It is well known that quantitative credit restrictions, rather than Bagehot-style ‘free lending' constituted the standard response to financial crises in the early days of central banking. But why did central banks in the past frequently restrict the supply of loans during financial crises? In...

On 28 August 1833 Parliament passed legislation that abolished slavery within the British Empire, emancipating more than 800,000 enslaved Africans. As part of the compromise that helped to secure abolition, the British government agreed a generous compensation package of £20 million to...

We use daily transactional ledger data from the Bank of England's Archive to test whether and to what extent the Bank of England during the mid-nineteenth century adhered to Walter Bagehot's rule that a central bank in a financial crisis should lend cash freely at a penalty rate in exchange for...