Stories about people

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Newsletter from the EABH

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European Association forBanking and FinancialHistory e.V.

1/2006

In late summer 2004 the Jewish MuseumBerlin presented the special exhibition “MaxSteinthal: A Banker and his pictures”. A fasci-nating group of paintings, prints and documentshad been found - quite unexpectedly - duringthe removal of material from the basement ofthe Dresden Gemäldegalerie at the time of thedevastating Elbe floods of 2002. Its history wassubsequently traced back to the Steinthal fam-ily and the extraordinary sequence of eventsthat led to its being deposited in Dresden wasthereby unravelled. The collection comprisedOld Master, 19th-Century and Impressionist pic-tures and prints, as well as decorative works ofart and documents. Chief among the highlightsof the collection was an important 19th-centurywork - Las Tras Velas (The Three Sails), by theSpanish artist Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida,painted in 1903. Another outstanding objectwas the first share certificate of Deutsche Bankfrom 1871, with the number 00001.

Who was the man behind the collection? Whowas Max Steinthal? Along with Georg von Si-emens and Hermann Wallich, Max Steinthalwas one of the most important figures from thefirst decades of Deutsche Bank existence. Alland all he was linked to the bank for more thansix decades. He was born in Berlin on Christ-mas’ eve 1850 the son of a Jewish merchant.In the ninety years of his life he never left thecity for longer than four weeks. After schoolfollowed a banking apprenticeship withBankhaus A. Paderstein. An intelligent, hard-working young man, he rose quickly throughthe ranks. After the liquidation of Padersteinas a result of the so called “Gründerkrise” in1873, he was left searching for a new job. Atthis time he made the acquaintance ofHermann Wallich, manager of an up-comingjoint stock company which had been foundedonly three years previously and which hadsurvived the economic crisis – Deutsche Bankin Berlin. Wallich, also a Jew, liked the youngman and thought about whether there mightnot be a function for him within Deutsche Bank.When Georg Siemens, first spokesmen ofDeutsche Bank, first met 23 year old Steinthalhe asked him: “So, you want to become headclerk here?” Steinthal replied self-confidently:“Not at all, I want to be a director.” And so itwas that Steinthal was made a board directorof Deutsche Bank. One of Steinthals earliertasks in the late 1870s and 1880s was to pushDeutsche Bank’s foreign exchange businessinto a better position. At the same time he be-came responsible for the bank’s stock ex-change transactions and cared for the domes-tic financing business. The major role of thearbitrage business in Berlin was also a resultof Steinthal efforts.

Continue on page 81Max Steinthal, 1903 (1850-1940)

Max Steinthal (1850-1940) - a forgotten banker

Continue from cover page

In 1889 he married Fanny Lindenthal, a youngViennese of Jewish origin. After two decades ofexistence Deutsche Bank began to expand itsposition as an investment bank by financing bigindustrial firms. Steinthals time was mostly oc-cupied as head of industrial syndicats at thistime. One of his major projects was the trans-formation and reorganisation of theMannesmann Röhrenwerke into a joint stockcompany. He played a decisive role in pushingthe extension of the Berlin underground andelevated railways. He combined the financing ofthe urban railway system with the developmentof new residential quarters by founding severalproperty companies. Later on he was called“Father of the Berlin underground”. He was fur-ther engaged with the Goerz-Companies(South-African gold-mining), the Deutsch-Ostafrikanische Eisenbahngesellschaft (Ger-man-East African Railway Company), and theBayerische Stickstoffwerke (Bavarian NitrogenIndustries).

Steinthal was often characterized as a man withenormous persistence. He was able to managedifficult tasks over decades. While his col-leagues travelled all over the world to checkDeutsche Bank’s major engagements on thescene, Steinthal kept the bank on course “athome”.

Steinthal left the Management Board ofDeutsche Bank in late 1905 and was appointedto the Supervisory Board, from 1923 until 1932as its chairman. But that official change did notmean that he really reduced his workload forDeutsche Bank, it was more that he could bet-ter concentrate on some of the most importantprojects.

Beside his numerous activities as a banker,Steinthal made significant donations for philan-thropic purposes and began to set up a privateart collection (for which his wife Fanny was pri-marily responsible). But he was also a promoter

for Deutsche Bank’s corporate culture. Thechoral society and the orchestral society, as wellas the fencing club of Deutsche Bank werefounded on Steinthal’s initiative. He remaineda loyal sponsor over the years and often madegenerous donations.

Finally, in May 1935, when he was 85 years old,his Jewish faith became a political embarrass-ment. Steinthal resigned from the DeutscheBank’s Supervisory Board with the words: “I don’twant to make any trouble for the bank”. Emigra-tion wasn’t a real option for a man of his ageeven though the living conditions for him andhis wife became worse and worse. After the socalled “Reichskristallnacht” he was urged to sellhis fashionable villa in Berlin-Charlottenburgand his idyllic property at Maxsee east of theGerman capital. On 8 December 1940 twoweeks before his 90th birthday he died in Berlinin a hotel-room, Fanny Steinthal survived herhusband by only ten month. Most of their sevenchildren had already emigrated from Germany,but one son died in a concentration camp.

Max Steinthal did not leave memoirs and whenhe died in 1940 it was unthinkable to publish anobituary for a Jewish banker. This remained sountil 2002, when the Berlin municipality restoreda commemorative plaque for the “Father of theBerlin underground” at the Alexanderplatz sta-tion, which had been replaced after 1933, andin 2004 – corresponding to the above men-tioned exhibition – a publication came out whichintroduced Steinthal as a banker and collector.

Reinhard Frost

Historical Institute of Deutsche Bank

Dear Colleagues,

More than fifteen years after its foundation, the EABH’s purpose remains to promote dialoguebetween archivists, historians and representatives of the banking and financial sectors from all overEurope and provide a network for the exchange of ideas and experiences while promoting the pres-ervation of historically valuable archive material and fostering research into financial history. Theremarkable quality of the articles in this 17th edition of the EABH Newsletter shows that this objec-tive is being achieved on a continuing basis.

The wealth of reviews of bank archives illustrates that the archives remain the most important ob-ject of the EABH interest. Indeed, the promotion of archives is now more important than ever. In themodern age banking and financial archives are facing two serious threats. The first threat is posedby the prevalence of mergers, takeovers and liquidations. As there is never a merger of equals, itis inevitable that when a merger takes place one institution’s identity and cultural memory will beoverwhelmed and destroyed. The archives themselves are also in danger of being lost if the insti-tution does not consciously operate a preservation policy. In the case of a takeover, this is an evenmore likely occurence, and when a company is liquidised unavoidably so.

The second threat posed to the preservation of historically relevant material is that of technologi-cal advancement. The development and prevalence of information technology- internet, email, SMS-in the world of banking and finance has led to the destruction of much material of historical inter-est. Information, previously conveyed by letter, is now transferred via electronic media. There areno longer originals which means information has a very short lifespan and is thus rarely stored forlong periods of time. Though valid forms of conveying information, emails and SMS ensure there isno way of archiving historically relevant material contained within them. The same can be said ofWebsites whose contents change frequently but which are not recorded. Of course, informationpassed through these media could be saved, but for most companies the costs are too high. Theforthcoming Workshop on Banking and Financial Archives: Priorities for the Future will deal morespecifically with these challenges and ways of combating them.

The review in this Bulletin of the challenges facing the Geld + Bank Museum in Utrecht demon-strates the difficulties facing many historical banking associations and bank archives in the age ofmergers and takeovers. However, it is reassuring to see several international banks showing anactive interest, and also a financial interest in their archives.

However, as well as concerning ourselves with archives, the EABH must be willing to grow and de-velop in line with the needs and interests of its members. The EABH is working on developing itsrole in the cultural activities of financial institutions- a very important and contemporary subjectmatter which is intrinsically linked to the cultural memory of banking and financial institutions. Thefascinating results of the survey on Art and Cultural Activities in Financial Institutions publishedhere illustrate the great interest our member institutions have in this field. Let us not forget: thetopic of cultural activities in financial activities ties in perfectly with one of the EABH’s main objec-tives: to reinforce our collective European culture and identity.

Manfred Pohl

Deputy Chairman

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EABH survey 2Burning the midnight oil 25New research 29Workshop report 51Paying a visit to... 65EABH noticeboard 72Stories about people 82

Published by the European Association for Banking and Financial History e.V.

Editor: Damir Jelic

Assistant Editor: Emer MageeFront page illustration: 1913 balance sheet of “Albina”, Spar- und Credit-Anstalt

The European Association for Banking and Financial History e.V.

Guiollettstrasse 25D - 60325 Frankfurt am Main

Telephone: +49 69 97 20 33 07

Telefax: +49 69 97 20 33 08e-mail: [email protected]

www.eabh.info

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Survey on Art and Cultural Activities in Financial Institutions

1) How to set up an art collection

Why do financial institutions set up an art collection?

Why did your company set up an art collection?What is the philosophy underlying the collection?What are the goals and objectives pursued with the collection?

How banks set up an art collection?

How did you implement this project?What are the criteria followed regarding the selection of pieces of art?Do you prefer established artists or promising, upcoming talent?Are the works regularly re-appraised and revalued?Do you work with independent curators?How do you evaluate potential significant additions to your collection?Have guidelines been formed to maintain the quality of the collection?

Accessibility of the art collection

Can clients, employees and shareholders profit from the art collection?Do you lend your works to other institutions? Is the collection accessible to the public?How do you contribute to the “dissemination” of your art collection to the public?Do you have a web museum, a newsletter?

2) How financial institutions may contribute to improve culture in thecommunities they work for?

Do you have an underlying philosophy to serve society with your cultural activities?Are your cultural activities a result of a deliberate and defined corporate responsibility/ socialresponsibility agenda?With what activities do you contribute to the cultural life of your community?Do you sponsor any cultural activity outside of the company, organised by other organisations?If so, what kind of activities do you sponsor? Is there a clear and specific policy which youfollow?

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1. ABN AMRO Historical art collection

Why set up an historical art collection?Through the years, many predecessors of ABNAMRO collected a considerable number of ob-jects (art and otherwise).With the merger of ABN and AMRO in 1991,management decided to establish a departmentto manage this large collection and on 15 May1992, ABN AMRO History Department wasfounded.Its tasks are compiling, archiving and document-ing all events in the history of ABN AMRO Hold-ing N.V. and all her legal predecessors, and tocollect all artifacts with a historical link to thebank and her predecessors.The bank considers her history as the basis forthe present and the future.

How to set up an historical art collection?The bulk of the collection was already accumu-lated by the banks predecessors through theprevious decades. At the moment the HistoryDepartment is still occupied with registering allthese collected artifacts. New material is mainlyobtained by acquisition at the office-buildingsof the bank and from gifts from (former) employ-ees or people who had dealings with the bankin the past.Purchases are seldom made and only when itfills a gap in the collection and has a clear con-nection with the bank or her predecessors.In fourteen years the department has devel-oped from one historian into a staff of six people:the company historian, an archivist, a writer, twocollection-managers and an administrative em-ployee. Apart from them there are a number ofacademics writing the history of the predeces-sors.A collection-plan is made in which mission, col-lection, acquisition and dequisition, operatingprocedures and management is described. The

plan will be reviewed every four to five years.The collection was appraised for the first timewhen the History Department was founded. Onlyrecently was it decided to appraise the collec-tion in a cycle of 5 years in which every year apart of the collection is valued and after 5 yearsrevalued.

