Financial History Seminar


2009-10-12 17:30: 'Shattered on the Rock? British Financial Stability from 1866 to 2007' (Professor Geoffrey Wood, Cass Business School)

2009-11-02 17:00:  'Quicksilver Production and Consumption in Early Modern Europe:  Reflections on Premodern Commodity and Financial Markets in the Second Phase of Globalization.' (Professor Thomas Max Safley, History Department, University of Pennsylvania)

2009-11-16 12:00: 'Exploring the Medici-Gondi Ledgers in the Henry Charles Lea Library.' (Ms Claudia Scala Schlessman, Original Manuscript Cataloguer, Henry Charles Lea Library)

2009-11-16 17:00: 'The Political Economy of Competition and Credit Control' (Mr Duncan Needham, Cambridge History Faculty and Trinity Hall)

2009-11-30 17:00: 'The economics of badmouthing: Defamation, rackeetering and the French Financial Press at the end of the 19th century.' (Dr Vincent Bignon, EconomiX, University of Paris - Nanterre)

2009-12-07 17:00: 'Historical Banking Crises and the Rules of the Game' (Professor Charles Calomiris, Columbia Business School)

2010-01-11 17:00: 'Reflections from the Mirror of Folly: Lord Londonderry and the Stock Market Bubbles of Paris, Amsterdam and London in 1720' (Professor Larry Neal (Illinois/LSE))

2010-01-25 17:00: 'Bankruptcy and Debtor's Rights in Early Modern England: Punishment to Rehabilitation' (Professor Ann Carlos (U. of Colorado/University College Dublin))

2010-02-08 17:00: 'Ottoman State Finances in European Perspective, 1500-1914' (Professor Şevket Pamuk (LSE))

2010-02-15 17:00: 'Household Finance in Early Modern Germany: Evidence from Personal Inventories' (Professor Sheilagh Ogilvie, Dr Markus Küpker and Dr Janine Maegraith)

2010-03-01 17:00: 'The Collapse of the City of Glasgow Bank, 1878, and other nineteenth century failures' (Professor Duncan Ross)

2010-03-15 17:00: 'Keynes, the Investor' (Dr David Chambers, Judge Business School)

2010-05-17 17:00: Labor Compensation in the Portuguese and Dutch Merchant Empires (Professor Claudia Rei, Department of Economics, Vanderbilt University)

2010-05-24 17:00: 'Reforming the Global Reserve System; Historical Perspectives' (Professor Catherine Schenk, Economic and Social History, Glasgow)

2010-06-07 17:00: Jewish Financiers in the City of London: Reality and Rhetoric, 1830 – 1914 (Professor Ranald Michie, Department of History, University of Durham)

2010-06-21 17:00: Efficiency of the Dojima rice futures market in Tokugawa-period Japan (Professor Shigeru Wakita, Graduate School of Social Sciences, Tokyo Metropolitan University)

2010-10-11 17:00: The Value of Regulation and Reputation: Going Public in London and Berlin, 1900-1913 (Dr David Chambers ( Judge Business School))

2010-10-25 17:00:  God and risk: The role of religion in rural cooperative banking in early twentieth-century Netherlands (Mr Chris Colvin, Department of Economic History, LSE)

2010-11-08 17:00: Blissfully Ignorant: The Rôle of State Financial and Managerial Assistance in the Decline of the British Shipbuilding Industry, 1945-1980 (Dr Duncan Connors, Glasgow)

2010-11-22 17:00: Ex post: The investment performance of collectible stamps 1865-2008 (Professor Elroy Dimson, London Business School)

2010-12-06 17:00: The Belle Epoque of International Finance: French Capital Exports, 1880‐1914 (Dr Rui Pedro Esteves, Department of Economics, Oxford)

2010-12-13 17:00: Stock market development in Germany: 1869-1925 (Dr Carsten Burhop, MPI for Research on Collective Goods)

2011-01-24 17:00: The Paradox of Success: Building Societies and their risk-taking behaviour in England, c. 1880-1939 (Mr Luke Samy, Winton Institute, Oxford)

