Financial Elites and European Banking

• Introduction


• 1: Youssef Cassis and Giuseppe Telesca: Financial crises and the public discourse on financial elites: A comparison between the Great Depression and the Great Recession


• 2: Niccolò Valmori: Reshaping strategies: merchants and bankers at the time of the French Revolution


• 3: Giandomenico Piluso: Adjusting to financial instability in the interwar period. Italian financial élites, international cooperation and domestic regulation, 1919-1939


• 4: Alberto Rinaldi and Michelangelo Vasta: Financial elites and the Italian corporate network, 1913-2001


• 5: Laure Quennouëlle-Corre: French bankers and the transformation of the financial system in the second half of the twentieth century


• 6: Leslie Hannah: Trust and regulation in corporate capital markets before 1914


• 7: TT Arvind, Joanna Gray, and Sarah Wilson: Financial elites, law, and regulation: A historical perspective


• 8: Mikael Wendschlag: Central bankers in twelve countries between 1950 and 2000: the making of a global elite


• 9: Alexis Fréderi Drach: Basel banking supervisors and the construction of an international standard-setter institution

Youssef Cassis is Professor of Economic History at the European University Institute, in Florence. His work mainly focuses on banking and financial history, as well as business history more generally. His most recent publications include Capitals of Capital: A History of International Financial Centres, 1780-2005 (Cambridge University Press, 2006, 2nd revised edition, 2009), Crises and Opportunities: The Shaping of Modern Finance (OUP, 2011), and, with Philip Cottrell, Private Banking in Europe: Rise, Retreat and Resurgence (OUP, 2015). He has also recently co-edited, with Richard Grossman and Catherine Schenk, The Oxford Handbook of Banking and Financial History, (OUP, 2016). Professor Cassis was the cofounder, in 1994, of Financial History Review (Cambridge University Press).

Giuseppe Telesca currently holds the position of Research Associate at the European University Institute (Fiesole, Italy) where he collaborates with Professor Youssef Cassis on a project on the "Memories of Financial Crises". He obtained his PhD in economic and social history at the University of Florence and undertook post-doctoral research as Jean Monnet Fellow at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies at the European University Institute. He has published on the history of the Italian banking system, the evolution of European financial elites, and the economic and urban impact of big sport events on host cities/countries.

This book has the merit to put the role of financial elites in a central place at a time when the main actors of the financial world are often blamed for the crisis ... By going beyond the obvious groups such as the bankers, the book forces the reader to reflect on what constitutes the financial elite. The book is likely to appeal to researchers in financial history, but also to anybody eager to know more about the multifaceted notion of financial elites. Kim Oosterlinck, Journal of Economic Literature