In 1693 Thomas Neale, groom porter to their majesties, organised a lottery that offered to its lucky winner a prize of £3,000. The scheme proved a great success, encouraging a variety of entrepreneurs to float similar projects. Indeed, by 1698 lotteries that offered tickets costing as little as one penny allowed all but the most destitute to indulge in dreams of wealth. Although these schemes may be seen as a mere manifestation of the contemporary love of gambling and games of chance, this article argues that they can also reveal much about the nature and progress of the financial revolution.

We document the transition from goldsmith to banker in the case of Richard Hoare and his successors and examine the operation of the London loan market during the early eighteenth century. Analysis of the financial revolution in England has focused on changes in public debt management and the interest rates paid by the state. Much less is known about the evolution of the financial system providing credit to individual borrowers. We show how this progress took time because operating a deposit bank was new and different from being a goldsmith. Learning how to use the relatively new technology of deposit banking was crucial for the bank's success and survival.

The monetary system of late medieval and early modern Europe has been commonly described as irrational, in the light of later commodity money standards. In particular, the alterations in the legal value and/or in the metal content of most coins throughout this period have been regarded as a source of disorder and as a product of ignorance and abuse. This article suggests that the whole system, and its apparently awkward articulations, may have been deliberately designed to ensure complementarity between domestic and foreign trade. From this perspective, monetary alterations appear as the levers of a peculiar form of monetary policy, with an extra degree of freedom compared to more modern instruments, and equally open to being managed or mismanaged.

The article examines the early history of provident institutions or trustee savings banks in Ireland. Combining aggregate data and an archive-based study of one savings bank, it describes the growth and performance of this ‘institutional import’. By and large, Irish savings banks catered for the lower-middle and middle classes, not the poor as intended by the founders of the movement. The article also explains how the collapse of three savings banks in 1848 dealt savings banks in Ireland as a whole a blow from which they never really recovered.

Using the transfer records and ledger books of the Bank of England, this article examines women's market activity during and after the South Sea Bubble. Women are classified by marital or social status. During 1720, women's activity constituted 13 per cent of transactions measured by value, 10 per cent of total sales and 8 per cent of total purchases. While individual women lost and made money from their market activity, women's net position over the Bubble was positive. We also provide a case study of Johanna Cock, one of the larger broker/jobbers in Bank stock. By September 1720, women made up 20 per cent of Bank shareholders holding 10 per cent of the capital stock. By September 1725, women held nearly 15 per cent of a much larger capital stock.

This article examines the investment practices of life assurance firms within the United Kingdom, through an analysis of the asset holdings of the sector over the period 1900 to 1965. The data are drawn from the detailed annual returns to the Board of Trade. Aggregate, sectional and individual company data are used in the study. Major trends in investment practice are identified and analysed; and cross-sectional comparisons are made. The main emphasis is on the contribution of the life assurance sector towards provision of financial support to the British industrial sector. From the beginning of the period a significant proportion of life firms' investments was held in corporate securities, although over time the composition moved away from fixed-interest stock towards share holdings. The study highlights the great variation in investment practice across individual life assurance firms, with no strong evidence of convergence over time excepting investments in equity holdings.

Classic accounts of the English industrial revolution present a long period of stagnation followed by a fast take-off. However, recent findings of slow but steady per capita economic growth suggest that this is a historically inaccurate portrait of early modern England. This growth pattern was in part driven by specialization and structural change accompanied by an increase in market participation at both the intensive and extensive levels. These, I argue, were supported by the gradual increase in money supply made possible by the importation of precious metals from America. They enabled a substantial increase in the monetization and liquidity levels of the economy, hence decreasing transaction costs, increasing market thickness, changing the relative incentive for participating in the market and allowing agglomeration economies to arise. By making trade with Asia possible, precious metals also induced demand for new desirable goods, which in turn encouraged market participation. Finally, the increased monetization and market participation made tax collection easier. This helped the government to build up fiscal capacity and as a consequence to provide for public goods. The structural change and increased market participation that ensued paved the way for modernization.

In this article, we calculate a market-weighted return index for the 20 largest stocks listed on the Brussels Stock Exchange over the period 1833–2005, based on a new, unique and high-quality database. We find that this index captures the most important stylised facts of the value-weighted return of all shares listed on the Brussels Stock Exchange in this period. Our results support the empirical practice of concentrating on just the largest stocks. The indices we construct are based on one of the longest Belgian time series available. The indices take into account the exact dividends, the timing of the dividend cash flows and all capital operations. We are therefore able to decompose total returns into capital gain returns and dividend returns, which is not possible with most historical return series. We show that, to construct a credible return index, it is crucial to fully take into account dividends.