2011-02-07 17:00: Institutions, Deficits or Wars, on the determinants of the borrowing costs of the British government: 1688-1850 and beyond (Professor Nathan Sussman, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem)

2011-02-28 17:00: Regulatory responses to financial crises: Spain, 1850-2000 (Professor Pablo Martín-Aceña, Universidad de Alcalá (Madrid))

2011-03-07 17:00: 'The South Sea Bubble of 1720: rational bubble or gambling mania?' (Dr Helen Paul (Economics, University of Southampton))

2011-05-02 17:00: An Italian bank and its international and local credit networks: Filippo Borromei & company of Bruges and London in the 1430s (Professor Jim Bolton, School of History, QMUL)

2011-05-16 17:00: Regulatory Capture in Microfinance: The Irish Loan Fund Board, 1860-1914 (Dr Eoin McLaughlin (School of History, Classics and Archaeology, University of Edinburgh))

2011-05-23 17:00: ’Midas, transmuting all, into paper’: the Bank of England and the Banque de France during the Napoleonic Wars (Dr Elisa Newby, Bank of Finland)

2011-05-30 17:00: Financial innovation and the crisis (Professor Michael Dempster, Centre for Financial Research)

2011-06-13 17:00: The Market for Bank Stocks and the Rise of Deposit Banking in New York City, 1866-1897 (Professor Peter Rousseau, Vanderbilt University)

2011-06-15 12:00: A Shareholder Lawsuit in Fourteenth-Century Toulouse (Professor Will Goetzmann (International Center for Finance at the Yale School of Management))

2012-01-23 17:00: Inventing a secondary market for sovereign debt in later medieval England (Dr Tony Moore, University of Reading, ICMA Centre)

2012-02-06 18:00: New Evidence on the First Financial Bubble (Dr Rik Frehen, Tilburg University, Department of Finance)

2012-02-20 17:00: The First Global Emerging Markets Investor: The Foreign and Colonial Investment Trust, 1870-1913 (Dr David Chambers, Judge Business School)

2012-03-05 17:00: Asymmetric Propagation of Financial Crises During the Great Depression (Dr Olivier Accominotti, London School of Economics)

2012-03-19 17:00: The economy of Spain in the eurozone before and after the crisis of 2008 (Professor Larry Neal, Cambridge Finance Visitor, NBER)

2012-05-14 17:00: The Role of Venture Capital in the Innovation Economy (Dr Bill Janeway, Cambridge Finance and Pembroke College)

2012-05-28 17:00: Re-thinking the origins of the British public debt, 1643-1742 (Dr D'Maris Coffman, Newnham College and Centre for Financial History)

2012-06-11 17:00: Making the market: trading securities at the Bank of England during the late eighteenth century (Dr Anne Murphy, University of Hertfordshire)

2013-01-21 17:00: The formative years of a modern corporation: the Dutch East India Company, 1602-1623 (Professor Joost Jonker, Utrecht University)

2013-02-04 17:00: Of Rules and Exceptions:  Financing a Modern Steel Industry in the United States, 1865-1888  (Professor Mary O'Sullivan, University of Geneva)

2013-02-18 17:00: Farewell to Prices and Incomes Policy (Mr Adrian Williamson, Trinity Hall)

2013-03-04 17:00: Scandal!: American business magazines in the Great Depression (Dr Tiago Mata, HPS, Cambridge)

2013-04-29 17:00: A Global Census of Corporations in 1910 (Professor Leslie Hannah, LSE and Tokyo)

2013-05-13 17:00: The Pricing Revolution in Marine Insurance, 1600-1824 (Mr Adrian Leonard (Trinity Hall and CFH))

2013-05-27 17:00: The Disappearing Equity Risk Premium on the 1920s NYSE (Dr Ali Kabiri, University of Buckingham)

2013-06-10 17:00: Predicting the Past: Understanding the Causes of Bank Distress in the Netherlands in the 1920s (Professor Abe de Jong, RSM Erasmus University)

