Seventeenth century London formed a network of credit and information, necessary for the City to become a hub of international finance. Lacking a central exchange bank, London-based finance involved bankers and merchants monitoring overseas agents and enforcing international claims. Using archival sources, we show how London bankers employed merchants to channel funds around Europe. As merchants became stakeholders in the payments system, they developed incentives to monitor foreign agents and spread information of defaults. The resulting web of information flows encouraged market integration by facilitating arbitrage. Finally, the availability of instruments for formal legal enforcement assisted informal enforcement.

This paper examines the evolution of the legal foundation under which commercial banks operated in different countries. The earliest incorporated banks were established under charters issued by sovereigns or legislatures. Subsequently, charters were issued: (1) though corporation law; or (2) via special banking codes. Countries that concentrated their note issues in central banks earlier were less in need of detailed banking codes and were, therefore, more likely to have allowed banks to operate under general corporation laws. By contrast, countries in which note issue was not centralised were more likely to have established a detailed banking code.

This article employs, for the first time, the private archive of one of the world's largest and oldest reinsurance companies, Swiss Re, founded in Zürich in 1863, in order to analyse the early development and internal workings of reinsurance – the insurer's insurance – in nineteenth-century Europe. In the course of overcoming existential crises during its early years, the company's management learned valuable lessons about the technical basis of reinsurance and the importance of information and communication. In the long run, this experience enabled Swiss Re to gain a greater autonomy of action for professional reinsurers within the insurance industry as a whole.

Count Mollien, councillor and Minister of the Treasury of Napoléon, was at the same time a theorist who extended Adam Smith's analysis of banknotes and a man of action who worked with success on the application of his ideas. He showed that the solidity of the banknotes relied on the quality of the discounted bills when they are put into circulation, and rejected the risk of excessive issue, thereby disseminating the real bills doctrine in France. Furthermore, he studied the conditions in which the issue should take place and put forward some proposals that led to the organisation of the working rules of Banque de France.

The article discusses Italy's integration into the international capital market following the First World War. Abundant inflows of foreign capital subsequently clashed with the stringent monetary policy that accompanied the Lira revaluation and consequently were partially sterilised. During the aftermath of the world crisis, foreign funds withdrew from Italian firms as a consequence of the precarious equilibrium in which the gold bloc countries found themselves, once other currencies devalued or became prone to devaluation. The resulting isolation from the world financial market raised the need for a domestic solution to the liquidity crisis, and the creations of IMI and IRI are viewed as part of the resultant process of the Italian credit system's overall restructuring.

As a result of legislation in 1855, 1856 and 1862 that effectively enabled limited liability companies to be formed with minimum difficulty for the first time, there was an explosion of new companies. However, after the collapse of Overend, Gurney Ltd in 1866 they became unpopular. This paper examines the case of a business which failed to raise the necessary funding because of suspicion of exaggerated claims made in public prospectuses and the ways in which it attempted to survive. This gypsum industry case history also illustrates the problems facing the new class of ‘pure’ investors and directors who had little understanding of the industry in which their company was operating and the nature and reliability of the financial information available to them required for their decision-making.

In Switzerland, finance companies constituted the business group with the largest accumulation of capital of all joint-stock companies. This development began during the 1860s with respect to investment in gas, and accelerated from 1875 as a result of the activities of syndicates combining Swiss and foreign banks, first, in railways and, from the 1890s, in electricity. During the period 1910-14, domestic holding companies were established to aid the major Swiss industries of textiles, food and mechanical engineering. However, over the interwar years, international forces were once more dominant, leading to the establishment of both giant holding companies (related to the petrol and chemical industries), and small-scale companies, linked with capital flight to Switzerland.

Until 1935 there was no national legislation governing banking in Switzerland and hence no banking secrecy codified at national level. Over the centuries a distinctive relationship of trust had arisen between the Swiss banks and their customers which made banking secrecy an unwritten law. Even before the First World War a number of banks had failed in Switzerland and the first specific calls for government supervision of the banks were made, unsuccessfully, as early as 1916. In the early 1930s major Swiss banks had been severely affected by the 1931 German banking crisis. There was also during the 1930s a great fear of civil disruption, a breakdown of order and of espionage and infringements of sovereignty in the context of an increasingly threatening international situation. Banks throughout Europe were spied upon to prevent the evasion of the war taxes that had been introduced in many countries. Swiss banks had been the target of French and German investigations since 1931. The debacle over Volksbank in 1933 was in some ways the catalyst that finally accelerated a political settlement over banking legislation.

This bibliography covers publications that appeared during 1999. It follows previous criteria, being divided into two broad areas: general literature in financial history in section 1, and specialised material in section 2. Section 2 is subdivided chronologically and, further, by geographical area (the complete classification scheme was published in Volume 1, Part 2, October 1994, pp. 157–60.) Where there are no entries for a particular section, the heading has been omitted. Abbreviations have been kept to a minimum, but standard abbreviations such as J. for Journal, Q. for Quarterly, or Rev. for Review/Revue, have been used throughout. Short titles are used for references to edited volumes within the section in which they are listed; elsewhere they are cited in full. Articles published in books ‘edited by’ are mentioned only if the bibliographer accessed the index of the book before the deadline of the publication. Doctoral theses and Working Papers are not included.

Incorporated in 1872, Banque de Paris et des Pays-Bas – Paribas – inherited the European and international traditions of several well-established banking houses (Bischoffsheim & Goldschmidt and Goüin, among others). It then became a sort of model for French-style merchant banking and, as a result, swiftly aroused historians' subsequent curiosity. The bank's unusual character intrigued them. It was a hybrid, combining continental European private banking, then in decline, major retail or commercial banking, which was growing strongly, and British merchant and American investment banking that was already setting a trend.

Rondo Cameron died on the first day of the third millennium from a heart attack after a long illness. He was born in Linden, Texas, into a family of Scottish stock. He fought as a pilot during the Second World War and, thereafter, studied economics at Yale University thanks to a grant from the GI bill. After obtaining his M.A. degree in 1949, he went on to the University of Chicago, where he received his Ph.D. in 1952 with a dissertation on French investment abroad. His thesis director was Earl J. Hamilton and his research in Paris was made possible by a Fulbright grant. Rondo kept working on the themes of his dissertation, which in the end, polished and enlarged, became his celebrated France and the Economic Development of Europe, 1800–1914 (1st ed. Princeton University Press, 1961), later translated into several languages, French and Spanish among them. This monograph already exhibited what would be Cameron's trademarks: thorough research, intellectual ambition, excellent writing style, interest in banking history and in cultural factors of economic development, together with a fond love for the Old World, in particular France.