The pivotal role played by non-banking institutions in supporting the expansion of international trade after the Napoleonic Wars and before first globalization c. 1870 - 1913 has long been recognised. Merchant-bankers in particular played a crucial role by advancing monies to consignors of...

The pivotal role played by non-banking institutions in supporting the expansion of international trade after the Napoleonic Wars and before first globalization c. 1870 - 1913 has long been recognised. Merchant-bankers in particular played a crucial role by advancing monies to consignors of...

Charles Mackay's book "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds" enjoys extraordinarily high renown in the financial industry and among the press and the public. It also has an extraordinarily low reputation among historians.This paper argues that Mackay's sins of commission...

The collapse of an investment mania usually reminds people that the phrase "This time is different" is dangerous. Recollections of this mantra then typically either state outright or at least imply that "It is never different." However, there is at least one counterexample to this cautious view,...

How did European merchants finance the Commercial Revolution? Established narratives highlight roles for reputation effects or the risk-sharing afforded by commenda contracts in enabling merchants to mobilize investment for long-distance trade. In contrast, this study illuminates tradeoffs...

Can industrial policy be effective when dealing with a revolutionary new technology? Mark Casson's recent book, "The World's First Railway System," offers the intriguing claim that a slight dose of central planning by the British government in the 1840s would have produced a dramatically more...

The pivotal role played by non-banking institutions in supporting the expansion of international trade after the Napoleonic Wars and before first globalization c. 1870-1913 has long been recognised. Merchant-bankers in particular played a crucial role by advancing monies to consignors of...

We describe how the structure and governance of international trade finance – the oldest domain of international finance – evolved from the Middle Ages until today. Trade finance products initially consisted of idiosyncratic assets issued by local merchants and bankers. The financing of...

This paper examines the role of an important type of instrument in international trade financing - the merchant bank acceptance - in the pre-WW1 British economy. A new dataset on merchant bank acceptances from 1880 to 1913 is analysed through the lens of recent developments in time series...

The British Railway Mania of the 1840s was by many measures the greatest technology mania in history, and its collapse was one of the greatest financial crashes. It has attracted surprisingly little scholarly interest. In particular, it has not been noted that it provides a convincing...