ABSTRACT
The role of banks and, more generally, financial systems in promoting economic development is a perennial issue in discussions of economic history and economic policy.1 Europe’s industrialization in the nineteenth century has furnished much of the material for the discussions and debates of economic historians. At the extremes of the debates, banks that provided finance to industrial firms have been viewed as necessary and/or sufficient for industrial development to occur, or as passive and not particularly relevant responses to such development.
