival records, survey and statistical data with literary narratives, realist fiction and performing arts to recount how the greed of bank owners and managers ruined their institutions as well as common people. It argues that greed turns perilous when the state and the market facilitate its agency, and it examines the contexts and histories, the indifference of the fledgling colonial state, feeble political response, and the consequences for those who were impacted and the losses, especially the refugees, the lower-middle class and women. The volume also re-composes relevant elements of Western sociological scholarship from classical theories to early twenty-first-century financial sociology. An insightful account of the social history of banking in India, this book will greatly interest researchers and scholars in sociology, economics, history and cultural studies.