Decision Making, Confidence and Risk Management in Banks from Early Modernity to the 20th Century

This book offers 14 contributions that examine key questions concerning bankers´ decision making, their confidence in partners and customers, and their risk management practices from Early Modernity to the 20th century. It explores various mechanisms of banks' decision taking, how they were established and how they changed over time. Specific chapters also analyze the types of risk management techniques used and the extent of their success; factors that contributed to the constitution of confidence and factors that damaged it; and methods that banking historians can use to analyze and describe bankers´ risk management and decision making. The volume features varied methodological approaches for historical research (from system theory to behavioural finance, from new institutional economics to praxeology, from convention theory to network analysis). The different methodological approaches are put to the test in case studies based on archive material from five hundred years of banking (from Early Modern European banking networks to international computerization) in order to connect banking history more closely to political and cultural history.