Decision taking, confidence and risk management in banks from early modernity to the 20th century, by Korinna Schönhärl (ed.)

Korinna Schönhärl (ed.) (2017) Decision taking, confidence and risk management in banks from early modernity to the 20th century, Palgrave Studies in the History of Finance, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Reviewed by Dr Ekaterina Svetlova: School of Business, University of Leicester The volume contributes to the field of banking and financial history which is a rather small but interesting specialism within the historical discipline. This field gained a particular attention after the financial crisis of 2008 due to the increased interest in historical parallels to the former financial meltdowns (Cassis et al. 2016: 1). At the same time, the last crisis accentuated the importance to understand the ways in which banking and financial practices have taken their modern shape. In other words, the question of how it came that practices of granting loans, risk evaluation, asset valuation etc. are organized exactly as they are today. Those insights can help to approach the question of why and how the current financial system is vulnerable. In particular, the volume at hand focuses on practices of decision-making and risk management in banks and describes how these practices have changed over time and how they can be explained and analysed by banking historians.