Accessibility of the art collectionPart of the collection hangs in (head)office-buildings and can hardly be called “available forthe public”. Unfortunately we have no accom-modation to display the artifacts to the public.We do honour applications from museums andfellow-institutions, but requests are limited.On the website www.abnamro.com/history asmall part of the collection is available. Re-searchers and interested people can make anappointment to view archives, photographs andsometimes a part of the collection. We try toassist them to the best of our ability in theirsearch for information.

2. How an historical art collection may con-tribute to improving culture in the commu-nity

Apart from the historical collection, ABN AMROhas an Art Foundation, established in 1977 byAmro. They concentrate on collecting art ofDutch artists or artists living in the Netherlandsfrom 1950 to the present. Though accommo-dated in the same building, the Historical Ar-chives and the Art Foundation are two totallydifferent departments operating independently.The bank in general feels a social commitmenttowards society, and sponsors a number of ac-tivities amongst which culture, sports and vol-untary work. The History Department contrib-utes, if requested. For our department thismeans financial contributions as well as contrib-uting knowledge and material to external publi-cations, sharing knowledge and know-how, co-operating with fellow-institutions and makingsmall exhibitions mainly within the bank. Our

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own publications are primarily available for per-sonnel and fellow-institutions, but outsiders cancertainly apply for a copy.We do believe that the ABN AMRO History De-partment can make a valuable contribution toour cultural heritage.

Cindy M. Rodermond-SnabiliéABN AMRO History Department

P.O. box 283 (AT 0050)1000 EA Amsterdam

Tel. +31-20-629.6752Fax. +31-20-629.6788

E-mail: [email protected]

1) How to set up an art collectionWhy did your company set up an art collec-tion?The Bank of Italy does not have an art collec-tion proper, so to say, that is, a systematic col-lection of works by selected artists or of selectedtypes. The core of the Bank’s holdings of artconsists of a large number of works acquiredfrom a single collector, Riccardo Gualino, aprominent industrialist who built up an enormouscollection, renowned worldwide for its eclecti-cism and the large number of masterpieces. Atthe end of the 1920s he went bankrupt and hadto transfer to the Bank “on account of a largerpayment owed” a total of 174 pieces, includinga precious collection of Chinese artworks.Much later, and in particular starting in the1980s, the Bank initiated a policy of increasingits artistic holdings.

What is the philosophy underlying the collec-tion?At first the Bank of Italy was interested mainlyin Italian artists of the nineteenth and twentiethcenturies, representative of the evolution of Ital-ian art since the founding of the Bank itself to-

wards the end of the nineteenth century. An-other criterion has been to concentrate onworks that can be easily displayed in the work-place.

What are the goals and objectives pursued withthe collection?To expand and exploit the Bank’s art holdings,to exhibit original works of both painting andsculpture to furnish offices and public spaces.

How banks set up an art collection?How did you implement this project?To expand its holdings of artworks, each yearthe Bank of Italy budgets an amount earmarkedfor acquisitions. Most of the acquisitions aremade at the leading auction houses; in somecases they are made directly from artists, onlyrarely from private collectors.

What are the criteria followed regarding theselection of pieces of art?a) the historical and artistic worth of the artistand the work;b) the decorative value of the work and the at-tractiveness of the subject, considering theneed for decoration of prestigious spaces withinthe Bank.

Do you prefer established artists or promising,upcoming talent?The current preference is for established art-ists of the twentieth century, but emerging art-ists are also considered.

Are the works regularly re-appraised and reval-ued?In 2000 the carrying value (purchase price) hasbeen flanked by a market value estimate.

Do you work with independent curators?The Bank of Italy has ten outside consultantsspecializing in a variety of areas of art. An art-works committee has been formed to considerproposed acquisitions. It consists of three high-

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ranking managers of the Bank and two art ex-perts, selected according to their specialty,among the consultants.

How do you evaluate potential significant addi-tions to your collection?The Bank is interested in making significantadditions. Acquisitions as proposed by the art-works committee are submitted to the top man-agement for approval.

Have guidelines been formed to maintain thequality of the collection?Yes. Those recently approved by the top man-agement are as follows:a) orientation to twentieth-century Italian artists,with an emphasis on those not yet in the col-lection or represented with relatively minorworks, so as to cover the main currents in Ital-ian art of the last century. A list of modern andcontemporary artists to refer to in proposing ac-quisitions has been drawn up;b) increasing holdings of works by artists ofwhom the Bank already has collections of acertain extent and quality (De Nittis, De Pisis,Pirandello).

Accessibility of the art collectionCan clients, employees and shareholders profitfrom the art collection?The artworks are displayed in the workplace(offices, studies, conference rooms and otherpublic rooms). Thus as a rule they are acces-sible to the employees and guests present inthose spaces.

Do you lend your works to other institutions? Isthe collection accessible to the public?At the request of organizers and with the per-mission of the competent authorities, the Bankreadily lends its artworks for exhibitions spon-sored by institutions offering all the necessaryguarantees.During conferences or special events (visits fromforeign delegations, school groups, etc.) the

Bank conducts guided tours of Palazzo Koch(the headquarters building) or the DonatoMenichella Centre, where part of the collectionis held.Four especially valuable pieces from theGualino collections (three Chinese and one In-dian) are on temporary deposit with the MuseoNazionale di Arte Orientale in Rome and arethus accessible to the public.

How do you contribute to the “dissemination” ofyour art collection to the public? Do you have aweb museum, a newsletter?The Bank has no web museum or newsletter.Some works, in particular those of the Gualinocollection, have been described and illustratedin non-commercial publications. A volume exclu-sively for the Bank of Italy, illustrating the mostimportant works present in Palazzo Koch, isforthcoming.

2) How financial institutions may contributeto improve culture in the communities theywork for?

Do you have an underlying philosophy to servesociety with your cultural activities?No, except in the fields covered by our institu-tional mandate (economic and legal research).

Are your cultural activities a result of a deliber-ate and defined corporate responsibility/socialresponsibility agenda?As above.

With what activities do you contribute to thecultural life of your community?The Bank provides the premises and budget-ary resources for its employees’ social and cul-tural organization.

Do you sponsor any cultural activity outside ofthe company, organised by otherorganisations?No.

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1) How to set up an art collection?

Why do financial institutions set up an artcollection?Why did your company set up an art collection?Our company set up an art collection mainly touse it for top management and representativeoffices needs.

What is the philosophy underlying the collec-tion?The philosophy underlying the Banca di Roma’sart collection is influenced by the previouslymentioned logistical needs and by the relatedinterest to cultivate the company’s image in sup-port of art and cultural activities.

What are the goals and objectives pursued withthe collection?The main goals pursued with the collection con-cern the availability of many interesting andbeautiful pieces of art, which can show a sig-nificant value increase in the medium-long termand can also contribute to communicate toemployees, customers and visitors the bank’sinterest in supporting art.

How banks set up an art collection?How did you implement this project?Through specific projects oriented to build upa unique Banca di Roma’s collection, which isthe final heritage composed by the goods of thethree former banks Banco di Santo Spirito,Cassa di Risparmio di Roma and Banco diRoma.

What are the criteria followed regarding theselection of pieces of art?The art collection has been formed throughdecades with the on-going acquisition of piecesof art in the antiquarian market or through op-erations linked to credit recovery processes.

Do you prefer established artists or promising,upcoming talent?Until now acquisition has been oriented towardswell-known and talented artists’ pieces. In thefuture, it is possible the bank will try to focus onupcoming talents.

Are the works regularly re-appraised and reval-ued?They are not re-appraised and revalued regu-larly, only on an occasional basis.

Do you work with independent curators?Yes, although on a limited basis.

How do you evaluate potential significant addi-tions to your collection?It mainly depends on the amount of resourcesmade available through the yearly budget andon the needs to face new logistical needs.

Have guidelines been formed to maintain thequality of the collection?Guidelines mainly concern the conservationand protection status of the various art pieces(many of which have been created in the pastcenturies), reached with dedicated restorationactivities committed to the best known profes-sional laboratories working in Italy and certifiedby Soprintendenze (Ministero per i beni e leattività culturali).

Accessibility of the art collectionCan clients, employees and shareholders profitfrom the art collection?On a limited basis, since the various art objectsare placed in many different locations.

Do you lend your works to other institutions? Isthe collection accessible to the public?The pieces of the collection are lent to be shownon the occasion of important and selected ex-positions. For example many visitors are al-lowed to visit our historic buildings in occasion

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of the “Invito a Palazzo” day, yearly promotedby Associazione Bancaria Italiana. In additionthe public is occasionally invited to participatein guided tours.

How do you contribute to the “dissemination” ofyour art collection to the public? Do you have aweb museum, a newsletter?We are preparing a web site that will collect themost important pieces of the collection.


Do you have an underlying philosophy to servesociety with your cultural activities?Our philosophy is strictly linked to communica-tion. We want to transmit by art a positive im-age of Capitalia Group and his innovative ca-pacity. A deep dialogue between preservationand exploitation of the art, made by profession-alism, knowledge and reliability of the personswho work in our large company.

Are your cultural activities a result of a deliber-ate and defined corporate responsibility/ socialresponsibility agenda?Yes, they are part of a larger social responsi-bility agenda, which is often discussed and ap-proved together with public bodies (i.e. the Cityof Rome, The Ministero per i Beni e le AttivitàCulturali, and so on).

With what activities do you contribute to thecultural life of your community?We contribute to the cultural life of our commu-nity by sponsoring some cultural events. In ad-dition we participate in the special day yearlyorganized by Associazione Bancaria Italiananamed “Invito a Palazzo”. In the fifth edition ofthis year a prize will be awarded for a youngrestorer among those graduated from theOpificio delle Pietre Dure, a famous institutionfounded in Florence in 1588 by Ferdinando

de’Medici the first.

Do you sponsor any cultural activity outside ofthe company, organised by otherorganisations?Yes, sometimes we do.

If so, what kind of activities do you sponsor? Isthere a clear and specific policy which you fol-low?Mainly art events and also through permanentexhibitions of the significant archival heritagehandled by Banca di Roma. The Historical Ar-chives of Banca di Roma are handled by theBank, under the patronage and respecting theguidelines of the Ministero per i Beni e le AttivitàCulturali.

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Why did your company set up an art collec-tion?Our Bank has always been interested in thesetting off of the local artistic culture, with thepurchase of many art works (paintings, coins,sculptures, silver wares), so there have been theneed to collect these ones in an art collection,and to place the same collection in the histori-cal head office of the Bank.

What is the philosophy underlying the collec-tion?The preservation and the setting off of the lo-cal, historical and artistic property

What are the goals and objectives pursued withthe collection?The possibility, for all the people living in thisarea and over, to know and appreciate our col-lection

How banks set up an art collection?How did you implement this project?Our Bank, during the years, made a shrewdpolicy, regarding the art works purchases

What are the criteria followed regarding theselection of pieces of art? Do you prefer estab-lished artists or promising, upcoming talent?Most parts of the collection concern establishedartists of the local tradition, but we make roomalso for national artists as well known and somepromising talent. As well as the very importantcollection Mario Sironi (42 art works among oilpaitings, sculptures and mixed techniques), DePisis and Morandi, for example, are presents.

Are the works regularly re-appraised and reval-ued?Yes, over the inventory there is a catalogue thatis updated and topographic.

Do you work with independent curators?Yes

How do you evaluate potential significant addi-tions to your collection?The meanings that we have just express aremore than enough

Have guidelines been formed to maintain thequality of the collection?Yes

Accessibility of the art collectionDuring the year we organize a day entirely dedi-cated to the guided tour of the entire palace ofthe Bank, with particular attention for the artcollection; this initiative earn more and moresuccess every year. We have also a web mu-seum and a news letter. Over that day it is notpossible to visit our collection on booking, be-cause the art works are holded in operativerooms for the bank’s life.

