The Second Bank of the United States (1816–36) faced a potential trade-off between the private profits it was expected to produce for shareholders and the ‘free’ yet costly fiscal services it was mandated to provide to the Federal government during an era of westward expansion and primitive transportation networks. This article shows that the bank's large-scale dealings in domestic and foreign exchange transformed this potential trade-off into a positive synergy between the bank's private and public obligations. The bank was financially successful because it found a market niche – the provision of interregional and international payment services – whose exploitation had the added virtue of reducing the cost to the bank of being the Treasury's fiscal agent.

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.

This article provides an historical case study of the hypothesis that a currency board imparts a deflationary bias to a growing economy. The hypothesis is based on the argument that, while economic growth increases the demand for money, the expansion of the money supply in a currency board system is constrained by the balance of payments. After examining the origins, development and criticisms of the deflationary bias hypothesis, the article investigates the experience of the Philippines during its economic recovery from the devastation of the Second World War. The evidence suggests that, under the currency board arrangement then in place, deflationary pressure emerged in the manner predicted by the hypothesis.

In the era before state regulation of insurance rates, the American fire insurance industry succeeded in regulating itself. The final quarter of the nineteenth century witnessed a sustained movement towards organisation in the fire insurance industry. Through the establishment of local rate-setting boards fire insurers were able to manage the risks that had plagued their industry since its inception. The local insurance ‘cartels’ of the late nineteenth century differed from their mid-century predecessors in their longevity. As the organisations became stronger, they were able to stabilise prices throughout the industry and enhance diversification. As a result, economic downturns no longer routinely resulted in destructive competition, and major fires no longer led to waves of bankruptcies.

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.

This article traces the origins of the ‘national bank’ in the Gold Coast. It shows how the Colonial authorities perverted the demand by Africans for a special kind of bank to aid their development. The Colonial Office preferred and ensured the establishment of an orthodox institution, which had little to give with regard to Africans' demand for developmental credit. This was because it believed that such development institutions would be unhelpful to, arguably, uncreditworthy Africans. This attitude, it is argued, represented a setback to the Gold Coast's development. Either such an institution, as demanded by Africans, would have helped the colony's advance, or Africans would have learnt earlier that the concept of development was more fundamental than setting up a ‘national bank’.

Insurance for damage caused by public unrest became popular in post-1918 Central Europe and proved to be a profitable business, but one that became increasingly problematic because of the role of fascist regimes in promoting civil commotion. This article addresses some of the experiences of insurance companies, especially the Munich Reinsurance Company, when trying to manage policies covering political unrest and riot in Italy, Germany and Spain between 1922 and 1941. In the case of Italy in 1922, the new fascist regime forced the insurers to pay for damages caused by the Squadri. In Germany, the insurers were forced to assume a fictitious liability for damages done to the Jews in the Pogrom of November 1938. In Spain, Franco forced the insurance companies to treat Civil War damages as a civil commotion and make payouts despite their strenuous objections. These experiences demonstrated that civil commotion insurance was most safely marketed in democracies that provided enough unrest but also law and order to make it worthwhile.

This article considers the changing regulatory environment in which French insurance operated between the ancien régime and the post-war years. At first treated with suspicion, the state came to recognise the social benefits of insurance during the industrial revolution. The extension of regulation over different products and companies – life, marine, general – needs to be understood as a historical process in which first the benefits and then the possibilities for access to substantial financial resources came to be understood. A dual tradition of mistrust and fascination has prevailed in the French attitudes towards insurance, and this paper explores this relationship in a variety of contexts. It is suggested that the eventual nationalisation of much of the industry in 1946 was a signal of both increasing respectability and of the state's desire to offer universal coverage. The opportunity to mobilise and direct investment flows was also attractive.