Decision Taking, Confidence and Risk Management in Banks from Early Modernity to the 20th Century

This book offers 14 contributions that examine key questions in bank decision-taking,

constitution of confidence in banks and risk management practices from Early Modernity to the twentieth century. It explores how the various mechanisms of bank decision taking changed over time. Chapters also analyse the types of risk management techniques used, the contributory factors to the constitution of confidence and the methods that banking historians can use to analyse and describe bankers´ risk management and decision taking - from system theory tobehavioural finance, new institutional economics to praxeology and convention theory to network analysis. The different methodological approaches are put to the test in case studies based on archive material from four hundred years of banking in order to connect banking history more closely to political and cultural history.

Korinna Schönhärl is Assistant Professor for Social and Economic History at Essen University, Germany. Her current research centres on the investment of European banks in Greece in the19th century. Additional research foci are historical methodology, the history of economic thought, the history of migration and the history of tax morale.