With what activities do you contribute to thecultural life of your community?Yes, of course we can contribute to the culturalgrowth in our community, especially with an in-tense publishing activity.

Do you sponsor any cultural activity outside ofthe company, organised by otherorganisations?Yes

If so, what kind of activities do you sponsor?Art exhibitions, debates and conferences, bookpresentations.

Is there a clear and specific policy which youfollow?Yes, we sponsor a lot of cultural and artisticevents, and also sport teams and events.

Maria Grazia Cadoni

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BANK OF FINLAND

How to set up an art collection?The Bank of Finland has set up its art collec-tion over many years. The Bank’s objective isto acquire new pieces of art for display in pre-mises as they are renovated or in entirely newpremises as they are taken into use. Collect-ing art is not an end in itself. The underlying phi-losophy is to decorate the Bank’s general pre-mises and individual offices with art in order tomake them more pleasant and appealing.The Bank of Finland has an Art Committee whichis chaired by the Governor and has two othermembers: the recently retired secretary to theBank of Finland board and a representative ofthe Bank’s staff association. The Art Commit-tee is responsible for all matters relating to theBank of Finland’s art collection. The Art Com-mittee has an annual budget adopted by theBank of Finland board as part of the normalbudget process.Pieces of art are purchased by the Bank ac-cording to certain criteria. The guiding principleis that all new acquisitions should be works pro-duced by Finnish artists at the peak of theircreativity. Pieces of art can either be purchaseddirectly from the artist or from art exhibitions andgalleries. Outside experts are sometimes con-sulted where significant acquisitions are con-cerned.The Bank endeavours to collect art of high qual-ity, and hence all decisions on art acquisitionshave been entrusted to the Art Committee.Since the Bank also seeks to take good careof its art collection, funds for this purpose areearmarked in the annual budget.All works of art displayed in public areas cannaturally be viewed by the general public. Suchareas include the exterior of the Bank where

statues and sculptures are on display. Otherpublic areas are lobbies, waiting rooms and, toa certain degree, reception rooms. However,pieces of art placed in working areas, meetingrooms and on other staff premises are not ac-cessible to the general public. The Bank of Fin-land has no virtual museum or equivalent.The Bank takes a positive attitude to requestsfor loans if the exhibition or project is of nationalimportance. A condition for lending works of artis that the organiser bears all costs involvedand takes out adequate insurance.

How the Bank of Finland contributes to im-prove culture in the community?The Bank of Finland has a museum that wasopened in 2003 and is accessible to the publicfree of charge. The museum arranges freeguided tours in Finnish, Swedish or English.The main target audiences are schoolchildrenover 15 years of age. Lectures pitched at thegeneral public are also held at the Bank of Fin-land Museum on subjects such as monetarypolicy and the history of money.

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1) How to set up an art collection?Why do financial institutions set up an artcollection?Why did your company set up an art collection?The first works of art were acquired for the of-fices of the Bank’s leading officials. Art waspurchased, often commissioned, but always ina sense of incorporating fine art – not décor,and in an aim to create a pleasant working en-vironment. As the institution expanded and grew,setting up an art collection was perceived to bemore of a long-term capital deposit, as well asan excellent, no less, imperative form of promot-ing the institution’s public image. Not much later,an employee art-committee was assigned tooversee development of the collection. Famousworks of very prestigious Greek artists werebought and displayed in the Bank’s premisesthroughout Greece.

What is the philosophy underlying the collec-tion?Expansion and growth brought changes in atti-tude and perception. The cautious, tentativebuying of the early years as well as the extrava-gant buying patterns of the later ones, were,almost instinctively, gradually replaced by anacquisition philosophy, which we today feel issecurely and much more wisely established.The Bank’s collections currently consist of asophisticated and extensive anthology of ob-jects, ranging from paintings, prints and sculp-tures to antiquities, antiques and memorabilia,aiming to preserve the organization’s history aswell as to offer a significant contribution to thecountry’s artistic and cultural life.With regard to painting, the collection does notaspire to compose a panorama of the historyof Greek art, prior to the 1850’s. There are morepaintings from the 1850s to the 1960s and less

from the 1960s to the 1980s, while a few worksform the 1980’s to 2000 illustrate some of thevisual trends of the recent decades, as well asthe current one.

What are the goals and objectives pursued withthe collection?Through its art collection, the Bank of Greecehas, over the years sought to:- encourage and support artistic expres-sion in Greece,- contribute to the restitution of importantpieces which represent landmarks in the laterhistory of Greek art,- preserve and convey the country’s artis-tic identity and culture,- reflect the aesthetic dimensions of itscorporate culture, and “communicate valuesthat are otherwise difficult to define and express”.

How banks set up an art collection?How did you implement this project?An employee art-committee was assigned tooversee development of the collection. As thecollection evolved, the organization moved tothe establishment of a Service which would pri-marily be responsible for the preservation andconservation of the works. As finally defined inits articles of association, the Service was fur-thermore assigned to develop an overall collec-tions’ management policy. As the collectiongrows, the role of the Service will continue toevolve.What are the criteria followed regarding theselection of pieces of art?- Artistic value- Aesthetic flair- Price for value- Thematic content (mostly still life, land-scape, figuration and portraiture). The art hasto be meaningful, engaging and suit our busi-ness environment.

Do you prefer established artists or promisingupcoming talent?

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Artists are usually selected on the basis of hav-ing substantial resumes, solid exhibition histo-ries with established art galleries, works in sig-nificant corporate collections and/or works inmajor museum collections. Some of them haveprice histories with key auction houses.

Are the works regularly re-appraised and reval-ued?They are re-appraised and revalued occasion-ally, but not regularly.

Do you work with independent curators?In-house curators take care of the collectionson a permanent basis. Project oriented collabo-rations with highly expertised professionals froma broad range of fields add to the conductionof specialist research.

How do you evaluate potential significant addi-tions to the collections?The art committee, which currently consists ofemployees as well as well-known consultantsfrom the corporate art field, evaluates potentialadditions with a view to fill the gradually descend-ing “gaps” of a quality collection which aims toillustrate adequately many points in the courseof Greek art during the last two centuries.

Have guidelines been formed to maintain thequality of the collection?We are in the process of initiating an “up to in-ternational collections’ management standards”acquisition policy, aiming to define the frame-work which will maximize the aesthetic and ar-tistic value as well as the investing potential ofthe collection.

Accessibility of the art collectionCan clients, employees and shareholders profitfrom the art collection?No. They can benefit in various ways, but notfinancially profit.

Do you lend your works to other institutions? Is

the collection accessible to the public?We do lend our objects, as well as relatedphotographic and scientific documentation toother Greek and foreign institutions. The entirecollection is not open to the public on a perma-nent basis; however, partial access to the col-lection is achieved through rotation displays inthe Bank’s premises, on a regular basis. Spe-cial requests to access certain objects are pro-cessed and can be arranged.

How do you contribute to the “dissemination” ofyour art collection to the public? Do you have aweb museum, a newsletter?The Bank has been releasing publications onits art collection since 1993, and has been con-tributing to an array of publications of other in-stitutions ever since. Making parts of the artcollection available on the Internet, as well asincluding a Virtual Museum Program in thebank’s official web-site, are part of our currentprojects.


Do you have an underlying philosophy to servesociety with your cultural activities?The Bank actively participates in the country’scultural life by organizing and supporting activi-ties which aim at disseminating and preservingthe Greek culture, as well as mainly advancingeconomic science. We proudly perceive this tobe a complementary and integral part of ourcommunity role.

Are your cultural activities a result of a deliber-ate and defined corporate responsibility/socialresponsibility agenda?Having always stood by cultural and social in-stitutions, we have initiated a social responsi-bility policy which aims to further enhance ourcontribution to the community through a broadrange of activities, including support for the arts,

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science, research, sports, environmental pro-tection and humanitarian causes.

Do you sponsor any cultural activity outside ofthe company, organized by other organiza-tions? If so, what kind of activities do you spon-sor? Is there a clear and specific policy whichyou follow?The Bank of Greece discreetly sponsors culturalactivities as an integral part of its broader, lowprofile, sponsoring philosophy which aims to fi-nancially support a wide range of communityactivities.

1) How to set up an art collection?Why do financial institutions set up an artcollection?For decoration purposes- VIP and public areasas well as working offices.We do not have a collection of a specific typeof art objects, but a good number of art piecesof good quality. The only true collection we keepdeveloping is the Portuguese coin and banknotes collection. We have a museum of the his-tory of money from the ancient peoples that hadlived in our territory up the Euro. In what con-cerns painting and other art objects we just buywhen we need them for decorating new pre-mises.

How banks set up an art collection?We have designed a project to develop the coinand bank notes collection with a strategy thatwas approved by the Board of Directors of theBank. In what concerns the art acquisitions wehave an internal committee and in some casesan external expert, depending on the type andvalue of the piece. We select mostly Portugueseart or foreign art related to Portugal. This crite-rion applies also to the coin and bank notes.

Do you prefer established artists or promising,upcoming talent?Established artists with a few exceptions

Are the works regularly re-appraised and reval-ued?No, they are not re-appraised

Do you work with independent curators?Yes, in some cases.

How do you evaluate potential significant addi-tions to your collection?If they fit our objectives to develop the collec-tion or to integrate in a specific area decora-tion.

Have guidelines been formed to maintain thequality of the collection?Yes we have internal guidelines


Can clients, employees and shareholders profitfrom the art collection?Yes, the pieces are in public areas, VIP meet-ing rooms or in the museum

Do you lend your works to other institutions? Isthe collection accessible to thepublic?Yes to certain instituions, normally for tempo-rary exhibitions

How do you contribute to the “dissemination” ofyour art collection to the public? Do you have aweb museum, a newsletter?Museum exhibition and a site in the Internetpage of the Bank. We also have some bookson specific collections.

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Do you have an underlying philosophy to servesociety with your cultural activities?In some cases yes

Are your cultural activities a result of a deliber-ate and defined corporate responsibility/ socialresponsibility agenda?No

With what activities do you contribute to thecultural life of your community?Organising or cooperating in exhibitions, pub-lishing books, articles and catalogues, creatingvirtual access to some collections

Do you sponsor any cultural activity outside ofthe company, organised by otherorganisations?Yes

If so, what kind of activities do you sponsor?Publishing, research, academic prizes andscholarships, orchestras, recuperation of his-torical buildings, museums, public social cam-paigns

Is there a clear and specific policy which youfollow?There is not a pre-defined policy, just somebasic principles and each case is studied andsupported or not according to its goals and thekind of instituions promoting the event.

Luis Nunes

Central Bank of Iceland

Why do financial institutions set up an artcollection?The Central Bank of Iceland does not regardthe works of arts that it owns as an art collec-tion. The works are acquired to decorate theBank’s premises and enhance the atmospherethere.

How banks set up an art collection?The Central Bank of Iceland has not appointedan acquisitions committee to select works of art.Acquisitions have been made by the Bank’sOperations Department. Generally, purchasesof art works are considered by more than oneperson. In recent years the Bank has focusedon acquiring works by artists whose works itdoes not already own.Only the insurance value of the works is ap-praised.

Accessibility of the art collectionThe works are mounted in employees offices,the staff canteen and meeting rooms.Works are also lent to public exhibitions on re-quest.

2) How financial institutions may contributeto improving culture in the communitiesthey work for?The Supervisory Board and the Board of Gov-ernors of the Central Bank of Iceland receivemany requests for grants every year, and agreeto support various artistic and cultural events.

