Introduction

The purpose of this volume is to reopen an old and venerable debate in political economy on completely new terms. At issue are the origins of the distinct features of national financial systems. Since the nineteenth century, it has been commonplace to distinguish between financial systems in which commercial and investment banking are carried out by separate types of firms and those in which “universal banks” carry out both kinds of operation. Britain is often considered the paradigmatic case of a country in which commercial and investment banking evolved separately, and Germany as the paradigmatic homeland of universal banking. Many of the other countries examined by the contributors to this volume fall somewhere between, with France and the Netherlands falling closer to the British end of the spectrum, Italy and Portugal closer to the German end, and Norway, Sweden and Late Imperial Russia somewhere between. Once in place, these financial systems have proved remarkably robust. Most industrial nations still have today financial systems conforming to the broad type they developed by the end of the nineteenth century.