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 to behavioural
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.