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.