2013-06-25 17:00: Why Zambia Failed: Institutional Degradation and Economic Decline Since 1964 (Mr Stuart Barton, MBA, CFA (CFH and Corpus Christi))

2014-01-20 17:00: Saving the City: The Great Financial Crisis of 1914 (Professor Richard Roberts - Director, Centre for Contemporary British History at Kings College, London )

2014-02-03 17:00: Contagion and Intervention in the 1772-3 Credit Crisis (Paul Kosmetatos, Centre for Financial History and Darwin College)

2014-02-17 17:00: The Irish Famine and British Financial Crisis (Charles Read, Centre for Financial History and Christ's College)

2014-03-03 17:00: The political economy of inflation in the 1970s (Professor Jim Tomlinson, University of Glasgow)

2014-05-05 17:00: Crowdfunding an early modern startup: mapping investment in the East India Company (Edmond Smith)

2014-05-19 17:00: Finance and the real economy. (Lord Adair Turner)

2014-05-26 17:00: This time is different: causes and consequences of British banking instability, 1830-2010 (Dr Christopher Coyle, Queen's University, Belfast)

2014-06-02 17:00: Monetary policy and financial repression in Britain, 1951-59 (William Allen, Cass Business School)

2014-06-09 17:00: Jacques Necker's Compte rendu au roi (1781) and the Transformation of Modern Political Discourse (Professor Jacob Soll, University of Southern California)

2014-11-05 17:00: The international monetary arrangement is dysfunctional: surges in cross-border investment flows are the source of financial turbulence.  (Professor Robert Z. Aliber, Professor Emeritus of International Economics and Finance, University of Chicago Booth School of Business.)

2014-11-12 17:00: State Dissolution, Sovereign Debt and Default: Lessons from Irish independence. (Dr Eoin McLaughlin, University of St Andrews)

2015-01-19 17:00: What caused Chicago bank failures in the Great Depression? A look at the 1920s (Dr Natacha Postel-Vinay, University of Warwick)

2015-02-02 17:00: Going beyond ‘market versus state’: ideological struggles in explaining the existence and longevity of the 1922 Grain Futures Act  (Rasheed Saleuddin, Corpus Christi, University of Cambridge)

2015-02-09 17:00: Rating the United Kingdom: The British government’s first sovereign credit ratings (Dr David Gill, University of Nottingham)

2015-03-09 17:00: British Financial Crises in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Professor Forrest Capie, Cass Business School, City University, London)

2015-04-23 18:00: Mr Osborne’s Economic Experiment (William Keegan, Senior Economics Commentator, The Observer)

2015-05-06 19:00: The Coalition Effect, 2010-2015 (Dr Mike Finn, Director of the Centre for Education Policy Analysis and David Howarth, Member of Parliament for Cambridge from 2005–10.)

2015-05-11 17:00: Doctrinal determinants of Federal Reserve policy, 1914-1934 (Professor Barry Eichengreen,  George C. Pardee and Helen N. Pardee Professor of Economics and Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley)

2015-05-25 17:00: Keynes, Trouton and the Hector Whaling Company (Professor Bjørn L. Basberg, Norwegian School of Economics, Bergen)

2016-01-25 17:00: Individual investors in the late nineteenth century:  what did they invest in, and why? (Professor Janette Rutterford, The Open University Business School)

2016-02-08 17:00: Respectable banking: the search for stability in London’s money and credit markets since the great currency crisis of 1695 (Dr Anthony Hotson, Wolfson College, Oxford and Centre for Financial History)

2016-02-22 17:00: The end of the Swiss economic model (Professor Jonathan Steinberg, Walter H. Annenberg Professor of Modern European History at the University of Pennsylvania)

2016-03-07 17:00: The ‘Bimetallic Controversy’ and the golden age of monetary orthodoxy, 1880-1900 (Sabine Schneider, St John's College, Cambridge and Centre for Financial History)

