Search Results

The author analyses the different positions in relation to the single European currency of the many different types of firm and interest organizations in the London financial sector. There is considerable diversity in their evaluation of the development, and also in their attitude to eventual UK adoption of the euro.

This chapter identifies the City of London as occupying a place at the very centre of international banking over the space of two centuries. London’s success is seen to rest on the combination of a highly successful money market cluster and a network that linked it to banks from around the world. Initially, preferential access to this market only allowed British overseas banks to expand successfully overseas from the mid-19th century onwards. However, over time foreign banks were able to access this market and so challenged the early dominance of British banks. As a result London became the payments centre for the world economy, which further enhanced the attractions of its money market for banks from around the world. The diversity of Asia provides an excellent case study for the study of this relationship. Asia contained countries that were tied to Britain through the Empire, notably India, along with countries that had a semi-detached relationship, like China, or were fully independent as with Japan. Though this is important what is also shown to be significant is the way particular banks connected to London, as this had implications long after the era of European empires passed. This calls into question the whole debate on ‘gentlemanly capitalism’ and the Eurocentric perception of imperial history.

Using the products of an extensive and carefully compiled database this chapter presents, for the first time, a detailed examination of the network of international finance. As the need to make and receive payments worldwide grew from the middle of the 19th century onwards banks formed business relationships with each other. Through these business relationships each bank undertook to receive and pay out money on behalf of the other so creating an international mechanism through which payments could be made without the need to move large amounts of gold around the world. Instead, it could all be done through debits and credits in bank ledgers. The result was to revolutionise international trade and finance and liberate the world economy from a dependence upon the available supply of gold. However, these correspondent links were more than a payments network, for they also gave banks access to London’s money market through which surplus funds could be borrowed or lent. Despite all the difficulties experienced between 1914 and 1945 these correspondent links survived, and were only reduced in importance through the emergence of multinational banking groups in the late 20th century.

In the wake of English victory at the end of the Nine Years War, Ulster met a similar fate. The unexpected flight of leading Irish lords to the continent and the revolt of Sir Cahir O'Dogherty enabled the state to confiscate vast tracts of Ulster. James VI and I allocated land in relatively small parcels to one hundred Scottish and English ‘undertakers’ and about fifty ‘servitors’ in the hope that they would create a British type of rural society. In addition, he set aside other acres to endow key ‘civilizing’ institutions — the church, towns, schools, and Trinity College, Dublin; while he obliged the City of London to take on the entire County of Londonderry in an effort to bring capital and economic prosperity to a commercial backwater. In addition to plantations, the Crown sought to tame ‘those rude parts’ — while at the same time enriching itself by interfering in land titles.

This chapter considers the resurgence of the City of London as an international financial centre in the late twentieth century. It highlights the role played by a campaign to promote the revival of the City as a post-sterling international financial centre. The Committee on Invisible Exports campaigned for the recognition of the City’s contribution to Britain’s balance of payments through its ‘invisible earnings’, and argued that this could be increased by reducing impediments on its activities. The invisibles campaign was a distinct product of the post-war preoccupation with the balance of payments, which challenged the fundamental belief, embedded in economic policy since the war, that the route to national prosperity was in expanding industrial production. The campaign sought to reconceptualize Britain as a historic commercial and financial, rather than industrial, economy. In doing so it undercut a core principle on which the social democratic political–economic project was based.

Robert Paul was the oldest of five children, born to a London shipping agent and a clergyman’s daughter in Islington in 1869. The family moved around London, while Robert seems to have been the only one to benefit from a public school education at the City of London, which was also among the first in Britain to offer science. He progressed to a new college, the Finsbury Technical, bringing him into contact with electrical pioneers such as Silvanus Thompson and William Ayrton, who would help him start in business on his own account in 1891, repairing and soon inventing instruments for the emerging electricity industry. By the end of 1895, both Paul and his former associate Acres were at work developing projectors that functioned like magic lanterns, throwing moving pictures on a screen. Paul premiered his Theatrograph in February 1896 on the same day as the first Lumière Cinématographe demonstration in London. Another of his shows led to Paul being hired to screen a programme at Olympia, soon followed by his projector appearing at the Egyptian Hall on Piccadilly, and then at the Alhambra music hall, next door to the Cinématographe at the Empire, both in Leicester Square.

