These chapters – as well as the relevant sections in G. Kurgan's and Cassis and Tanner's ones – offer us a classic example of the polar attractions of ‘splitting’ and ‘lumping’ in social and institutional history. All the contributors either implicitly or explicitly see financial institutions and their members as occupying some kind of special, salient position in modern socio-economic and political structures. Yet all suggest that this salience differs in characters, not merely between different periods and different national contexts, but between different types of financial institution within the same national culture, and even between different examples of the same kind of finance house. Thus, as Martin Daunton's paper helpfully reminds us, by no means all persons engaged in financial practices can be seen as part of a single homogeneous group. In terms of social status, recruitment patterns, financial rewards and access to government, merchants banks in the City of London differed from each other and from the joint-stock banks, which in turn differed from the Stock Exchange, Lloyds and other financial groupings. Similarly, Dolores Augustine's study of German bankers demonstrates that the social character of a financial elite in a bourgeois and patrician city like Hamburg might be quite different from that of its counterpart in administrative and aristocratic Berlin. The study of Cassis and Tanner shows that the economic and cultural milieu of financial groups in Switzerland was dependent upon highly localized cultural and political traditions of the different cantons.