ABSTRACT
This book comprises a collection of papers presented to Forrest Capie not on his retirement but on the completion of his latest major project, the official history of the Bank of England from the 1950s to 1979. This official history is an addition to only one aspect of his work. Not only has he researched and published extensively in monetary and banking history; inspection of his list of publications (which is on pages 301 to 308 of this present book) shows that he has also written on international trade, unemployment, international finance, business cycles, growth, inflation (including hyperinflations) and deflation and the history of economic thought. In addition, he guided and worked on a project which led to major refinements and extensions to British monetary and banking data. The chapters in this volume are all prompted by different aspects of his work, either developing prior work of his or contributing to the further development of areas he has studied. In addition, more than one makes use of the extensive data he collected and published in Forrest Capie and Alan Webber, A Monetary History of the United Kingdom, 1870-1982: Data Sources & Methods (1985). This short chapter briefly reviews these other chapters, places them in the context of present-day scholarship, and, in emulation of Forrest’s admirable custom of relating his historical studies to present-day problems, tries to draw some policy implications.