Mbkv. Ingvar A. SigfússonRekstrarstjóri/Director

Seðlabanka Íslands / Central Bank of Iceland

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1) How to set up an art collection?Why do financial institutions set up and artcollection?

Why did your company set up an art collection?The Bank has two interconnected premises fromwhich it undertakes its daily operations andfunctions. These have been refurbished on anumber of occasions and these projects in-cluded the commissioning and purchase of vari-ous works of art from time to time. Therefore theBank’s main objective was not to create an artcollection but rather the embellishment of thepremises. These works of art are distributedthroughout both premises and are mostly situ-ated in the Bank’s Board Room and ConferenceRooms, corridors and main entrances. Thelargest concentration of these works is foundin the Bank’s Boardroom. Today the Bank hasa modest art collection.The Bank also has a Currency Museum of Mal-tese banknotes and coins, numismatic coinsand related items. The Bank is currently in theprocess of extending further this museum inorder to include old historical Maltese coins. TheCurrency Museum is situated in a public areaat its main premises.

What is the philosophy underlying the collec-tion?As already stated, the initial philosophy of theBank was to embellish its premises rather thanthe setting up of an art collection. While thishas remained the predominant philosophy, asmall change has taken place during these lastfew years with the Bank starting to view its worksof art as a collection through the introductionof a specific inventory for its entire works of artwhich includes detailed information on the art-

ists.

What are the goals and objectives pursued withthe collection?The main objective for the Bank’s art collectionis primarily to embellish the Bank to standardexpectations of one of Malta’s main institutions.However as explained this philosophy has slowlystarted to change in recent years and currentlymore attention is being given by the Bank to itsart collection and eventually its development.

How banks set up an art collection?How did you implement this project?The Bank’s art collection was mainly set-up intwo main phases that coincided with the open-ing of its two premises, the first one in 1968 andthe other one in 1992. However other works ofarts were procured in between these dates andsubsequently to 1992.

What are the criteria followed regarding theselection of pieces of art?The Bank has no specific criteria for the selec-tion of pieces of art. The Bank’s involvement inthis area is mainly driven by the Bank’s commit-ment to promote culture in Malta and hence apreference to the commissioning of works of artto local artists identified as having talent or po-tential in this area. However, occasionally for-eign artists having close connections to Maltahave also been commissioned, an example be-ing Mr Victor Pasmore, a renowned internationalartist who was commissioned for various worksfor the new premises, since he was living inMalta at the time. Recently the Bank has alsopurchased a precious oil painting of a well es-tablished local artist and which was passed tothe National Gallery of Art for public viewing inline with its commitment towards the enhance-ment of culture in the community.

Do you prefer established artists or promising,upcoming talent?The Bank has no particular preference and

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throughout the years has opted for a mix of bothestablished local artists as well as upcoming andpromising ones. This policy is clearly evidencedby the substantial range in styles of the worksof art found in the Bank.

Are the works regularly re-appraised and reval-ued?The Bank’s works of art are occasionally ap-praised or revalued for insurance purposesonly.

Do you work with independent curators?The Bank’s art collection does not warrant theduties of a full time curator and consequentlywhen the need for services arises, these areundertaken by independent curators on an adhoc basis.

How do you evaluate potential significant addi-tions to your collection?The Bank does not have an internal infrastruc-ture or guidelines towards such evaluations andtherefore in such instances professional helpmust be obtained from experts in the field toensure a feasible and sound procurement de-cision.

Have guidelines been formed to maintain thequality of the collection?The Bank has no guidelines in place to main-tain the quality of its art collection, except theirprotection from a security aspect.

Accessibility of the art collectionCan clients, employees and shareholders profitfrom the art collectionSince the works of art are spread around theBank and mostly in non security areas, thesecan be enjoyed by the employees and share-holders and to a lesser extent by the Bank’sclients.

Do you lend your works to other institutions? Isthis collection accessible to the public?

The Bank does lend its works of art to otherinstitutions from time to time upon specific re-quests, depending on the status of the institu-tion making the request and after ensuring thesatisfactory protection of the asset. Unfortu-nately, due to security reasons the Bank’s worksof art are not readily accessible to the public,other than those lying in the public areas. How-ever the Bank would consider making specialarrangements for such access for specific re-quests made by the public.

How do you contribute to the ‘dissemination ofyour art collection to the public? Do you have aweb museum, a newsletter?The Bank has not yet set up a web museum andhas never issued a newsletter and therefore thedissemination of its works of art to the public israther limited. Notwithstanding, such ideas caneventually be given due consideration in line withthe Bank’s changing philosophy as already ex-plained.


Do you have an underlying philosophy to servesociety with your cultural activities?Although this philosophy is not referred to in itsmission statement, the Central Bank of Maltahas always sought to promote culture withinMaltese society. For example, apart from thecommissioning or purchase of works of art, theBank has on various occasions sponsored art-ists in other areas and has also sponsored therestoration of places with a historic value.

Are your cultural activities a result of a deliber-ate and defined corporate responsibility/socialresponsibility agenda?The involvement of the Central Bank of Maltain various cultural initiatives throughout theyears has to a large extent institutionalised thiscommitment, even though this has not beenspecifically defined.

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With what activities do you contribute to thecultural life of your community?Throughout the years the Bank has financedor sponsored in whole or in part, cultural publi-cations, vocal and instrumental concerts, the-atrical productions, art exhibitions, as well as therestoration of historical sites. The Bank alsohas its own numismatic exhibition and which wasalready referred to in the first part of this sur-vey.

Do you sponsor any cultural activity outside ofthe company, organised by otherorganisations?In fact this is currently the most common formof sponsorship undertaken by the Bank.

If so, what kind of activities do you sponsor? Isthere a clear and specific policy which you fol-low?This has already been detailed above i.e. cul-tural publications, vocal and instrumental con-certs, theatrical productions, art exhibitions andthe restoration of historical sites. In general, theBank sponsors non-profit making or philan-thropic activities. The Bank also seeks to en-sure a fair and even distribution of sponsor-ships, with an emphasis on activities which aredeemed not to be viable without assistance.

Peter Paul TaboneManager

Administration Office

Art collectionDanske Bank Group is the result of a long se-ries of mergers and acquisitions – hence the artcollection has grown dynamically since the late19th century. Portraits of stately, bearded chair-men of the board and chief executives, paintedby renowned Danish artists, form the basis ofthe “old collection” (1871onwards). In the 1940’sand 50’s focus shifted to Danish classical mod-ernists of which the Bank has an interestingselection. The art of the 70’s - 90’s ischaracterised by modern primarily non-figura-tive lithographic works by Danish and Europeanartists. The collection also includes outstand-ing samples of Danish ceramics. In recent yearsart acquisitions have focused on young Danishartists.The main purpose of the collection is decora-tive. Offices, branches, meeting rooms and re-ception rooms are amply decorated by art –hence there are no “museum” premises as suchapart from two splendid classicist buildings (late18.c) with listed interiors that house the Bank’shead office in central Copenhagen.Danske Bank Group has a private curator incharge of the art collection, its keep, generalcondition, revaluation and gradual rejuvenation.The Group has not formulated an art policyproper. However, it is essential that the generalmodern “look” of the branch network in respectof furniture, electronic equipment etc. is re-flected in the art decorating the walls. Ideallythere should be a symbiosis between art andlocation. This philosophy means that “uninter-esting” art is gradually sold off and the proceedsspent on new art acquisitions.Danske Bank Group believes in the communi-cative power of art and its ability to make cus-tomers and staff feel comfortable and happy.

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Thus, the art collection is accessible to the pub-lic in the sense that visitors of the various loca-tions of the Group can enjoy the works of art.Head office collections are open only upon spe-cial application by groups (free guided tours).Knowledge of this very popular service is com-municated through word-of-mouth.Paintings from the collection are often exhibitedin Danish museums, sometimes also in Swedenand Norway. Some works have been acquiredby museums, others are more or less on per-manent loan to museums.

SponsorshipsIn the past two years the BG Bank branch ofDanske Bank Group has sponsored Danish lit-erature in various ways. The most significantcontribution is the “BG Bank literature prize”presented to one of three candidates everyautumn at the Book Fair in Copenhagen. Theprize is the second most prestigious literatureprize in Denmark (DKK 300.000). BG Bank alsohas a money prize for a promising young writeraccompanied by a statuette created by a tal-ented graduate student from the Royal Acad-emy of Art.The other brand of the Group: Danske Bank,has focused on sponsoring performing arts, thetheatre, plays and ballets at the Royal Theatrein Copenhagen and theatre performances tour-ing the country. A new initiative is the sponsor-ing of Knowledge in the form of scholarships forstudents wishing to study abroad, visits by chil-dren to scientific invention museums and col-laboration with the Copenhagen Institute forFutures Studies a.o. Danske Bank also spon-sors some 200 annual youth sports events allover Denmark involving more than 125,000 chil-dren and young people under the headingDanske Bank Cup.Danske Bank Group does not sponsor art di-rectly. However, it contributes a substantial an-nual sum to the Danske Bank Art Club – possi-bly the largest corporate art club in Europe witha membership of almost 4,000. The club ac-

quires well over 300 works of art annually to beallotted to its members. According to the articlesall works of art acquired must be contemporary.Sponsorship activities are managed by a sepa-rate entity, Stakeholder Relations, organisedunder Group Communications at DanskeBank’s head office.

Adam GrandjeanCurator

Danske Bank

Why do financial institutions set up an artcollection?

Why did your company set up an art collection?The main reason the Nederlandsche Bank setup an art collection is because it wanted to im-prove working conditions for the employees ofthe bank by smartening up their working space.Yet it also believes that art is a means of com-municating to the public. More than other insti-tutions, it has the means to be of considerablesignificance to the art community. The Banksupports young and upcoming artists, also byorganizing exhibitions. The artists and the artthey produce, on the other hand, act like a busi-ness card for the Bank – showing that it is aninstitution in touch with the culture in which itthrives.

What is the philosophy underlying the collec-tion?The philosophy underlying the collection of theNederlandsche Bank is to make working at the

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bank a cultural and educational experience, andto promote young, upcoming artists.

What are the goals and objectives pursued withthe collection?To create awareness of art within the workingcommunity of the bank.

How do banks set up an art collection?How did you implement this project?The collection of the Nederlandsche Bankstarted when several higher placed employeesof the bank started buying works of art for theiroffices and public area of the Bank in the be-ginning of the 20th century. In 1982 the art com-mittee was founded, making what used to bewall decoration a serious business.

What are the criteria followed regarding theselection of pieces of art?In general the collection consists of works of artthat are made by living artists and that offer aview of the future. Whatever their aesthetic vir-tues, the works need to be innovative and inkeeping with the trends of contemporary art.New art, seen at galleries or at art fairs, can besuggested by any member of the art committee(there are usually no more than 7 members).

Do you prefer established artists or promising,upcoming talent?The Nederlandsche Bank prefers promising,upcoming talent, but tends to stay faithful toartists whose work they bought in the past. Thatway the collection can give a good view of anartist’s artistic development.

Are works regularly re-appraised and revalued?Yes. They get evaluated every 4 years.

Do you work with independent curators?Up till the end of 2005 one of the curators ofthe Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam advised theArt Committee.

How do you evaluate potential significant addi-tions to your collections?Potential additions are discussed at the monthlymeeting of the Art committee. The work of artwill not be bought if the majority of the commit-tee cannot agree on the sale.

