Commercial Banks and Industrial Finance in England and Wales, 1860-1913

In the decades before 1914, the City of London was the premier international financial centre. However, this position was not long maintained, other industrial nations quickly and effectively challenged the influence of Britain, and following the disruption of the world markets caused by World War I and the Great Depression of the 1930s, international hegemony slipped away for ever. The relationship of bankers and industrialists has often been cited as a key factor in this decline. Critics of the banks claim that, even before World War I, there were serious deficiencies in the financial provision provided by banks to the domestic industrial sector, and that these deficiencies handicapped Britain's competitive advantage in world markets, leading to the decline of their influence and power. This book examines these claims, and bringing to bear important new data that presents the debate in a novel and revealing framework, expounds an economic rationale for historical bank behaviour. Using a rich source of contemporary records, it presents a series of micro-economic studies into commercial bank assets and liabilities, financial crises, bank mergers, the professionalization of banking, the organization and conduct of the industrial loan business, and the nature of bank support given to industrial clients. The result is a new, authoritative interpretation of bank-industry relations in the half-century before World War I.