Although taxes were raised substantially in the United States during World War I, recourse was had to five bond issues, the famous Liberty loans, to finance the bulk of war expenditures. The Secretary of the Treasury, William Gibbs McAdoo, hoped to create a broad market for the Liberty bonds and to limit their yields by following an aggressive policy of ‘capitalizing patriotism’. He called on everyone from Wall Street bankers to the Boy Scouts to volunteer for campaigns to sell the bonds. The campaigns have become legendary. Some of the nation's best-known artists were recruited to draw posters depicting the contribution to the war effort to be made by buying bonds, and giant bond rallies featuring Hollywood stars were organized. These efforts, however, enjoyed limited success. The yields on the Liberty bonds were kept low mainly by making the bonds tax exempt and by making sure that a large proportion of them were purchased directly or indirectly by the Federal Reserve, turning the Federal Reserve into an engine of inflation. Patriotism proved to be a weak, although not powerless, offset to normal market forces.

This article assesses the role of international markets in the brazilian financial crisis of 1890/91 (the crash of the encilhamento). It looks for the impact of the argentine financial crisis in 1890 (the baring crisis) on brazilian access to capital markets. The history of bond yield fluctuations in london for brazilian and argentine debt, exchange rates, data on investment flows and archival and journalistic accounts reveal a close congruence between the argentine and brazilian crises. The effects of the argentine experience carried over to brazil because the open capital and money markets of the period easily transmitted crisis from one economy to another and because fundamental conditions in both economies rendered them similarly vulnerable to fluctuations in capital flows. The article raises this case as a precedent for the contagious financial crises that emerging markets faced at the end of the twentieth century.

The development of a well-adapted financial system was a main part of the successful Swedish economic modernisation in the latter half of the nineteenth century. In this article it is shown that this development followed the pattern of a financial revolution. Major institutional and organisational changes that took place roughly between the late 1850s and early 1870s led to a rapid increase in liquidity and financial services. This financial revolution preceded the acceleration in economic growth in general and in the modern, industrial sector in particular. Monetisation especially encouraged growth, both in the industrial sector and in GDP as a whole. The basis of the financial system, measured as commercial bank assets and equity capital, affected overall GDP growth. The results also clearly promoted the importance of the development of the financial sector and monetisation as an interlinked and complementary process.

Based on archives of the French brokers, the French finance ministry and the occupying forces, this article analyses the motivations of the legal changes imposed on the French exchanges during the war. Most of the measures taken by the Vichy government were meant to stimulate the demand for French state bonds. Three main tools were used to render stocks as unattractive as possible: forced registration, imposition of a maximum threshold for stock prices and taxation. The article suggests that forced registration and the cap on maximum prices were the most efficient tools.

The US monetary union has undergone four distinct phases of development. From the early colonial period through the Revolution and Confederation, the unit of account differed in each region of British North America. Soon after the Constitution went into effect in 1789, the country shared a single specie-based unit of account and standard of deferred payment, but exchange media were numerous. After the Civil War, the trend was towards the use of fewer media of exchange. Over the course of the twentieth century, the current system, characterised by a common medium of exchange denominated in a single unit of account divorced from specie, evolved.

Before the Revolution American colonies issued paper money known as ‘bills of credit’. The bills issued in the Middle colonies held their value surprisingly well despite large wartime fluctuations in the quantity issued, but those issued in New England depreciated as the quantity in circulation increased. The bills' stable purchasing power in the Middle colonies has often been attributed to the redemption provisions enacted when the bills were issued. Similar provisions in New England supposedly failed because New England failed to enforce them. This article explores the comparative enforcement of redemption provisions in the two regions, and in New York in particular, and concludes that differential enforcement does not explain the disparity between the New England experience and that in the Middle colonies.

The study of the foundation of the Bouches-du-Rhône Savings Bank in 1821 provides an opportunity for observing how the local elite intended to lead the working classes into economic recovery. Their relationships with depositors was a clear evidence of their own belief in economic progress, and involved a new definition of how they would socially intervene, consisting of teaching an example of behaviour that would guarantee freedom. The underlying object was to give a liberal dimension to paid work by enabling it to ensure the independence of the poorest through savings. The nineteenth century opened up the social arena to morality and the founders of the Marseilles savings bank were acting within this perspective. As a significant institution, a savings bank constituted a tool for social control well suited to strengthening proximity power. The actual activity of a trustee of a savings bank sheds light on the way the upper classes integrated this work to its own strategies of economic and social domination.