The Oxford Handbook of Banking and Financial History

Youssef Cassis is Professor of Economic History at the European University Institute. His work mainly focuses on banking and financial history, as well as business history more generally. His most recent publications include Capitals of Capital: A History of International Financial Centres, 1780-2005, (Cambridge University Press, 2006, 2nd revised edition, 2010), Crises and Opportunities: The Shaping of Modern Finance (Oxford University Press, 2011); and, with Philip L. Cottrell, Private Banking in Europe: Rise, Retreat and Resurgence (Oxford University Press, 2015). He was the cofounder, in 1994, of Financial History Review (Cambridge University Press). He was also a member of the Academic Advisory Council of the European Association for Banking and Financial History and past President (2005-2007) of the European Business History Association.Richard S. Grossman is Professor of Economics at Wesleyan University and a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University. He is the author of Unsettled Account: The Evolution of Banking in the Industrialized World since 1800 (Princeton, 2010) and WRONG: Nine Economic Policy Disasters and What We Can Learn from Them (Oxford, 2013). He is a research fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research in London, a research network fellow of CESifo in Munich, and an associate editor for socioeconomics, health policy, and law at the journal Neurosurgery. He has held visiting positions at the US Department of State, Yale University, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and his research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the German Marshall Fund of the United States and the Guggenheim Foundation.Catherine Schenk FRHS is Professor of International Economic History at the University of Glasgow. She gained her PhD at the London School of Economics and has held academic posts at Royal Holloway, University of London, Victoria University of Wellington and visiting positions at the International Monetary Fund and the Hong Kong Monetary Authority as well as the University of Hong Kong. She is Associate Fellow in the international economics department at Chatham House in London. Her research focuses on international monetary and financial relations after 1945 with a particular emphasis on East Asia and the United Kingdom. She is the author of several books including International Economic Relations since 1945 (2011) and The Decline of Sterling: managing the retreat of an international currency (2010).

The global financial crisis that began in 2007-08 and continued to rattle the Eurozone countries after 2010 has certainly been good for the market for financial history. The Oxford Handbook of Banking and Financial History is clearly a response to these events. In their introductory chapter, the editors set out their ambitious agenda, which is to deal with the individual parts of our modern complex financial system and trace how each has evolved over time. Each chapter ends with some insight into how the current turmoil in global banking and finance might affect part of the global financial system. This broad-ranging approach is very much in keeping with current analysis by policy economists, who have become very sensitive to how our financial system intertwines banks.

• PART I: THEMATIC ISSUES; PART II: FINANCIAL INSTITUTIONS; PART III: FINANCIAL MARKETS; PART IV: FINANCIAL REGULATION; PART V: FINANCIAL CRISES