2016-04-25 17:00: Related investing: corporate ownership and the dynamics of capital mobilization during industrialization (Professor Zorina Khan)

2017-01-30 17:00: UK monetary and credit policy around the Radcliffe Report (Oliver Bush, Bank of England and London School of Economics)

2017-02-13 17:00: The London merchant banks and the road to the 1931 crisis (Dr Brian O'Sullivan, Kings College London)

2017-02-27 17:00: Why did Britain have broad money supply targets? (Dr Duncan Needham, Centre for Financial History)

2017-03-13 17:00: Money: the unauthorised biography (Dr Felix Martin, Institute for New Economic Thinking and Centre for Global Studies )

2018-02-05 17:00: Bullion or specie? The role of Spanish American silver coins in Europe and Asia throughout the 18th century (Dr Alejandra Irigoin, London School of Economics and Political Science)

2018-02-12 17:00: Britain, Jamaica and the modern global financial order, 1800-50 (Dr Aaron Graham, University College London)

2018-02-26 17:00: Not Maggie's fault? The Thatcher government and the reemergence of global finance (Dr Daisuke Ikemoto, Meijigakuin University and Darwin College)

2018-03-13 17:00: Bears, Bulls and Boers: Market Making and Southern African Mining Finance, 1894-1899 (Professor Ian Phimister, University of the Free State)

2018-05-02 16:00: The Invention of Monetary Policy. Divergent Paths of Monetarist Experimentation in Switzerland and the UK (Dr Leon Wansleben, London School of Economics)

2018-05-07 17:00: Efficient derivatives pricing before Black, Scholes and Merton: evidence from the interwar London Metals Exchange     (Dr Rasheed Saleuddin, UCL and Centre for Financial History)

2018-05-14 17:00: What would Keynes make of President Trump's economic policies? (Graham Turner, GFC Economics)

2019-01-28 17:00: The Scottish Ministers' Widows' Fund: the world’s first soundly-funded pension plan (David Pitt-Watson, Judge Business School)

2019-02-11 17:00: Taxes and growth: new narrative evidence from interwar Britain (Nicholas Dimsdale, University of Oxford)

2019-02-25 17:00: Bankers with different 'golden dreams': bank business models and the British money supply in the early Industrial Revolution. (Dr John Gent, KCL)

2019-03-11 17:00: Economic uncertainty over the long run: a natural language processing approach. (Dr Walter Jansson, Bank of England)

2019-11-11 17:00: City financiers as patrons in the later seventeenth century (Dr Anthony Hotson (Centre for Financial History, University of Cambridge))

2020-01-27 17:00: Fiscal reform in Britain and Germany since 1945 (Professor Martin Daunton (Cambridge) and Dr Marc Buggeln (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin))

2020-02-03 17:00: The anatomy of Britain’s inter-war super-rich: reconstructing the 1928 'millionaire' population (Professor Peter Scott, Henley Business School, University of Reading)

2020-02-10 17:00: City financiers as patrons in the later seventeenth century (Dr Anthony Hotson (Centre for Financial History, University of Cambridge))

2020-02-25 17:00: Three hundred years of Prime Ministers, 1721-2021: how has the office survived and adapted? (Sir Anthony Seldon (University of Buckingham))

2020-03-09 17:00: Walter Bagehot: the life and times of the greatest Victorian (James Grant (Grant’s Interest Rate Observer))

2020-05-11 17:00: Sharing the blame for the Great Depression: The Federal Advisory Council, 1918-36. (Dr Rasheed Saleuddin, Judge Business School)

2021-02-01 17:00: The Great Demographic Reversal: ageing societies, waning inequality, and an inflation (Professor Charles Goodhart (LSE)  and Dr Manoj Pradhan (Talking Heads Macro))

2021-02-15 17:00: Menus without prices? Manifestos, party competition, and public finance in Britain, c. 1955-1983 (Dr Peter Sloman (University of Cambridge))

2021-03-01 17:00: Poland, the international monetary system and the Bank of England, 1921–1939 (William Allen (National Institute of Economic and Social Research))

