We document the transition from goldsmith to banker in the case of Richard Hoare and his successors and examine the operation of the London loan market during the early eighteenth century. Analysis of the financial revolution in England has focused on changes in public debt management and the interest rates paid by the state. Much less is known about the evolution of the financial system providing credit to individual borrowers. We show how this progress took time because operating a deposit bank was new and different from being a goldsmith. Learning how to use the relatively new technology of deposit banking was crucial for the bank's success and survival.

This special issue of the Financial History Review contributes to the vast literature on the political economy of monetary unions. Inspired by the recent events in Europe, it reaches back in history to consider an earlier experiment in forming a monetary (as well as economic and political) union. In this historical case the pivotal event was the ratification of the United States Constitution in 1788, two centuries before the Maastricht Treaty. Between formal independence in 1781 and the implementation of the Constitution reforms in 1789, the fledgling country was organised politically into a loose confederation of thirteen, virtually sovereign states. Despite the nominal powers granted to the national government under the Articles of Confederation, it lacked the direct means to collect taxes and to enforce its policies. Consequently, during this brief period, state governments could and did pursue their own economic and monetary policies.

It is established historical knowledge that the Bank of Japan (1882) was modelled upon the Banque Nationale de Belgique (1850). In this article, I point out how Japan's recurrent frustration with foreign dependence nurtured a social Darwinist view of international politics and finance: Japan's capability to survive in the world was believed to be dependent on its capability to assimilate foreign knowledge and institutions. In the field of finance, Matsukata Masayoshi, Japan's most enlightened financial policy maker at the time, turned to Belgium. I explain that Matsukata was dedicated to the emulation of Belgium's financial infrastructure, in which several public institutions would each be responsible for a specific area of the credit system. I indicate how efforts to adopt Belgian institutions and banking ideas proceeded meticuluously; yet, in the end, Japanese and Belgian finance developed along quite distinct pathways.

The US monetary union has undergone four distinct phases of development. From the early colonial period through the Revolution and Confederation, the unit of account differed in each region of British North America. Soon after the Constitution went into effect in 1789, the country shared a single specie-based unit of account and standard of deferred payment, but exchange media were numerous. After the Civil War, the trend was towards the use of fewer media of exchange. Over the course of the twentieth century, the current system, characterised by a common medium of exchange denominated in a single unit of account divorced from specie, evolved.

This article assesses the extent to which bankers approached sovereign debt defaults during the interwar period according to norms established during the nineteenth century. Bankers treated postrevolutionary Mexico as a hybrid, that is, as a case of both developmental and revenue default, in Fishlow's taxonomy, in the interest of protecting the rights of bondholders generally. Their approach led them to reject the argument of US ambassador to Mexico (and former Morgan partner), Dwight W. Morrow, that a government could be financially insolvent. Bankers acted similarly during the debt crisis of the 1980s.

The monetary powers embedded in the US Constitution were revolutionary and led to a watershed transformation in the nation's monetary structure. They included determining what monies could be legal tender, who could emit fiat paper money, and who could incorporate banks. How the debate at the 1787 constitutional convention over these powers evolved and led the founding fathers to the specific powers adopted is presented and deconstructed. Why they took this path rather than replicate the successful colonial system and why they codified such powers into supreme law rather than leaving them to legislative debate and enactment are addressed.

In the classical monetary debates, the Banking School held that notes would be equally demand-elastic whether supplied by many issuers or a single one. The Free Banking School held that notes would be less demand-elastic if supplied by a single issuer. These assertions have rarely, if ever, been subject to more stringent statistical testing. In this study the elastic properties of the note stock of the Swedish note banking system in 1880–95 is compared with those of the regime in 1904–13, when the Bank of Sweden held a note monopoly. Evidence suggests that notes did not become less elastic after monopolisation, thus lending support to the views of the Banking School.

A convertible US-dollar monetary union was the least controversial component of the US financial revolution of the early 1790s. Although the fiat paper currencies of the colonies before 1776 sometimes worked reasonably well, the founders had good reasons for the constitutional ban on their continuance by US states. The ban, a surrender of states' sovereignty over money, at the time proved to be relatively uncontroversial for two reasons. One is that the financial revolution lightened the fiscal burdens of states by assuming their debts and making them part of the national debt. The other is that states quickly learned that chartering banks could accomplish virtually all of the legitimate purposes of state fiat money issues, and possessed additional economic and political advantages.

The transition of the US money supply from the mixture of paper bills of credit, certificates and foreign coins that circulated at various exchange rates with the British pound sterling during the colonial period to the unified dollar standard of the early national period was rapid and had far-reaching consequences. This article documents the transition and highlights the importance of this standardisation in bringing order to the nation's finances and in facilitating the accumulation and intermediation of capital. It describes how the struggle of the colonies to maintain viable substitutes for hard money set the stage for the financial leaders of the Federalist period to settle upon the dollar, attach it to a convertible metallic base, and create a national bank that issued notes denominated in the new monetary unit. It also presents recently constructed estimates of the US money stock for 1790–1820 and relates them to measures of the nation's early modernisation.