These papers, presented at the twelfth meeting of the EABH in Ljubljana, are concerned with the topic of banking in continental Europe in the twentieth century. The objective was that the meeting should be the ante and the after in the history of European banking in hard times. So the absence of major banking systems should have been expounded in the introduction. Nevertheless the three editors' attempt to show that banking history must open new territories is fully commendable.
The first part begins with three papers about the coming of foreign banks to Russia after 1917. It starts with an analysis by John Orbell of the activity of Baring, the Russian financial agent in Britain until 1917. It is a distinct narrative of the British Treasury policy regarding the financial cost of furnishing and paying for the Russian army ammunitions. The central role of Lord Revelstoke and of Baring's officers is well expounded. The paper by Sergueï Lebedev is revelatory of the uncertainties and improvisations in the management of financial matters by the new power. Based on the works by Ananic'h and Bovykin as well on recent investigation, this commendable paper helps us to understand many of the problems described by a number of scholars. Catherine Potier's participation belongs to a different category. Since René Girault, this is the first thorough investigation in the French banks' archives on the subject. Such precise information is essential, given the French interests at stake.
The second part of the first period concentrates on post-Versailles Central Europe. Green's paper is related to Midland Bank's activities through the reports of its overseas branch reports in Eastern Europe. Within these limits, it is a useful paper focusing on the role of two successive leaders: Edward Holden, who was in charge at the time of British monetary imperialism, and Reginald McKenna, who held that responsibility during the difficult 1920s. Readers will fix their attention on the contents of the report's commentaries by Butler and Wurth. With Bićanić and Ivancović's paper, we are immersed in the core of the book, the Yugoslav financial saga from the birth of the state until its disintegration at the end of the twentieth century. Bićanić and Ivancović concentrate their analysis on the 1926–36 decade. Trying to show the interrelations between macro Yugoslav economic policy and Croatian banking they divide their paper into two parts. The first part surveys the relative success of the state monetary and banking policy until the agrarian crisis. The second part describes the Croatian banking structure, inherited from Austrian times, explaining why it weathered the crisis better than the other banks, but was unable, given the growing regional inequalities, to generate any economic development, thus fuelling intraregional tensions.
Part three, concerned with the civil wars, offers a bridge between the two epochs. Two studies by Tom Buchanan and Gabriel Tortella and Jose Luis Garcia Ruiz focus on Spain. The first is a compassionate essay on British responsibility in the democratic country's policy regarding the Civil War. Tortella and Garcia Ruiz's approach is centred on Franco's policy. The literature on the subject is impressive, so the paper is a compendium of its well-chosen bibliography. Most shortcomings come from the difficulty of synthesising a complex subject. Kostis's essay on Greece's post-Civil War era is a short but welcome exploration of a complex subject.
Opening the second epoch, Martin Müller presents the reconstitution of the banking system in Germany after the disappearance of the national state in 1945. Three aspects are considered: the nature of the defeat, the Soviet and DDR action, and American policy as a prerequisite to the reconstruction of the Federal Republic system. Müller relates the struggles to build an efficient banking system in the DDR within the corset of ideology. On the western side, the failed attempts of the British to resist the harmonising of a reconstructed system under US-inspired lines are well indicated. If the whole story of the Bundesbank has been many times related, Müller underlines the absence of a true western will to denazify the staff, and the strong underground continuity of the former Grossbanken directorate leading to the revival of the traditional banking system with its two scales – the big banks and the Länder saving system. Frank King's analysis of the re-establishment of foreign banks in Asia has a misleading title for an essay shaped around British banking in China and his own publications about HSBC. That means that the problems of Dutch banks in the East Indies and French banks in Indochina are rarely mentioned. The indisputable interest of this paper concerns the problems of the evolution of HSBC staff, the way its managerial hierarchy adapted to the changing rules as well as the national requirements even in Hong Kong.
In many respects, the two following papers on the Slovenian experience in the last third of the twentieth century extend the range of the paper about Croatia. The first one by Franjo Štiblar compares the 1930s crisis in Yugoslav Slovenia and the one at the beginning of the 1990s subsequent to the nation's independence. The first part of the paper is mostly a duplicate of Bićanić and Ivanković's paper about Croatia during the interwar years and the weight of the federal policy. The main difference is the partial naturalistion of the regional branch of the Austrian Creditanstalt and the repercussions of its crash. More interesting are the developments concerning the disintegration of Yugoslavia and the complex problem of managing a heavy burden of inherited non-performing loans, while establishing a new banking system or, says Štiblar, rehabilitating what remained of the former one. Ivan Ribnikar's paper is technically of great interest since he describes the very original system of industrial credit in former Yugoslavia resulting in assets that are neither stock nor debt. The loss incurred by this particular situation after the secession, the way the Ljubljana authorities helped to eradicate the bad loans in the banks' balance-sheets and the limits of a national banking system in such a small country are clearly stated and explained. What's more risky is to anticipate an evolution given the speed of bank restructuring in Europe.
The sixth part is a sort of conclusion on two totally different subjects. In his rapid survey of Eastern European banks between the 1920s and the eve of the twenty-first century, John Lampe explains the relative weakness of French and German banks in the region during the first decade. Concerning the post-1950 period and above all the 1970s, we are offered a good synthesis linking and sometimes answering some questions, in particular about Yugoslavia. Virginia Hewitt and Tim Unwin offer an interesting survey of the complex problems involved in issuing banknotes in new or newly created countries. For people who must use euro banknotes, with their ugly choice of design, the fine-tuned remarks, the well-chosen pictures and the users' reactions are interesting to read.
As an analysis of the development of European banks in their economic and political context, this book makes an important contribution to financial historiography. Moreover, its relevance to important problems recommends it to anyone interested in the ramifications of European history as a whole.
