This volume addresses aspects of banking in 20th-century European market economies. It examines the historical role of banks in using domestic and foreign financial resources, showing how from the 1880s onwards, banks became an integral part of the capital market in continental Europe. The study analyzes the relationship between banks and industry, and the impacts on inflation and the crisis-prone interwar period.

An account of the rise of banking since the Middle Ages and its place in the modern international economy, first published in 1997.

Although international finance and banking has been the subject of research and writing, the economic impact of banks on industrial structures and the relations between banking and industry in the twentieth century have remained relatively unexplored areas. This volume examines and interprets the economic effect of the financing of industry by banks and of the banks' credit intermediation in industrialized economies. Particular attention is given to the interplay of economics and politics, to the connections between bankers and industrialists, and to the significance of interlocking directorships. A special section is devoted to a hitherto wholly neglected problem in economic history: the vital influence of universal banking in small but highly industrialized countries in central Europe and Scandinavia.