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Consiglio J. A., Martinez Oliva J.C., Tortella G. (Eds): Banking and Finance in the Mediterranean: A Historical Perspective – 2012, Ashgate Publishing Ltd, Surrey, 355 pp.
This book is seminal. It is the first ever collection of research work seeking to bring together the multiple facets which, over many centuries and diverse economic conjunctures, have characterised banking and finance in the Mediterranean region.
A work that all Maltese bankers should read- Joe Falzon
Analytical treatment of the history of banking and finance in this region always faces – besides undoubtedly the conventional approach of specific issues or institutional analysis – the important question of whether the region’s financial systems have followed a path of convergence or of path dependence.
Is there some Mediterranean banking homogeneity which should be blandly or romantically accepted as uniting the institutions and their history over time? The bringing together in this book of a lot of research work by the leading lights in the membership of the European Association for Banking History (EABH) goes a long way towards providing some answers to that question.
The collection of papers shows a very detailed panoramic picture of the many national and international trends and developments, factors, customs, and events that have, in both consciously and unconsciously desired manners, characterised banking in the Mediterranean area over the past two centuries and more.
This ambitious research project saw its start ahead of the EABH’s June 2007 conference held in Malta with the support of the Central Bank of Malta and Bank of Valletta.
That conference had shown that, perhaps contrary to what many would be inclined to think, the evolution of banking in the Mediterranean goes way beyond the restricted realities of colonial relations.
There are so many other realities, and there is revealing treatment of this element in the book via the various studies of Iberian, Italian, French, Greek, Moroccan, Maltese, and Ottoman banking histories. The book’s editors tackled their wide remit by resorting to a structure that, a posteriori, has resulted in very comprehensive coverage of this very wide thematic.
Due homage is given to the origins of the project – the original conference – via a first part that is totally dedicated to insights into Malta’s banking and monetary history.
Consiglio’s overview and observations about Malta’s relatively short banking history again insist (as in his now generally accepted2006 seminal work on the subject) on the need for a much deeper analysis than hitherto about the banking realities here during the brief three-year French interregnum.
This first part of the book also includes an in-depth study of Malta’s numismatic history by our leading numismatist Joseph Sammut.
Of course, an important contrasting element in this sub-discipline is the fact that while the country’s purely banking history spans, at most, some five centuries, its coins can be traced to over two millenia.
This factor, plus the second part, which deals with the rise of modern banking and finance in the Mediterranean, includes two papers dealing with the mentioned convergence or path dependence issue, and the Imperial Ottoman Bank’s 1875-1914 record as an example of stability against many odds.
The Ionian Bank’s history from the 1840s to the 1920s is excellently dealt with by academics from the London School of Economics and the European University in Florence, who use the example of this important bank as an illustration of the vicissitudes of banks in the smaller islands of the Mediterranean.
Greek banking history, and sistermic diversity during the 19th and 20th centuries in the banking systems of France, Italy and Spain, feature in the third part of the book.
This is a book that all Maltese bankers should read.