Have guidelines been formed to maintain thequality of the collection?No official guidelines have been formed, yet thecriteria discussed in the above serve as such.Works of art that have been found lacking, aresold at auctions.

Accessibility of the art collectionCan clients, employees and shareholders profitfrom the art collection?Yes, employees can borrow the art over a pe-riod of three years and hang or place the workin their offices. Any employee of theNederlandsche Bank has this right. There is nolimit on the amount of art works a person canhave in his office. The employee borrowing artsigns a contract that he or she will take care ofthe work, and make sure that it is placed or hungon a spot where it will not suffer damage.

Do you lend work to other institutions? Is thecollection accessible to the public?Yes and yes. Art objects from the collection areoften sent out on loan to museums. The publichas the possibility to visit the two exhibitionsorganised by the Nederlandsche Bank every sixweeks.

How do you contribute to the ‘dissemination’ ofyour art collection to the public?The Art Committee of the Nederlandsche Bankposts information about the various exhibitionsat the bank on a website called www.galeries.nl.To reach the employees of the bank the com-mittee makes use of the intranet database. Thisdatabase enables an employee to have a lookat the available art he or she can borrow, orbrowse through the entire collection of theNederlandsche Bank.

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1) How to set up an art collection?Why do financial institutions set up an artcollection?

The Bundesbank has been associated with artsince it was established in 1957. From the verybeginning the Bundesbank’s motivation in pur-chasing art works was to remove their aura ofremote, museum-like exclusivity by integratingthem into the normal, workday world. Art wasconsidered an important aspect of our culture.Art purchases focused on contemporary works,which means that, currently, the collectionmainly covers works dating from the second halfof the twentieth century to the present day. Theart collection is accessible to our employees.Stimulating and provocative art encourages usto accept the challenge it presents and promptsreflection and discussion.


The art collection was managed by individualswho made occasional acquisitions of art works.They had quite different priorities, the commondenominator being twentieth-century art fromGerman-speaking countries. The purchasesincluded a number of excellent works by theGerman expressionists and some by the neo-classicist Karl Hofer as well as works by up-and-coming young artists. From the 1980s to themid-1990s, an attempt was made (with the sup-port of an art advisory council) to acquire out-standing works of art in order to present strik-ing examples of current trends. At the moment,additions to the collection are concentrated onpromising new artists to bring the collection upto date. The purchases are mainly related to ourexhibition series “Perspektiven heutigerMalerei”.


The bank’s art collection is accessible to ouremployees and to guests. It is displayed in re-ception areas and in meeting rooms as well asin individual offices. Many staff members viewworks of art as an essential part of their work-place. From time to time we organise guidedtours allowing the public to view our collectionand exhibitions.We lend works to other public institutions if theyare organising exhibitions about artists featur-ing in our collection. Our employees can findinformation concerning our cultural activities onthe intranet and in the staff magazine.

Dr. Iris CramerDeutsche Bundesbank

Zentralbereich KommunikationWilhelm-Epstein-Straße 14

60431 Frankfurt am Main

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ING Art Management, Amsterdam Netherlands


Why did your company set up an art collection?Nearly 30 years ago, ING started collecting con-temporary figurative art made by artists living inthe Netherlands. The conscious decision tocollect figurative art as a matter of policy hasresulted in a museological collection that offersa comprehensive overview of Dutch figurative artsince 1920.The primary aim was to providedecoration for all ING offices. Later on, publi-cations about the collection were used for mar-keting and communication purposes and theexpert knowledge of the staff was used for busi-ness-relatives; for Private Banking customerswe provide special Art Management Services.ING and art have become inseparable. The INGCollection in the Netherlands now comprises wellover 20.000 works of art, which are displayedin the Dutch offices and at international INGoffices.

What is the philosophy underlying the collec-tion?The underlying philosophy of the collection isto create a creative atmosphere in the office inwhich the employees feel comfortable and in-spired. Collecting art expresses ING’s role asan art patron and reflects its societal and cul-tural responsibilities. Via collecting art INGstimulates and sponsors the Dutch contempo-rary art market.

What are the goals and objectives pursued withthe collection?The goal and objective pursued with the collec-tion is to give an overview of the Dutch 20th and

21st century figurative art.How banks set up an art collection?How did you implement this project?ING implements the collection on contentgrounds comprising four different figurativestreams; Fine Painting, Realism, Impressionismand Expressionism. These streams are highlycontemporary, yet they are part of the histori-cal tradition of Dutch painting and sculpture andoften evoke associations with the great mastersof the past.

What are the criteria followed regarding theselection of pieces of art?The followed criteria regarding the selection ofartworks are that the pieces have to fit into theING Art Management policy and the existingcollection. The policy is Dutch contemporaryfigurative art.

Do you prefer established artists or promising,upcoming talent?ING Art Management purchases both estab-lished and upcoming artists.

Are the works regularly re-appraised and reval-ued?The artworks are valued every three years, asrequired by the Dutch Insurance Companies.

Do you work with independent curators?The three curators and three conservation em-ployees of ING Art Management work exclu-sively for ING.

How do you evaluate potential significant addi-tions to your collection?First of all the art has to be in line with the policyof ING Art Management and the rest of the col-lection. Furthermore we take notice of variousother aspects, among others authenticity, origi-nality and innovative character.

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Accessibility of the art collectionCan clients, employees and shareholders profitfrom the art collection?ING Art Management offers all ING employeesthe ability to choose a work of art for their of-fice. Two to three times a year ING Art Manage-ment organises an exhibition of the collectionin a national or international museum. Clientsand employees can get most of the time, a re-duced fee on the admission price of ING Col-lection exhibitions in museums. ING Art Man-agement advises Private Banking customersand prospects on collecting art. In this contextthe collection is regarded as a form of intangibleinvestment. A collection is defined as a groupof objects having common properties. Art Man-agement Services as an activity has been de-veloped in response to market needs as well asrequirements of customers or prospects. INGArt Management is the only department withina financial institution in the Netherlands with up-to-date and commercial knowledge of art andis thus the only department that can make a di-rect connection between art management andbanking without the need to involve third par-ties.

Do you lend your works to other institutions? Isthe collection accessible to the public?ING Art Management lends artworks to otherinstitutions and national and international mu-seums. ING Art Management handles over 250requests per year. The ING Collection is acces-sible to the public in the public access of thebank offices and during the ING Collection ex-hibitions, which are organised around three tofour times a year in different venues.

How do you contribute to the “dissemination” ofyour art collection to the public? Do you have aweb museum, a newsletter?ING Art Management contributes to the dissemi-nation of the art collection to the public by hav-ing a website: www.ingcollection.nl . (Take no-tice of the site for our publications and

webmuseum).


Do you have an underlying philosophy to servesociety with your cultural activities?The underlying philosophy to serve society withour cultural activities is to stimulate the Dutchcontemporary art market.

Are your cultural activities a result of a deliber-ate and defined corporate responsibility/ socialresponsibility agenda?Our cultural activities are a result of a deliber-ate and defined corporate responsibility/ socialresponsibility agenda.

With what activities do you contribute to thecultural life of your community?ING contributes to the cultural life of the com-munity and stimulates art in the company bydecorating the offices. By doing this ING hopesto create a positive and creative atmosphere inthe office and hopes as well to stimulate theemployees on culture.

Do you sponsor any cultural activity outside ofthe company, organised by otherorganisations?We do sponsor cultural activities outside of thecompany, organised by other institutions. Cul-tural Sponsoring has got a high priority at ING.ING helps cultural institutions to promote art andtries to introduce high quality art for a wideraudience to enjoy.

If so, what kind of activities do you sponsor?ING is main sponsor of the RoyalConcertgebouw Orchestra, The RijksmuseumAmsterdam and Realisme 06 (the Figurative ArtFair in the Passengers Terminal Amsterdam).ING sponsors TEFAF (The European Fine ArtFair), The ‘Prinsengracht’ Concert and specificexhibitions, for example, Rubens- Brueghel at

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the Mauritshuis, The Hague.


Why did your company set up an art collection?The UBS Art Collection is a logical continuationof the outstanding 30 year old heritage of thefirms which have become part of UBS - it in-cludes works originally acquired byPaineWebber, SG Warburg, Union Bank ofSwitzerland and Swiss Bank Corporation.

What is the philosophy underlying the collec-tion?- The Collection is a reflection of our tradition

and spirit as a company. Second, art itself is areflection of culture and “Zeitgeist1 ”, and bycollecting it, we contribute to an investment inculture.

- Our predecessor firms all shared a commonbelief: that creative thinking and intelligentrisk-taking foster positive and enriching out-comes for all concerned.

- In this regard, the arts serve as a constantreminder of the value of creativity, innovation,inspired action and energy – values that we atUBS hope shape the actions of each of ouremployees and are brought to the relation-ships we share with each of our clients.

What are the goals and objectives pursued withthe collection?- To us, implicit in ownership of these outstand-

ing works of art is a responsibility to sharethem with our clients, our employees, ourshareholders, the communities in which wework and everybody else who is interested andpassionate about art.

- To maintain one of the most important collec-

tions of contemporary art.How banks set up an art collection?

How did you implement this project?A team of independent art experts reviewed andassessed art works owned by the Companyworldwide and identified those of museum qual-ity which were to become part of The UBS ArtCollection.

What are the criteria followed regarding theselection of pieces of art?The UBS Art Collection focuses on works ofmuseum quality that represent the definingtrends in European and American contempo-rary art from the second half of the twentiethcentury – paintings, photographs, drawings andsculptures.

Do you prefer established artists or promising,upcoming talent?The objective is to develop an internationalportfolio containing some 70-80% establishedartists and some 20-30% less well-known oremerging talent. We also mean to track contem-porary trends and to make of the collection areflection of our social development. Currentholdings will be complemented with both estab-lished artists and new, contemporary trends.

Are the works regularly re-appraised and reval-ued?The Collection is constantly being reappraisedand revalued by independent art experts.

Do you work with independent curators?The Collection’s management benefits from theinput of a professional curator, who determinesthe modes and guidelines of its developmentand composition. In addition, independent cu-rators are also involved in the putting togetherof exhibitions of The UBS Art Collection.

How do you evaluate potential significant addi-

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tions to your collection?A professional curator evaluates possible ac-quisitions and determines whether or not theyfit the guiding principles governing the compo-sition of the Collection. If so he puts them be-fore the Advisory Board for consideration.

Have guidelines been formed to maintain thequality of the collection?Clear guiding principles governing the compo-sition of the Collection exist and are strictly ad-hered to.


Can clients, employees and shareholders profitfrom the art collection?Do you lend your works to other institutions? Isthe collection accessible to the public?The Collection is already available to the pub-lic through exhibitions in museums as theMoMA, the Fondation Beyeler and Tate Mod-ern. We are constantly exploring and develop-ing further ways to make the collection acces-sible to a wider audience.

How do you contribute to the “dissemination” ofyour art collection to the public?Do you have a web museum, a newsletter?We launched a web museum of the Collectionin Dec. 2004 – www.ubs.com/artcollection


Do you have an underlying philosophy to servesociety with your cultural activities?We strongly believe it is our duty to activelysupport and encourage cultural activities in theplaces where we do business.

Are your cultural activities a result of a deliber-ate and defined corporate responsibility / so-cial responsibility agenda? With what activities

do you contribute to the cultural life of your com-munity? Do you sponsor any cultural activityoutside of the company, organised by otherorganisations?UBS’s global sponsorship concept focuses onthe following themes: Alinghi, golf and orches-tral music. We might take an interest in addi-tional projects if they can be tied in with thesethemes somehow. Our Swiss sponsorship ac-tivities are centred on established sporting andcultural commitments, the aim here being toensure continuity and maximum impact.

