As Claud Demole of Pictet et Cie explains in a foreword, this volume is published in celebration of that Geneva bank's 200th anniversary in 2005. Enterprisingly, instead of sponsoring the usual celebratory and self-congratulatory volume, the discreet, private bank commissioned Youssef Cassis, Professor of Economic History at Geneva, to write an impartial history of international financial centres. He has succeeded triumphantly.

The history of banking and finance is, with some distinguished exceptions, written in national silos with extensive institutional detail. When internationally comparative, it is typically heavily influenced by Gershenkronian-type models of comparative backwardness or related oversimplified dichotomies of bank-based and market-based financial systems. So poorly developed are international comparisons that it is not uncommon to find articles explaining that what did not happen must have happened. Thus, while contemporaries like Georg Siemens, the head of Deutsche Bank, Thomas Woodlock, the editor of the Wall Street Journal, or Alfred Neymarck, the Paris financial writer, all in the decade after 1900 puzzled over why the Berlin and New York stock exchanges had failed to catch up with Paris and London in size and sophistication, it is now not uncommon for modern writers to spill a good deal of ink explaining – erroneously – why they already had. (For the record, Cassis (p. 106) gives the figures for all securities listed on major stock exchanges as late as 1913: £11.3 billion in London, £6.2 billion in Paris and £5.3 billion each in Berlin and New York.) If for no other reason than firmly discouraging the burgeoning school of purely imaginary comparative financial history, Youssef Cassis's calm and authoritative, quantitative and qualitative, survey of the changing ranks of international financial centres over the last 225 years – and of the dimensions in which each excelled at different times, and why – is very welcome.

It is, however, far more than that, as we would expect from the scholar who produced Big Business, an effective antidote to the imaginary characterisations that marred another – and not unrelated – historical field, the rise of the large corporation in Germany, France and Britain. That book was also a rich, and quantitatively disciplined, source for understanding a much wider range of social and economic issues in comparative perspective, and this book follows the same path. Cassis has a good eye not only for what bankers and stockbrokers were doing, but also for the political and other imperatives which lay behind national attempts at various stages to shift the balance of competitive advantage away from dominant financial centres, and for the reasons why such attempts more often failed than succeeded.

In evaluating the chronological and geographical pattern of change, he carefully dissects the relative importance of factors such as fiscal and legal supports, the size and nature of the banking sector, the differences between domestic and international transactions and how they interacted, national wealth, national trade exposure, the accumulated stock of skills, the prevailing national and international monetary regimes, and overseas investment flows. He is thus able to tease out why Paris and London firmly supplanted Amsterdam in the nineteenth century and why New York took so long to overtake both in the twentieth. He is a master of the European sources in several languages, but, in this book, he has to venture also across the Atlantic and, in the later chapters, to Hong Kong, Shanghai, Singapore and Tokyo. These broader perspectives are generally convincing, though his usually deft touch is occasionally less assured in these areas. For example, his description of the early twentieth-century New York curb market as for ‘securities with a weak nominal value, mostly in mining firms’ is surely more accurate as a description of listings on the New York Consolidated Exchange; the ‘curb’ was then the place to trade major firms like Standard Oil, Singer, Eastman Kodak and others among America's largest industrials, and it was decades before some of these were officially listed on the New York Stock Exchange.

This is one of only a few such minor blemishes on what remains a magisterial survey and they are not critical to his central arguments. This book will become the starting point from which all scholars will in future have to base their research on these matters.