ABSTRACT
Twenty years ago it would have been impossible to construct a history of the City of London in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries which could in any way have matched the rich and varied accounts of the development of British industry and agriculture. Part of the problem was the traditional shyness of City institutions much of whose success had depended on secrecy or, at the least, discretion. Such inhibitions have now largely vanished; archives have been opened and historical curiosity stimulated. The reasons for this rather sudden desire for exposure are not entirely clear but they may, in an oblique way, reflect economic decline. Despite the City’s survival as an international financial centre it is now an offshore island of a global capitalism rather than, as it was in its heyday, the market which expressed the international dominance of British capital and British commercial and financial institutions. For the great names of the City, including the Bank of England itself, the days of supreme achievement are quite obviously over and contemplation of a glorious past may offer some small compensation. Whatever the rationale, the outcome has been a flood of research redressing the previously inevitable overemphasis on the fortunes of industrial capitalism which has distorted historians’ perceptions both of the complexity of the British economy and of its evolution.2 It has also directed attention to the fact that, whatever were the tribulations of industry after 1880, the City of London, like the south-eastern service sector of which it was the core, was a remarkably dynamic and enterprising entity rather than a mere derivative of industrial development. The result is that some traditional judgements which have long associated the service sector with labour intensity and low productivity are being revised and the importance of entrepreneurship and institutional innovation in these areas of the economy more clearly recognized.3
