From the late nineteenth century to the late twentieth century the European banking sector experienced countless mergers and acquisitions. The outcome of this century of consolidation is strikingly similar across the continent, with the banking sector of each country now dominated by a handful of giant banking corporations. Consolidation and concentration trends in banking was the theme of the Academic Archive Colloquium of the European Association for Banking History held in Madrid in June 1997. This volume is comprised of the 18 papers and responses presented at the Colloquium by a truly...

Crisis and Renewal in Twentieth Century Banking explores the behaviour of banks at times of war, revolution, civil war, social turmoil, and reconstruction. Analysing the history and archives of banks, it discovers examples of how banking is affected by political and social upheavals; how banks may influence the outcome of such events; how banking has recovered from periods of intense political and social stress; and how the archives of banks provide remarkable testimony to events in the wider world. By examining the setting of different banking markets in the last century, up to and including...

Finance and Modernization centres on a set of historical developments and problems typified by the long history of the A sterreichische Creditanstalt and its successor organizations, and opens the way to compare and contrast experiences throughout Central and Western Europe and also on other continents. The structure of this volume reflects the changing role and nature of banks as economies become industrialized and modernized. Although banks adapt to the needs of an industrializing economy, at the same time, industrialization influences the manner in which banking systems grow and the...

Bringing together cultural, economic and social historians from across Europe and beyond, this volume offers a consideration from a number of perspectives of the principal forces that further integrated the Ottoman Empire and Western Europe during the first century of industrialisation. The essays not only review and analyse the commercial, financial and monetary factors, negative as well as positive, that bore upon the region's initial stages of modern transformation, but also provide a ready introduction to major aspects of the economy and society of the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth...

Banking regulation has been the subject of intense debate in recent years. This book contributes to that debate in its study of the impact of financial regulation on Spanish banking performance, especially profitability, from the end of the Spanish Civil War to the end of the Franco regime. Maria Pons discusses the Francoist authorities' policy of forced industrialization based on heavy industry, and the huge interventionist apparatus that it set up to involve banks in its industrialistic programme. This included several items of banking legislation related to the fixing of interest rates,...

The essays in this volume consider the involvement of business corporations and of individual businessmen in the politics of the 1930s and 1940s: in the move away from the market and also from democracy, towards state control and authoritarianism, including the massive intervention of the state in property rights. How far did businesses attempt to guide this intervention for their own purposes, and to what extent did they succeed? This debate deals, centrally, with the role of German business, of banks, of industrial corporations, and of small tradesmen in the Nazi regime. An older discussion...