This well-edited collection of essays will benefit students of the relations between banks and industries as well as all historians mindful of economic imperatives. By looking at the relations between the worlds of finance and industry through three complementary perspectives, and, in each of the corresponding sections, surveying or analyzing a range of meaningful cases, this volume illustrates what a comparative approach can do best—question the stale conceptions of generalists and remove the blinders of specialization.

The history of the financing of modern Europe's industrial expansion has been built around a series of contrasts and the attendant temptation of generalizations. Behind the clearly distinct experiences of industrialization in Britain, France, and Germany, historians have found and sketched very different financial circuits. Although few explicitly sought to erect these three cases as models, comparisons nevertheless quickly came to dominate reflections on the matter. More problematic even than some of these parallels, however, may be their common denominator—the idea that financial systems made industrialization possible, shaped it, and paced it. These essays challenge this fundamental assumption in a gratifyingly coherent manner.

Four national surveys, four sectoral studies, and four case studies of large and small banks illustrate the reciprocal and unsystematic rather than causal or even permissive nature of the links between banks and industry. The contribution of the first section of the book is perhaps the less remarkable, because national boundaries are increasingly proving poorly suited to the work of economic historians. Still, national surveys need to be updated (if only for teaching purposes), and the British, German, Italian, and French experiences are articulated in new terms here. In the first case, we are invited (not for the first time, but the point bears repeating) to reflect upon the ways in which a long period of leadership shaped the competitiveness of the British industrial complex, rather than upon the role of banking practices in what is too easily seen as its decline. For its part, and contrary to some recent efforts, the essay devoted to the German context reaffirms the importance of the role played by great financial institutions, but also insists on the continuing distinction made by all parties between the functions of financing and producing. In a third paper, sharp periodization and careful attention to the tensions existing between core and periphery as well as other unique aspects of Italian industrialization sketch a scenario that defies easy parallels with precedents north of the Alps. Finally, a more chronologically focused probe suggests that the weaknesses of the support given by French banks to industry may be rooted in fundamental characteristics of the former, but also that a range of circumstances regularly recast the problems facing them. Without negating the distinctions between these four histories, these analyses all draw the attention of readers to the autonomy of the strategies followed by both bankers and industrialists.

The second section is devoted to the French public works and hydroelectric sectors, the Swiss counterpart of the latter, and the diverse but sensitive field of French foreign investment. The conclusions reached by the authors of these essays again point to the distance separating industrial and banking projects. Changing technologies or conjonctures, powerful exogenous factors such as political choices or national preferences, or, conversely, the sometimes surprising persistence of sharp sectorial characteristics, have regularly invited industrial groups to cultivate a variety of strategies to supply their capital needs, while discouraging financial institutions from developing coherent and sustained ambitions to dominate them. A final section drives this theme a little further by looking at the long-term evolution of the choices made by four banks. In the first two cases, we learn that the robustness of two great banking vocations was never fully eclipsed by their substantial involvements into primary or secondary production. And when we turn to two lesser-known banks remarkable for the weight and steadiness of their interest in industrial affairs, we discover a range of factors that paint them as exceptions rather than models.

Sections two and three clearly point toward the need for further sectorial analyses and case studies, while the opening essays remind us that national generalizations are always in need of revisions. Yet, it is clear that we should avoid thinking of banking systems as commanding supports, guides, or obstacles to industrialization. Banks have been and are financial institutions with a conditional interest in industry. The comparative approach that makes this volume one instance of a sum greater than its parts is well chosen to reveal the contingent nature of this relationship.