The effects of the British mini-budget of 2022 and the extended aftermath of the global financial crisis of 2008 have reminded historians of the important role that banks and the financial sector plays in influencing the course of British and world history. At the same time, in recent years, Britain’s role in shaping the economic trajectories of many of its former colonies, as well as in the transatlantic slave trade, has come under the spotlight. Debates rage about the role Britain’s imperial past—and the forms of capitalism it took the lead in spreading—for the creating the modern world around us.
This Advanced Paper brings these themes together by equipping students with the analytical tools to think critically about the role that British finance and capitalism played in shaping history at home as well as of places in the wider world that British influence touched, focussing on recent research and debates among economists and historians. This Advanced Paper covers much more than simply the history of the City of London from the South Sea Bubble of 1720, Britain’s first major financial stock market crash, to the global financial crisis of 2008, one of the most recent. This paper enables students to explore in detail the history of British finance at home and in the wider world through the lens of recent developments in the history of capitalism, as well as how these increasingly intersect with economic history.
The impact of British finance is more than just financialisaton at home. It played a key role in the rise of merchant capitalism, the slave trade, imperialism, industrialisation and features at the centre of debates about where economic power lies in modern Britain. To this end, this paper encourages students to analyse the financial institutions and structures, as well as the ideas and assumptions in British political economy, that have shaped the wider economic, political, intellectual and cultural histories of the British Empire.