Petra ArendsThe UBS Art Collection


Why did your company set up an art collection?We want to exploit our art collection as a com-munication tool, both for internal purposes (em-ployees involvement in creativity) and externalbranding activities.

What is the philosophy underlying the collec-tion?To support emerging Italian creativity.

What are the goals and objectives pursued withthe collection?Our art collection is part of a larger project de-voted to the patronage of contemporary art. Thisproject includes sponsorship of the two mostimportant Italian contemporary art museums(Castello di Rivoli and MART), student grants,publishing (a reference book in 5 volumes aboutthe XX century art), partnership with art galler-ies and many other activities.Our main objectives are:

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-To communicate the Group’s thrust towardsinnovation to the outside world: the ability tobreak with the past and look towards the fu-ture.

-To develop an open mentality inside the Group,capable of valorising differences.

-To support a generation of emerging Italianartists.

-To educate the younger public to read the signsof the present, thereby playing a decisive rolein civil society.


How did you implement this project?We implemented this project with dedicatedteams (both on the scientific and operationsside) and funding

What are the criteria followed regarding theselection of pieces of art?We collect Italian artists operating since the late70s’

Do you prefer established artists or promising,upcoming talent?We prefer emerging artists.

Are the works regularly re-appraised and reval-ued?Yes

Do you work with independent curators?We set up an independent scientific committeethat give the Group’s guidelines and hints forthe corporate collection

How do you evaluate potential significant addi-tions to your collection?Every new addition is evaluated by the scien-tific committee

Have guidelines been formed to maintain thequality of the collection?Yes, see above

Accessibility of the art collectionCan clients, employees and shareholders profitfrom the art collection?Yes, we decided to disseminate the artworks in

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increase the fruition of the collection

Do you lend your works to other institutions?Yes, we lend to other institutions.

Is the collection accessible to the public?Yes, the collection is partially accessible to thepublic

How do you contribute to the “dissemination” ofyour art collection to the public?See above

Do you have a web museum, a newsletter?Yes, we have a web museum on our corporatewebsite.

2) How financial institutions may contributeto improve culture in the communities theywork for ?

Do you have an underlying philosophy to servesociety with your cultural activities?Yes, we want to serve the local communities inwhich we have our banking activities

Are your cultural activities a result of a deliber-ate and defined corporate responsibility/ socialresponsibility agenda?Yes, we have corporate responsibility rules,expressed in our Integrity Charter

With what activities do you contribute to thecultural life of your community?We have two main fields of activity: music andcontemporary art

Do you sponsor any cultural activity outside ofthe company, organised by otherorganisations?Yes, we sustain, for example, all the activitiesof the Castello di Rivoli and Mart

If so, what kind of activities do you sponsor? Isthere a clear and specific policy which you fol-low?We don’t select single activities, we prefer toselect the partner in terms of its cultural policyand overall quality and reputation

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ers. His successor, M.W. Holtrop, who took overat the helm under changed circumstances in1946, also emphasised DNB’s particular re-sponsibility for the gold. Faced with a vastshortage of foreign currency, he felt it was hisduty as DNB president to actively join in attemptsto recover the gold, even though the govern-ment was politically responsible. That is exactlywhy DNB made such strenuous efforts in theyears 1933-2000. Firstly to bring the gold tosafety when it realised that Hitler was headingtowards war, and then, when the war was over,to recover the stolen gold bars for the Nether-lands.

All that glisters is not gold

To fund its megalomaniac ambitions the Third Reich needed gold and hardcurrency. In early 1939 Reichsbank president Hjalmar Schacht told Hitler thatGermany was on the brink of bankruptcy. German rearmament had absorbedmore than 50% of all state spending over the previous six years. Despite a rigidsystem of foreign exchange controls, bilateral trade and clearing agreements,German gold and foreign exchange reserves were nearing depletion. A disas-ter for a country that, notwithstanding the Nazi’s attempts to create an autarky, remained depen-dent on the import of strategic commodities. Schacht’s warning cost him his job. In the Netherlands,businessman Ernst Heldring, a member of the Supervisory Board of De Nederlandsche Bank NV(DNB) since 1929, kept a close eye on events in Germany. He was extremely concerned about thegold reserve held by DNB, noting in his diary that the German government would ‘dearly love topinch’ that gold.

Partij in de marge. Oorlog, goud en deNederlandsche Bank 1933-2000 (Player on thefringes. War, gold and the Nederlandsche Bank1933-2000) explores the vicissitudes of themonetary gold of the Netherlands in the period1933-2000, the gold held by the central bankof the Netherlands as reserve currency. Thestory begins in 1933 when Hitler came to powerin Germany and ends in 2000 when the Neth-erlands decided to rest its claim to the gold sto-len during the war. By far the greatest share ofthe gold possessed by the Netherlands in May1940 did not fall into German hands. During theoccupation, Germany managed to get hold of145,649 kg of Dutch gold, of which 71,820 kgwas eventually recovered. The main questionadressed by this study is why less than half wasreturned to DNB’s vaults.The reconstruction of the gold’s odyssey isundertaken from the perspective of DNB, whichacted as owner and, following the nationalisationin 1948, as guardian of the gold. DNB and theDutch state had, and have, a special relation-ship. The management of the gold reserve fol-lows from DNB’s shared responsibility with thegovernment for effecting a sound financial sys-tem. L.J.A. Trip, DNB’s president from 1931 to1946, took a strict view of his role as manager,finding that the gold belonged to the sharehold- The headquarters of the Nederlandsche Bank, DNB,

Turfmarkt, 1930's-1940's

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DNB, established in 1814 as a trade bank andbank of issue, was a private institution with pub-lic tasks. Its public nature was especially evidentin monetary affairs, and that made it difficult toclarify ownership of the gold. While the goldformed security for banknote circulation, itsmanagement also served to stabilise the ex-change rate of the guilder. The central bankgold thus secured the nation’s financial health.In a strictly legal sense, however, the gold wasowned by DNB and, in the final instance, by theshareholders collectively. This situation did notchange in 1936 when the Netherlands becamethe last country to abandon the gold standard.What did change was that the autonomy ofmonetary policy came to an end, with the gov-ernment demanding to have the last say. Mean-while, dark clouds were gathering above Europeand DNB was concerned about developmentsin nazi-Germany. In the months following theAustrian Anschluss, DNB became convincedthat it was not wise to keep the entire gold re-serve in the country. But the Netherlands pur-sued a policy of strict neutrality, so DNB had tobe circumspect.Early in the autumn of 1938, the first gold trans-port left the Netherlands with the government’sacquiescent support. On the day of capitulation,May 14th 1940, almost 80% of the monetary goldwas abroad, most of it in the United States andthe United Kingdom.

DNB’s foreign gold was to be the main sourceof income to the Dutch government which ar-rived in London without means. However, incontrast to, for example, the National Bank ofBelgium, DNB had made no arrangements ofgoverning control of the gold in the event of abreakdown in communications between itselfand the government. It required a long and com-plicated legal battle, especially with the UnitedStates, before the Dutch government-in-exilewas able to put their hands on DNB’s gold. Thegold was used in London for expenditures strictlyin the Dutch national interest. The Gerbrandycabinet refused an urgent request from the Brit-ish government for financial support during theBattle of Britain in the autumn of 1940. Thecabinet discussions at that time show littleawareness that the fate of the Netherlands layin Allied hands. The refusal to come to Britain’said undermined the Dutch effort of positioningthe Netherlands as a medium-sized power andweakened attempts to influence Allied decision-making.Meanwhile, the Germans were cunningly gain-ing control of the remaining monetary gold in theNetherlands. Since DNB was a private institu-tion, the law of war did not permit the occupy-ing force to confiscate the gold. It was thereforerequisitioned under the pretence of a contribu-tion to the costs of occupation. The financingof these costs, and the Nazis’ attempts to sub-sume the Dutch economy into the German one(Verflechtung), resulted in serious monetarychaos. During the war, Trip protested againstthe levy imposed by the Germans and refusedto acknowledge them as valid under interna-tional law. His reservations paved the way forlabelling the exorbitant German demands as‘theft’; they enabled the Netherlands to fall inline with other victims under consideration bythe Allies, who were then formulating the post-war restitution policy on stolen gold. Despite itsbest efforts, the Netherlands were unable toexert any influence on the shaping of this policy.At the end of 1945, the Paris Reparation Con-The loading of goldbars on the inner court of DNB in

order to bring them to safety abroad

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ference laid down the basic principles for therestitution of looted gold, and its distributionacross the victim countries. The monetary golddiscovered in Germany, and the stolen goldrecovered from third countries, was depositedin a pool, managed by the Tripartite Commis-sion for the Restitution of Monetary Gold (TCG).It was staffed by the United States, Britain andFrance who acted as Trustees.The Dutch claim of 145,649 kg monetary goldwas prepared by DNB and submitted by theMinistry of Finance. In 1958 the Netherlandsbecame involved in a conflict with the TCG overthe 35,475 kg gold requisitioned from residentsunder the Currency Bye-Law (June) 1940. TheCommission’s well-founded argument was thatDNB had taken this gold as an agent of theGerman occupying force, and not in the courseof its normal statutory tasks. This particular partof the claim was not considered monetary gold.The Commission could make this contentionbecause DNB had not declared that the Cur-rency Bye-Law 1940 had been drawn up by theDutch government and was ready for publica-tion in the Staatsblad (Bulletin of Acts, Ordersand Decrees) in May 1940. Nor, and perhapsintentionally, had it mentioned the precedingEmergency Currency Measure issued by the DeGeer cabinet on 10 May 1940. In drawing up theclaim neither DNB, nor the Ministry of Financeor Ministry of Foreign Affairs, appear to havelooked deeply into the exceptional circum-stances of the German occupation and conse-quences thereof under civil law. The fact is thatReich Commissioner Seyss-Inquart was as-signed the highest governing authority on 29May 1940 and could use the Dutch administra-tive system to carry out his instructions. Thisdetermined the balance of power in the Neth-erlands. The occupying force held all thestrings, as reflected for instance in the appoint-ment of a German supervisor at DNB on 30 May1940.The Ministry of Finance did not want to resignitself to the TCG’s decision, but had to admit

defeat in 1965. DNB tacitly accepted the deci-sion, but did not want to concede that it actedas a financial instrument for the Germans dur-ing the war. It did not face up to that fact untilthe late 1980s.Outside the official channel, the TGC, DNB andthe government themselves tried to enter intobilateral negotiations with countries where sto-len Dutch gold had ended up. All these attemptsended in failure. The explanation lay in the ParisReparation Treaty, namely in the article listingthe United States, Britain and France as thecountries responsible for arrangements withneutral states for the liquidation of stolen as-sets found there. Although the gold section ofthe Treaty did not name the three countries asbeing pre-eminently authorised to negotiate onmonetary gold on behalf of third parties, it wascredible, also in view of the prevailing politicalsituation, that they should be the first to becalled upon to do so. The Netherlands did notfully realise that when it signed the Treaty; it wassubsequently unwilling to accept this fait ac-

The restitution of (part) of the Dutch looted gold in1947 (distribution from Frankfurt, a former branch of-fice of the Reichsbank

