ABSTRACT
European nineteenth-century financial history has tended to suffer from three shortcomings. Despite the early seminal works of Cameron, Goldsmith and Gerschenkron, until recently it has concentrated mostly on the study of sections of national financial systems, mainly commercial banks, rather than on these systems as a totality, thus leaving out the interaction between their constituent parts and giving less attention to other institutions such as non-profit banking or equity markets.1 In the second place, notwithstanding a considerable amount of work cast in a comparative perspective, this approach has been less thorough and consistent than might be desired, largely because it has lacked the sound statistical underpinning needed for it and which has yet to be constructed. A good deal of quantification of financial activity at the national and local level is currently available but its international comparability has not been the object of enough research effort and therefore solid, statistically motivated conclusions are hard to draw.2 Lastly, financial history on the whole has treated lightly the role of the legal and institutional framework in determining the shape, size and evolution of financial systems.3 In virtually every study of this kind, one can find references to legislation and other forms of state regulation of financial activity, much of it focused on national reactions to crises, but this approach seldom occupies the center of the stage and rarely, if ever, goes into sufficient detail. Given the special importance of regulatory conditions for an economic sector such as this one and the exceptional weight, in this context, of the state as an economic agent, an incomplete picture is the inevitable result. This chapter seeks to contribute to all three of these aspects, taking Portugal during the second half of the nineteenth century as the object of study.