This chapter focuses on the debates surrounding the development of Blackfriars Bridge, the third major Thames crossing completed in 1769. Both physically and metaphorically situated at the meeting of the polite Westminster and the working City, the bridge exposed the inherent tensions between the most powerful propertied interests in the metropolis. However, its completion symbolized the ultimately productive accommodation between the polite and commercial worlds, although this was only achieved through intricate agencies and the key brokerage of well-placed individuals. The career of John Paterson (c.1705–89) will be the central interest here. A cultured man himself, he felt confident that the City did appreciate the importance of projects and designs which communicated the growing wealth and influence of the Square Mile, but he sought to sell a vision of social regeneration which spoke directly to the concerns of the City’s governors, and appealed to a London spirit which married older corporate traditions to the cause of civic improvement. These discourses were contested, but Blackfriars Bridge serves as an enduring testament to his vision of a regenerated City, where politeness and commerce would support each other.

This chapter examines Margaret Harkness’s novel George Eastmont, Wanderer (1905). It focuses on the tensions between individualism and collectivism in the novel’s representation of the late nineteenth-century socialist and trades union movements. It demonstrates how such tensions are evident in the novel’s representation of the City of London Corporation Buildings, and explores how the novel’s radical departure from generic conventions offers a suggestion of ways to address such tensions.

The City of London and its Livery Companies were subject to various corporate pressures in the eighteenth century. Systemic problems with debt, property income, membership, and office-holding shaped their behaviour. Appreciating these problems helps us better understand a number of important issues. The apparent revival of guild controls should be seen in a financial as well as a trading context. The efforts to force wealthy Dissenters to serve as Sheriffs were not vindictive; it was simply that service was a requirement imposed on all members of the City Corporation. The unwillingness and/or inability to deal with what was later called corruption can be attributed to these corporate constraints. The City’s timid approach to ‘local government’ (including public improvements) is explicable in similar terms. And its politics were often driven by inward-looking—i.e. corporate—concerns rather than party-political ones.

Chapter 1 offers a typology and geographical survey of the Victorian and Edwardian London restaurant. It opens with a quantitative overview, using Kelly’s Post Office Directories, in order to establish not merely the number of restaurants, but also their locations. The chapter then identifies and details a variety of categories (for example, chophouses, working-class eating houses, small-scale owner-managed dining rooms, street carts, and women’s, vegetarian, and temperance restaurants), while at the same time emphasizing that the polyglot nature of eating often renders such categorization problematic. The restaurant is shown here to be more than just a fashionable West End establishment; it also encompassed modest refreshment rooms spread across the metropolis, in particular the City of London.

This chapter focuses on the guild and livery company as corporate forms: on the place of guilds and livery companies within the “body politic” of the City of London, and the relation of guilds, companies, and City to the commercial institution of the theater and its share-holding system. The chapter explores the legal, economic, and symbolic intersections among these urban corporate forms through a reading of Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday (1599), a play that affirms long-standing and increasingly anachronistic modes of corporate affiliation over new ones, including the long-distance trading companies and the theater itself. By means of acting, characterization, and other mimetic techniques, Dekker uses the resources of theater to intervene in an ongoing struggle over the right to assemble publicly in theaters, and to defend both actor and theater as a way of giving a symbolic structure to conflict among social groups and to produce a distinctive system of values for civic life. In this way, Dekker’s play affirms a corporate theater modeled on the guild as one of many sites in a pluralistic public space—a space composed out of multiple publics and associations, rather than as a single virtual “public sphere.”

Throughout the twentieth century, Britain was haunted by debates over its allegedly poor relationship between domestic industry and the financial sector. This controversy reached a climax in 1976 with the Committee to Review the Functioning of Financial Institutions chaired by the former Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson. Tasked to investigate the claim that British finance was starving out domestic industry, the Wilson Committee gathered evidence from the financial sector, businesses, and organized labour. What has been overlooked is that the committee also invited members of the public to provide testimony of their experiences with financial institutions and between 1976 and 1980 the committee received letters from 258 small savers and retail investors. These personal testimonies allow us to gain a rare insight into the ways in which ordinary savers and investors navigated through a decade of economic turmoil. Making sense of these everyday experiences with the financial markets allows us to better understand the appeal of Margaret Thatcher’s market populism that eventually offered a more optimistic future to an electorate weary of inflation. It also adds colour to our notion of the 1970s as a traumatic period for British savers and investors, at the end of which a more welcoming appraisal of the profit motive emerged in public discourse. But at the same time, with many investors feeling compelled by inflation rates to take higher risks, the decade heralded the acquisitive, short-term, and speculative approach to finance that came to dominate the 1980s.