2021-03-15 17:00: HM Treasury and its management of the Financial Crisis, 2007-2009 (Dr Eleanor Hallam, HM Treasury and Centre for Financial History)

2021-05-03 17:00: The landed gentry in British politics after World War II: from taxed decadence to subsidized cultural heritage (Dr Jenny Pleinen, German Historical Institute London)

2021-05-10 17:00: Opium, Tea and Cotton: The Rise and Fall of the Sassoon Dynasty in South East Asia (Professor Shalva Weil, Hebrew University of Jerusalem)

2022-01-31 17:00: The politics of money: Presidential power and the Federal Reserve System (Dr Nigel Bowles (University of Oxford))

2022-02-14 17:00: Who finances the financiers? Twenty years of HM Treasury resource accounts (Mario Pisani (HM Treasury))

2022-03-14 17:00: The Global Financial Crisis and its aftermath: a perspective from fiction and some general reflections on inter-disciplinary research (Dr Linda Arch (ICMA, University of Reading))

2022-03-28 17:00: Protectionism, deindustrialisation and European integration: the crisis of British Keynesianism revisited, 1973-1993 (Dr Colm Murphy (Institute of Historical Research))

2022-05-10 17:00: Popular attitudes to taxation in Britain c. 1945-1992: reassessing the evidence (Dr Rosa Hodgkin (Institute for Government))

2022-05-13 17:00: The Last Liberal Republican: An Insider's Perspective on Nixon's Surprising Social Policy (John Roy Price, Special Assistant to President Richard Nixon)

2023-01-30 17:00: An exchange rate history of the United Kingdom, 1945–1992 (Dr Alain Naef, Banque de France)

2023-02-13 17:00: What’s in a Bubble? The South Sea Bubble and the conceptual history of financial crisis. (Dr Claire Wilkinson (University of Cambridge))

2023-02-27 17:00: The Meade Committee on UK Tax Reform 1975-8 (Professor Susan Howson, University of Toronto)

2023-03-13 17:00: How Big Bang ruined the City.   Did 1980s reforms cause the 2008 financial crisis and all that followed? (Martin Vander Weyer, The Spectator)

2024-02-12 17:00: Inside Thatcher's monetarism experiment - the promise, the failure, the legacy (Sir Tim Lankester (University of Oxford))

2024-02-19 17:00: The long road to the Bank of Ghana, 1825-1966. (Kofi Adjepong-Boateng CBE (University of Cambridge))

2024-02-26 17:00: How insurers learned to stop worrying and love regulation: a City insurance man’s view of how the insurance market discovered the world of Basel and became a key risk partner for banks. (David Neckar (WTW Financial Solutions))

2024-03-11 17:00: How a ledger became a central bank: a monetary history of the Bank of Amsterdam.   (Stephen Quinn (Texas Christian University) and Will Roberds (Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta))

2025-02-03 17:00: A new history of the interwar Bank of England (Dr Robert Yee (University of Oxford))

2025-02-17 17:00: The Federal Reserve's 'rate war' and its aftermath: the political consequences of financial instability, 1966-72. (Dr Arthur Rothier-Bautzer (Centre for Financial History and GlobalCapital))

2025-03-03 17:00: What does it mean to Democratize Finance? (Dr Leah Rose Downey (University of Cambridge))

2025-03-17 17:00: Money: a Treasury-centric view (Mario Pisani (HM Treasury and King's College, London))

2026-02-02 17:00: 'Muddling through or tunnelling through?’ UK monetary and fiscal exceptionalism and the Great Inflation (Ryland Thomas (Bank of England))

2026-02-16 17:00: Bonds without borders: the Eurobond market (Chris O’Malley)

2026-03-02 17:00: The road to 1997: Bank of England operational independence in historical perspective (Dr Chetun Patel (King’s College London))

2026-03-16 17:00: Mortgages, maturity mismatching and the transformation of British banking: 1971-92 (Dr William Turkington (HM Treasury))