Featuring primary documents drawn from the Victorian era's business and periodical press, this anthology provides an introduction to the most important features of the financial system in nineteenth-century Britain. Topics covered include currency and credit instruments; the national debt and the stock exchange; banks and the banking system; and the money market, company law, and financial fraud. The documents represent a variety of perspectives, including working-class radicals' complaints about the burden the national debt imposed on the poor, Indian economists' warnings about how debt was impoverishing India, political economists' celebrations of "magic" capital, and satirists' exposures of the frauds perpetrated by nefarious swindlers and company promoters. Most of the selections are reproduced in their entirety so that readers can see how closely financial matters were intertwined with the politics, ethics, and literary concerns of the period. An introduction by the editor and a chronology of the British financial system help place the materials in their historical context. Ideal for courses in Victorian literature, culture, and history, The Financial System in Nineteenth-Century Britain will also interest general readers who have been puzzled by references to financial matters in writings of the period. This unique collection reveals how England rose to a position of international financial supremacy and how writing about finance both monitored and supported that triumph.

Banking, borrowing, investing, and even losing money - in other words, participating in the modern financial system - seem like routine activities of everyday life. This book looks at how this came to be the case by examining the history of financial instruments and representations of finance in 18th and 19th century Britain.

This accessible study investigates the role of banks in the finance of British industry, an issue which has long been the subject of dispute. From one perspective the history of British finance is one of success: from the late nineteenth century the City of London was the leading financial centre in the international economy. Yet there has been much disquiet over the level of support that banks have given to British Industry, particularly when Britain's economic hegemony was challenged at the end of the nineteenth century, and during the malaise which followed the First World War. Michael Collins weighs the conflicting arguments. Is there evidence of failure in the money markets? Has the estrangement of financial and industrial capital hindered Britain's economic development? He places these and other questions in historical context and provides a survey of literature on this contentious subject.

This study examines the impact of British capital flows on the evolution of capital markets in four countries - Argentina, Australia, Canada, and the United States - over the years 1870 to 1914. In substantive chapters on each country it offers parallel histories of the evolution of their financial infrastructures - commercial banks, non-bank intermediaries, primary security markets, formal secondary security markets, and the institutions that provide the international financial links connecting the frontier country with the British capital market. At one level, the work constitutes a quantitative history of the development of the capital markets of five countries in the late nineteenth century. At a second level, it provides the basis for a useable taxonomy for the study of institutional invention and innovation. At a third, it suggests some lessons from the past about modern policy issues.

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries witnessed significant developments in the structure, organization, and expansion of financial markets and opportunities for investment in Britain and its empire. But very little is known about how men and women engaged with these markets and with new opportunities for money-making. In what ways did the composition of personal fortunes alter in response to these developments? How did individuals make use of new financial opportunities to further their own priorities and ensure their families' well-being? What choices of securities did they make, and how did these reflect their attitudes to investment risk? What were the implications of a rapidly growing investor population for corporate governance and the regulation of markets? How significant is gender in understanding new patterns of wealth holding and investment? This interdisciplinary book brings together a range of leading international scholars to answer these questions and to develop important new research agendas. Foremost among these is a concern for gender, with several of the chapters exploring the growing importance of women within investment markets. These findings open up dialogues between economic and financial historians with social, gender, and feminist historians, and add a significant new dimension to existing research on women's economic agency. The volume also breaks fresh ground by analysing aspects of wealth holding and finance in British colonial settings: Canada and Australia. Understanding the extent to which global financial processes shaped the economic lives of those on the 'periphery' as well as at the 'heart' of empire will offer new insights into the social and geographical diffusion of financial markets.

During the twentieth century the financial sector became possibly the most regulated area of the economy in many advanced and developing countries. The interwar years represented the defining moment for the escalation of governments' intervention, turning the State into the core of financial systems in its capacity of regulator, supervisor or owner. The essays in this collection shed light on different aspects of the experience of financial regulation, ownership and deregulation in Europe and the USA from a secular historical perspective. The volume's chapters explore how the political economy of finance changed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and how such changes were related to shifting attitudes towards globalization. They also investigate how regulation responded to governance problems of financial intermediaries and markets, and how different legal frameworks and institutional architectures influenced such response. The collection engages with a set of issues as diverse as they are interrelated across countries and over time: the regulatory attitude of British authorities toward the banking system and the stock exchange market in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; the comparative evolution of bankruptcy laws and procedures; the link between state, regulation and governance in the evolution of the US and French financial systems; the emergence of banking regulation and supervision by central banks; the regulation and supervision of international financial markets since the 1950s; and the connection between deregulation and banking crises at the end of the past century. Taken as a whole, the chapters offer an intriguing insight into the differing ways western countries approached and responded to the challenges of the international financial system, and the legacy of this on the modern world. In so doing the volume holds up to historical scrutiny the debate as to whether overt state regulation of financial markets always has a negative affect on economic growth, or whether it can be an essential tool for developing nations in their efforts to expand their economies.

This and the previous volume chart the history of financial institutions in England in the mid-late nineteenth century as well as examining the periods of boom and bust, their causes and effects. Using hitherto unpublished sources from the International Financial Society this book provides an unrivalled record of the development of the modern banking industry.