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compli and even disputed it. In its attempts tolaunch bilateral negotiations with Switzerland,Sweden, Spain, Portugal and Italy, the Nether-lands repeatedly came up against the agree-ments which the Three had made, or were aboutto make, with these states. In all cases, theDutch interest was made subordinate to thehigher political objectives envisaged by theUnited States, the most powerful of the Three.The Dutch gold claim had to make way for fur-ther reaching military and politically strategicconsiderations, to which the Netherlands, as amember of the Atlantic alliance were also com-mitted.All of this emerged most distressingly in thenegotiations with Switzerland, where the lion’sshare of the looted Dutch gold had ended up.The Washington Accord, concluded betweenthe Three and Switzerland in May 1946, cameabout unbeknown to the Netherlands. This busi-ness left a bitter taste: the Three treated Dutchinterests carelessly and the Swiss deliberatelyfailed to mention that they held far more stolengold than they agreed to return to the gold pool.For their part, the Three not only knew that largequantities of gold had been stolen from theNetherlands, and that Germany had found itsideal principal banker in Switzerland, but - wellbefore the start of the negotiations - had hardevidence that the Reichsbank had not only soldBelgian but also Dutch stolen gold to Switzer-land. Owing to poor coordination and conflictsof interest between the American State Depart-ment and the Treasury, this information was notused against Switzerland. The French, aimingfor a quick result, did not want to jeopardise anacceptable outcome by confronting the recal-citrant Swiss with their knowledge of Dutch sto-len gold. But the Netherlands itself failed too.The press devoted much attention to the Allied/Swiss negotiations at the time. Despite all thepress publicity, the Netherlands embassy inWashington, which, since the autumn of 1945,had a memorandum on the gold theft drawn upby DNB and which had handed this paper to the

State Department in December 1945, appar-ently saw no reason to alert the Dutch govern-ment or to take any initiatives of its own. Headedby the Ministry of Finance, the Netherlandsplayed for high stakes in the Swiss question andlost. On paper, the Netherlands were right, andit wanted to see that proved. That was an un-realistic goal, since it was obvious from the out-set that the Three would never break open theSwiss Accord.In the post-war political constellation only onepath remained to the Netherlands to retrieve thegold stolen in the war, and that was through theTCG. In all, 71,820 kg was recovered, repre-senting 49.3% of the total amount claimed, and65.2% of the acknowledged claim. The Nether-lands did not formally accept the TCG decisionuntil 2000. The Commission had been dissolvedtwo years earlier, on which occasion the Neth-erlands received the last small remainder ofgold.More than fifty years after the end of the Sec-ond World War, just over half of the gold stolenby the Germans had been returned to the vaultsof DNB. The missing share is the silent witnessto a battle fought with vigour and frustration.The frustration stemmed in part from thegovernment’s lack of insight into the politicalreality. The Netherlands were on the sidelines.It received a proportionate share of the pool,giving DNB and the government good reasonto be pleased. In 1945 the material damagecaused by the German occupation was (ratherliberally) estimated at almost NLG 27 billion,including NLG 3.6 billion through confiscationand robbery. Only 4% of that amount flowedback to the Netherlands in some form of dam-age compensation. Seen in that light, efforts torecover the stolen monetary gold were glaringlysuccessful.

Corry van Renselaar

C. van Renselaar, Partij in de marge. Oorlog,goud en de Nederlandsche Bank 1933-2000.published by Uitgeverij Boom, Amsterdam

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The Borromei family were Tuscans by origin(from the town of S. Miniato) but after 1370 theyhad fled the town and had settled in other partsof Italy. In particular, in the period we are deal-ing with (the 1430s), there were three main

branches of the family: one in Milan, one inVenice and one in Florence. In all three placesthere had been family banking companies sincethe late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries.The ‘Venetian branch’ was active in northern

The Borromei Bank Research Project

The Borromeo-Arese family archive at Isola Bella on Lake Maggiore in north-west Italy containsthe ledgers of Filippo Borromei & Partners of Bruges for the year 1438 and of Filippo Borromei &Partners of London for the years 1436 to 1439. Both are kept in double-entry, using the standardmoney of account, the lira or pound (£) with sub-units of 20 shillings (s.) of 12 pence (d.) each.They are the earliest surviving ledgers for an Italian bank operating in north-western Europe in thefifteenth century. As such, they contain a mass of information about banking and trade throughBruges, the international financial capital of the north, and through London, where the Borromeisold precious silks, madder and fustian and bought English cloth, wool and tin for export. They hadas their clients other Italian merchant-bankers in Bruges and London, correspondents in Venice,Florence, Milan, Genoa, at the papal court, in Montpellier, Avignon, Geneva, Basel and Cologne,as well as ‘local’ merchants and other individuals from Bruges, Antwerp, Middleburg, Bergen-op-Zoom and London.

Figure 1. Account of Ubertino de’Bardi & Partners, Bruges ledger, f. 52 dare

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Europe from the 1420s onwards, with one com-pany in Bruges and one in London, both in thename of Galeazzo Borromei and Antonio diFrancesco. Both companies survived until1437, but from 1st January 1438 Alessandro diAntonio Borromei took the place of Galeazzo(who had died in 1436) and both branches werenamed after him. There are, alas, no survivingrecords for any of these companies.In the 1430s the’Milanese branch’ of the family,who had been using their relatives’ firms for theirbusiness in northern Europe, decided it was timeto make greater investments there. So, in 1434,Count Vitaliano Borromei decided to set up hisown company in Flanders, in the name of hiseldest son Filippo, with an initial capital of£3,000 Flemish. According to the contract, thecompany was to begin trading on the 1 Janu-ary 1435 and was to last for five years. Thefollowing year, once the Bruges bank was well-established, a branch was opened in London,

again in the name of Filippo Borromei. It is im-portant to understand the relationship betweenthese two banks. The capital for the Londoncompany came directly from the coffers of themain bank at Bruges or, to put it more simply,the two firms worked together as one unit. Thishas to be kept clearly in mind when analysingthe strategies and the profitability of the two: themanagement was ready to allow losses in oneof the two branches in order to achieve profit-ability in the other. For this reason, a databasewith transactions from both branches, with oneyear’s overlap in 1438, will provide a uniquesource for the study of the operations of an Ital-ian bank in the third decade of the fifteenthcentury.The ledgers are large, bound volumes, thepages being almost exactly the size of a mod-ern A3 sheet. Each contains over 400 double-entry folios, most of them closely written. Over900 clients kept accounts in either Bruges or

Figure 2. Data Entry Form

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London or in both cities. In addition, at least1,000 other individuals, from porters working onthe quayside to important merchants, were in-volved in one way or another in transactionsthrough the bank. Transcribing the ledgers forpublication in the traditional way would not havebeen particularly useful. Nor would the result-ing publications have been of much use to theresearcher. By their nature, double-entry ac-counts are complex, especially when they werekept manually. If space ran out on the folio, thenthe account would be continued on another,some times much later in the volume. Balanceswould be carried over or brought forward, fromone account to another or from one ledger toanother, so apparently inflating the value of theaccounts. The software has a feature whichprevents this happening. The main clients of thebank could and did have separate accounts fordifferent purposes, for cloth sales, cloth pur-chases, expenses and exchange transactions,

making it difficult to determine the total value ofhis, or occasionally her, business with the bank.In 1913, Girolamo Biscaro published a long ar-ticle on the activities of Filippo Borromei & Part-ners of London, using information from the1436-39 ledger. It was a milestone in its day inthe analysis of banking ledgers but the authortook from the sources only the elements thatinterested him. Consequently, much of the in-formation from these rich and detailed manu-scripts remains untouched and largely unknownto modern researchers.1 Faced withthese and many other problems, it was decidedfrom the outset to take a radically different ap-proach and commission computer software toconstruct electronic database versions of theledgers.The initial specification was for software thatcould:(i) identify individual accounts on a yearlybasis, for both banks.

Figure 3. Completed Data Entry Form

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(ii) collate the information from different ac-counts, that is, for exchange or commercialdealings, to construct a ‘total’ analysis of eachclient’s business with the banks.(iii) identify and quantify the commercial andfinancial relationship between the Bruges andLondon banks.(iv) calculate the annual turnover of bothbanks, and draw up annual balance sheets,showing profits and losses.(v) determine the volume and value of ex-change transactions, on a yearly basis, and themain axes both of trade and exchange, not sim-ply to Italy but also to other areas of the conti-nent.(vi) track the movement of exchange rates.(vii) determine the pattern of sales and pur-chases of imports and exports, and in the lightof points iii-vi above examine the balance oftrade and payments between northern andsouthern Europe.(viii) calculate the level of transaction costs(freight charges, insurance, customs duties,etc.).

(ix) establish the use made of the both banksby ‘local’ merchants, and particularly their abil-ity to settle accounts with each other by booktransfers, since this has implications for thedebate on credit and the money supply.

The decision was also made to approach a com-mercial accounting software company and toask them if the could write such software for adouble-entry ledger kept in £ s. d. After theyhad recovered from their initial astonishment,they estimated that they could produce an ap-propriate software package, with would alsocontain simple search tools, but it would cost£GB25,000. Copyright permission was obtainedfrom the Borromeo-Arese family for the use ofthe ledgers for research and publication and agrant application was made to the Economicand Social Research Council of Great Britain fora three-year research project on the Borromeiledgers. It included a specific sum for softwaredevelopment. The application was successful(ESRC Award R000239125) and work began at

Figure 4. Account Statement

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Queen Mary, University of London in 2001. MrNigel Smith of Roundhouse Software Ltd, Win-chester, Hampshire, England was and is respon-sible for writing the software. It is now in its four-teenth version since the initial development andan additional accounting enquiry package hasalso been developed, at the cost of a further£GB15,000, to allow much more detailed analy-sis of the accounts than was first planned. Thedatabase package is Queen Mary-RoundhouseHistoric Accounts and the enquiry packageQueen Mary-Roundhouse Historic Enquiry. It ishoped to make both available for purchase andit needs to be emphasised that they are not sim-ply for use with medieval records. They can beused to create electronic databases from led-gers of ANY date, up to the 21st century, pro-vided they are kept in double-entry and in astandard money of account. At present theycan only handle £ s. d., but it would be relatively

simple to modify them for decimal-based curren-cies.How do they work? Let us take an example fromthe Bruges ledger for 1438. This is raw data,as it were, part of the account of Ubertino de’Bardi & Partners of Bruges, a major Florentinecompany also present in London:It is a typical mixed account, containing a vari-ety of different types of transaction from bills ofexchange to payments to another account-holder by book transfer (no cash involved) orcash payments through the Borromei’s cashaccounts. Each entry on the folio is entered ona standard form like this:The name of the account holder is accessedfrom a central list with agreed spellings for eachname: this avoids the problems deriving fromthe fact that the ledger provides many differentspellings for each name, especially the non-Ital-ians. The folio number refers to the original

Figure 5. Data entry for Exchange rates

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number of the folio on which the account wasentered, the suffix .1 shows it is the first accounton that folio. Then the date of the transactionis entered, the value being automatically re-corded in the money of account of the ledger(in this particular case the £Flemish, in the caseof the London ledger the £sterling) and under‘Notes’ a synthesis, in English, of the contentof the transaction, according to a set of estab-lished formulae. No attempt has been made toprovide an exact translation of each entry: thatwould be almost impossible. Instead, the aimhas been to make the translations as intelligibleas possible to the reader.The first entry on the Bardi account (Figure 1)is for a bill of exchange. The name of the ac-count, the folio reference and the bank foliotype, in this case D for dare are set automati-cally, after the first entry. The operator thenenters the item date, the value in £Flemish andunder notes the details of the transaction. In this

case the bill is for 550 Venetian ducats at anagreed exchange rate of 51 groschen or pen-nies per ducat. That amount was delivered inVenice by Jacopo da Osnago on behalf ofNiccolò Ranghiadori to the takers, GiovanniPanciatichi and Giovanni Portinari & Partners.They then sent a bill to the Bardi in Bruges whopaid Filippo Borromei & Partners of Bruges thesum of £Flemish116 17s. 6d. after two monthsusance. This information is entered on the dataentry form in a standardised way. The doubleentry folio number has to be recorded preciselyto cross match it (which is done automaticallywhen all the data is entered) and to ensure thatthe sum involved is not counted twice when theaccount is analysed. Finally, the type of trans-action is entered, again from a central list. Thisprocess is repeated for all the entries on theBardi account, dare and avere, each type oftransaction being given a pre-determined codeaccording to its nature. What the software then

