ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the path leading to that statute, which involved some transfer of the authorities growing experience of regulating chartered colonial banks during the 1830s to joint-stock banks in the metropolitan economy. From 1711 until 1821 the British State stood back from intervening in the burgeoning formalized provision of banking services. The introduction of a legal framework permitting what came to be called joint-stock banking was hurried; hence the need for three Irish banking measures between 1821 and 1825. Legislation reforming the 1826 Act was finally passed in 1844, one of three parallel measures by which Peel attempted to meet the problems of financial and monetary instability. The model charter scheme failed to resolve all the difficulties facing the chartered colonial banks from the late 1870s. Some textbook writers have attributed the growing stability of British banking over the nineteenth century to the ascendancy of joint-stock banks and their growing branch networks from the 1860s.
