Judging by the title of this book, one may be led to expect a collection of case studies showing the historical patterns of financial development in centres and peripheries. But the reader will perhaps feel slightly disappointed: the chapters cover an extremely broad variety of subjects and approaches, making it rather hard to extrapolate any general lessons. Though, on the one hand, this makes the volume very rich in useful pointers for future research, on the other, its overall coherence proves seriously compromised. Of course, the editors cannot be taken too strongly to task: unfortunately, this is often the inescapable fate of conference proceedings – which this publication happens to be. The meeting took place in Stockholm in 2002.

There are fifteen contributions, grouped into four sections. The first section, ‘Global centres and networks’, includes an overview, by Boris Barth, of the relationships between German banks and their correspondents in neutral Scandinavia during the First World War; a tapestry, by Maria-Christina Chatziioannou and Gelina Harlaftis, of the Greek banking diaspora between the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries; and a new assessment, by Ronald Michie, of the role of London as a global financial centre between the late nineteenth century and the Second World War. Michie's focus here is mainly on the resilience of the City as the world market after the Great War shock: the idea is that one of its crucial causes was the ability of British banks to reconvert from sluggish national concerns to promising international businesses, like the foreign-exchange market. In the following chapter, Catherine Schenk draws a comparison between the very different patterns of financial development experienced by Hong Kong and Tokyo since 1950.

The second section is entitled ‘Banks as integrators’. Lawrence Officer returns to the subject he has already published on extensively: dollar–sterling gold points. Officer's database and methodology are employed here to compare ‘internal’ integration among American banking centres with ‘external’ integration with the London market. In the following paper, Dieter Lindenlaub reports the steps taken by German authorities in view of the introduction of the Reichsmark in the 1870s. Next, Alain Plessis focuses on a very interesting question: the role of the Banque de France in the creation of a truly national monetary system during the nineteenth century. As far as we know, the French central bank was one of the first to develop a widespread network of branch agencies throughout its own country: the determinants of this process and its long-term effects on the deepening of the financial system are a very promising subject, on which more quantitative data than are currently available and cross-country comparisons will no doubt bring forth valuable results. Chapter 8, by Lennart Schön, looks at growth and capital imports in Sweden in the second half of the nineteenth century.

‘The role of banks in mercantile and industrial credit’ is the title of the third section. Building on a considerable amount of archival research, Monika Pohle analyses risk-management processes by nineteenth-century bankers. Pohle's conclusions strongly point to the overwhelming importance of reputation as a short-cut to sensitive information, even when more technical data were available to decision-makers. This is an important result indeed, opening interesting perspectives for further research: perhaps the international financial system became a much riskier environment after the First World War also because of the disintegration of such long-established business networks, which had been suppliers of information besides banking services. The following paper is, by admission of the authors themselves (Ulf Olsson and Jan Jörnmark), a ‘bird's-eye view’ of the last 150 years of Swedish economic history. In chapter 11, Michael North argues that the Baltic area was not integrated with the Western European financial system until the seventeenth century, when the western manner of writing bills of exchange replaced older customs. Finally, Anders Ögren reviews the conventional wisdom on lender-of-last-resort policies and shows how it ill fits the experience of two juicy episodes of Swedish monetary history (the crises of 1857–8 and 1878–9). Ögren's conclusions, emphasising the role of the state rather than that of the central bank as the ultimate lender of last resort, appear even more intriguing in the light of the events of September 2008.

The last section, ‘Bank archives and history’, is quite different from the previous ones. It contains an account of the troubled history of the archives of Deutsche Bank, by Reinhard Frost; an alarming investigation into the preservation of electronic information in contemporary banks, by Anastasia Victorsson; and a report on how oral history can be employed for identity-building purposes in merging banks, by Pontus Staunstrup.

This brief review will not however be enough to underline its strengths. The book undoubtedly contains interesting contributions, and provides the reader with a somewhat representative overview of the general state of research in banking history at the beginning of the twenty-first century.