This chapter looks at the challenges of the 1904–1906 Russian imperial state loan negotiations. These loans were thrashed out in the face of civil unrest in response to the costly Russo-Japanese War and the tumultuous Revolution of 1905. Russia’s increasingly precarious financial position and uncertain internal stability strained the Franco-Russian relationship. But as both the formal Russo-French political alliance and their more informal but far more tangible financial interrelationship seemed in growing jeopardy, the same circumstances appear to have strengthened the nascent and tenuous possibility of an Anglo-Russian rapprochement. It was within the context of the construction of the 1906 Imperial Russian Loan that the British banking house Baring Brothers rose to prominence in the Russian market; with the increased involvement of the City of London and British investment in Russian imperial finances came an ever greater chance of an amelioration of the long-standing Anglo-Russian geopolitical tensions.

This chapter examines the relationships between Irish merchants in the City of London. Analysis of trade directories allows for an assessment of 135 Irish houses in the City. Mapping out where Irish merchants resided raises questions about the meanings of geographic proximity and suggests that ‘shapes on the ground’ only partially capture the relationships that existed between Irish merchants. Recourse to probate records makes it possible to fill in some of these gaps. Both emotional and practical considerations went into the writing of a will, and as a result, the testator often included personal details not recorded in other documents. This evidence shows that Irish merchants in London were a diverse group in terms of where they came from, religious affiliations, and business interests, but also indicates that they formed meaningful ties to each other despite their differences. Yet, the analysis here does not support the conclusion that all Irish merchants in London belonged to a single, unified, commercial community. While Irish merchants tended to know or were at least aware of one another, they had closer links to some than others. Significantly, these tighter-knit groups did not form exclusively around specific affiliations such as religion or business interests.

This chapter analyses the 1986 Financial Services Act (FSA), which complemented the Big Bang by instituting a light-touch and arm’s-length form of regulation of the City of London. In 1981, the government commissioned a legal academic—Gower—to investigate Britain’s financial regulations and make recommendations on future amendments. Gower proposed a system of self-regulation that would be directly supervised by a government body. This form of state oversight was met with disapproval by the government and Bank. However, the impending Big Bang changed policymakers’ opinions. This radical liberalization would invite global actors to operate in the City, which in turn necessitated the creation of an impartial and legally enforced system of rules. Nevertheless, the Thatcher government was concerned that Gower’s proposals would make them politically responsible for future financial crises, while the Bank worried that their informal relations with the City would be interrupted by government meddling. As such, the government and Bank worked to depoliticize Gower’s plans by inserting a private body between the government and the City, and thus insulate policymakers from legitimacy problems that would result from financial crises. FSA can thus be understood as an attempt to create a depoliticized framework of financial governance that would simultaneously provide a clear legal framework for Britain’s newly liberalized financial system and protect the state authorities from the political backlash derived from this financialized pattern of growth.

This chapter presents a short history of relevant archaeological research in London. It traces a long story of discovery that was born of seventeenth-century antiquarianism, stimulated by opportunities for discovery in rescue archaeology during Victorian rebuilding in the City of London, and came to maturity in England’s post-war development-led urban archaeology. This historiographic review explains how archaeological research has been organized in London, and how opportunities for study are a product of programmes of urban regeneration. The complex dialogue between archaeologists and developers has made a major contribution to the study and management of historic urban landscapes. It is explained that many hundreds of archaeological excavations have taken place in London over the last 400 years, but that many of the more important results remain relatively inaccessible.

This chapter explores the transformation of the 2008 financial crisis into a fiscal crisis and a welfare crisis. It provides an endogenous theoretical explanation of the crisis in terms of the collapse of neo-liberal inequality and debt-fuelled growth. The chapter then analyses the progress of this crisis in the UK — a major global player due to the City of London — in two stages: the impacts of financial bailouts, Keynesian measures and sharp recession on public finances; and the subsequent reactions as governments switched to fiscal tightening and welfare cuts. It concludes by sketching out an alternative framework for a sustainable and just economic and welfare system.