From its foundation as a private corporation in 1694 the Bank of England extended large amounts of credit to support the British private economy and to support an increasingly centralized British state. The Bank helped the British state reach a position of geopolitical and economic hegemony in...

This paper provides a political economy perspective on gold standard adoption in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia which joined the monetary system in midst of the Great Depression in June 1931. The analysis proceeds in three stages. First, the high relative costs faced by a peripheral country like...

This article examines the integration of regional Scottish grain markets from the early seventeenth century until the end of the long eighteenth century in 1815. The Scottish economy developed rapidly in this period, with expansion driven by improvements in market structures and specialisation...

I present a theory to account for the emergence of land rights in a subsistence agricultural economy. An important feature is that, to maximize tax revenue, an authoritarian state must devise land rights to overcome the informational constraint in registering the population for tax collection....

In the decade before the famine, Ireland experienced a boom in Microfinance Institutions (MFIs). This paper analyses the motivations of MFI proponents and practitioners, and finds evidence linking the boom in MFIs with the introduction of the poor law in 1838. Many contemporary writers saw...

This paper explores why Spanish banks internationalise and why Latin America has been the main region for the international expansion of BBVA and Santander. It shows that prior to 1986 Spanish banks had a limited presence abroad, and analyses the main drivers of this initial expansion...

This paper contributes to the literature on moral hazard, lending of last resort and the political origins of banking crises. Drawing on newly accessed quantitative and qualitative archival sources the paper documents how a bank - Banco de Cataluña - formed a coalition with the Dictatorship of...

By the time of his death in September 1921, Peter Johnstone Freyer was an extremely wealthy man. After an education at Queen's College Galway, his medical career had been defined by colonial service in India, and the establishment of a successful surgery and consultancy on London's Harley...

This study examines the formalization of banking supervision in Japan and Sweden that occurred in the decades around 1900. Using an incremental change approach, the respective cases are traced and examined from three dimensions: 1) the legal framework, 2) the banking supervisory agency, and 3)...

This short note is a description of the dataset compiled during the drafting of Cash and Dash: How ATMs and Computers Changed Banking (Oxford University Press, 2018). The full dataset is deposited with the European Association for Banking and Financial History, and is available for download from...