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Figure 6. Data entry for settlement date of and parties to a bill of exchange

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produces is a statement of this account:This statement runs to 4 pages and can beprinted off, if so required.There are, however, some further stages in thedata entry process. All that has been createdso far is a database of record. It can besearched in a variety of ways, by names of in-dividuals, products and types of transaction, butthe results are only listed, not analysed. Thenext set of figures shows the various stages inthe entry of the data from a bill of exchange onthe analytical section of the database.First, the exchange rate is entered on a newdrop-down form and then settlement date, onwhich the bill fell due, and the parties to the bill:Figure 6. Data entry for settlement date of andparties to a bill of exchangeAs a location for each person involved in thesetransactions has been entered on the centrallist of participants, it is possible to track the di-rection of the bill. In this case the Taker is inVenice and the Payor is in Bruges, so the flowis from Venice to Bruges. There are differentdrop-down forms for each transaction code,1JOU for simple book transfers, where nothingmore than the account to which the sum ofmoney is being transferred is given, 2JOU for atransfer involving a currency exchange, 1TRAfor the sale or purchase of goods where the cur-rency involved is the £Flemish, 2TRA whereanother currency is involved, and so on. Again,the currencies used, the types of commoditiesbought and sold, weights and measures, ex-pense items such as carriage, pilotage andwarehousing are all kept on central lists whichcan be added to or altered as necessary. Theselists appear when the operator is entering thedetails on the analysis forms.The second piece of software is the HistoricAccount Enquiry, which will be included on theCD-ROM, once the database is issued, andwhich will be the instrument used by the scholarfor his/her researches on the database contain-ing the about 25,000 entries from both books.This enquiry tool has been developed having

in mind the needs and capabilities not only ofan ‘accounting literate’, but also of any histo-rian without a background allowing him/her touse such valuable source. Moreover, the instru-ment provides the maximum of flexibility, as itcan be adapted to many of the user’s needs. Italso allows the scholar to save a certain amountof personalized settings.The simplest of the researches is the search forsingle word: and this can apply to the accountsheadings but also to the whole content of thedatabase. The result is a list of transactionscontaining that word. But of course the mostinteresting features of the enquiry tool lie else-where. Here are some examples.Figure 7 is a graph taken from theabovementioned f. 52.1 and shows the move-ment of Ubertino’s account with Filippo Borromei& Partners of Bruges between April and August1438, that is when they owed him money andhe was in credit or he owed them money andwas effectively overdrawn or borrowing fromthem. Figure 8 shows the total movement in allUbertino’s accounts for that year, or his debit

Figure 7. Account movement, Ubertino de’ Bardi &Partners, Bruges, April-August 1438

Figure 8. Account movements, Ubertino de’ Bardi &Partners of Bruges for the year 1438

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Figure 9. Account movements, all the accounts for theyear 1438

and credit balances at any point.The Company starts the year in credit, broughtover from the previous ledger, runs into debitin March and April, back into credit from Mayonwards and then carries over a credit balanceto the next ledger. There is an obvious patternto this and in this case it involves business doneat one of the great Netherlandish fairs atBergen-op-Zoom in Zeeland. This is importantbecause other client accounts show similar pat-terns which are indicative of the integrated na-ture of the Borromei’s banking operations atBruges, Antwerp and Bergen-op-Zoom.In the construction of the movement of accountsthe user can also select a number of accounts

of his/her interest (e.g. all the cash accounts,or all the accounts of clients active in a certainplace) and get as a result a graph like those infigures 7 and 8, and therefore understand thesituation at any date, from the bank’s point ofview. Ultimately, it is also possible to track themovement of all the accounts, as shown if Fig-ure 9, where the amount of £ 3,000 is the initialcapital of the company.Next, one of the important aspects of our studyis tracking the movement of exchange ratesbetween northern Europe and Italy and betweenBruges and other centres, such as Barcelona,Valencia, Avignon, Montpellier, Geneva andBasel. There are various ways of tracking ex-change rates, the most interesting being theone shown in Figure 10, where the chart com-pares the exchange rate for bills of exchangegoing from Bruges to Venice and the exchangerate for bills of exchange going from Venice toBruges. The chart clearly indicates when it wasconvenient to draw on Bruges and when, on thecontrary, it was convenient to draw on Venice.Moreover, the chart below indicates the num-ber of bills issued on each day.

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Figure 10. Exchange rate, Venice-Bruges, Bruges-Venice, 1438

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Charting is only one part – though effective andstraightforward – of the analysis. Accounts andtransactions can be grouped in a variety of dif-ferent ways, according to the interest of theuser. For example, transactions can be groupedaccording to type and month, so that for eachtype of transaction it is possible to know howmuch money was spent or received in any givenperiod. This way of grouping can of course beapplied to people, places, and so on.The databases will first be made available onthe Project’s website, at the address given be-low. They will be on a read-only basis and willhave only the simple version of the search tools.Our aim is put the first database, from theBruges ledger for 1438, on the web by 2007.The London ledger will follow when inputting hasbeen completed. The two pieces of software willonly become available for purchase once theresults of our research are published, however.Our intention is to write a full history of theBorromei banks in Bruges and London andpublish it along with a CD-ROM containing bothdatabases, with the History Accounts Enquirysoftware inbuilt. At the same time, but sepa-rately, we will offer Historic Accounts (for thecreation of databases with simple search toolsonly) and Historic Accounts Enquiry (foranalysing the information on the databases) forsale at as reasonable a price as is possible.

Website: http://www.history.qmul.ac.uk/re-search/borromei.html

1 G.Biscaro, ‘Il banco Filippo Borromei ecompagni di Londra (1436-39)’, Archivio storicolombardo 40, 1913, pp. 32-196, 283-385.

J.L. BoltonQueen Mary, University of London

F. Guidi BruscoliUniversità degli Studi di Firenze

Queen Mary, University of London

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Origins and IdeaThe idea of Barclaycard is generally credited togeneral manager Derek Wilde (later a vice-chairman of Barclays), and James Dale whobecame Barclaycard’s first departmental man-ager. Their idea was backed by Barclays’ chair-man John Thomson, who recognised the needto ‘beat the others to it’. Meanwhile senior man-agers in Barclays’ overseas’ business werestarting to use the American cards then avail-able in Britain (Diners Club and American Ex-press), for travel and expenses, and were sing-ing their praise within the Bank.1

Although an earlier internal report had appar-

ently looked into the feasibility of a credit card,the idea was not followed up. The immediateinspiration came from a visit to the United Statesin 1965 by Wilde, Dale and computer expertAlan Duncan, specifically to look at Bank ofAmerica’s BankAmericard, the first card to al-low holders to defer repayment. The conse-quent report included recommendations forBarclays to set up its own scheme.2

Barclays, though like the other ‘big five’ in Brit-ain essentially at this period a conservative bankin terms of staff recruitment and relations,organisation and tradition, had since the mid-50s begun to innovate and modernise in areas

Barclaycard: the advent of plastic money

29th June 2006 sees the 40th anniversary of the official launch ofBarclaycard, the first all-purpose European credit card. The historyof Barclaycard is a good example of how the archivist can act as‘story-teller’ in preserving the corporate memory and supporting thecompany’s brand.ne

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James Dale Derek Wilde

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such as technology and advertising; for ex-ample ordering the first computer for branchaccounting in 1959, and experimenting with cin-ema advertising. In 1967 Barclays would intro-duce the world’s first wall-mounted cash ma-chines. This period of innovation, in whichBarclays was a leader, led to intense competi-tion during the 70s and 80s, and was one of themain factors in the dissolution of the ‘cosy car-tel’ into which British banks had settled. Propheti-cally, when Barclaycard was announced, TheEconomist declared, ‘This could mean bankingwar’.3

At first Barclays wanted to buy Diners Club UK,but was forestalled by Westminster Bank. Wildetherefore recommended an entirely new cardunder Barclays’ brand. The advantages of thiswere that the Bank already had thousands ofoutlets (the branches), and could operate un-der licence from Bank of America, with whomBarclays already had a good relationship.The scheme was approved by the board with-out any market research or pilot, or adequatein-house computer system, and in the face ofnot inconsiderable internal and external suspi-cion, even hostility. It was recognised that prof-itability would be long-term, since the set-upcosts were so high and credit controls so strict.Although the idea of a plastic card for makinggeneral purchases was novel in Britain, con-sumer credit had already secured a place inpeople’s lives. Working people had long boughtessentials ‘on tick’ from their corner shop, and

there were other schemes operating locallysuch as the Provident & Clothing Company’scheck trading system in the industrial north-eastof England. After World War Two the idea of hirepurchase was developed into big business,becoming an integral part of the new ‘affluentsociety’. Despite the then chairman AnthonyTuke’s publicly expressed views on the wholesubject of excessive credit in the Britisheconomy, in 1958 Barclays had bought a sharein United Dominions Trust, the largest ‘HP’ com-pany, and later would acquire Mercantile Credit.4

One barrier faced by Barclays was the widelyheld view that the credit card was an inflation-ary system that encouraged people to spendmoney they did not have.5 There was at this timea ‘freeze and squeeze’ on wages and credit bythe Treasury. The controversy was debated inparliament and on television, and wascrystallised by an M.P. (Mr. Rowland), who be-rated the Chancellor in a Commons debate on8th August, declaring that credit cards: ‘create demand inflation and cost inflation be-cause some-one must pay for this credit to theholder of the card.’6

Another member accused the government of:‘urging credit restraint upon banks in lendingmoney to industrial organisations when at thesame time they are lending it for the purposesof consumer inflation.’7

Another initial barrier was the attitude that creditcards were ‘undesirable American influences.’8

There remained a sniffy (but two-faced) attitudetowards personal credit amongst the moneyedclasses and amongst bankers. Early oppositionto Barclaycard itself was voiced at senior man-agement level and by branch managers, whosaw no advantage to their business and wereoften either indifferent or hostile:‘….people who’d been in the bank all theirlives…. people in their forties, fifties, sixties, thiswas totally wrong, this wasn’t banking! What wasBarclays doing with this plastic card? You know,I mean they absolutely hated it…..the attitudewithin the staff changed as those people retired

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and it took ten, fifteen years to get rid of thatanti attitude in a lot of the branches. Of course,the problem was when Barclaycard people wentto a branch and talked to branch staff they hadto go through the top people in the branch firstof all. Some branch managers refusedBarclaycard to come in and talk to staff.’9

However, Barclaycard’s success changed allthat - with the respected Barclays name, peoplequickly came to flaunt the card as a status sym-bol. Mr. Rowland, again in his 1966 Commonsspeech, asked whether,‘there is a growing and quite unnecessary snob-bishness in the use of these cards ?’10

Resistance from some groups of retailers alsohad to be overcome. Although many smallershops were keen from the start, some largerchains were reluctant, especially if they hadtheir own credit schemes. The most successfuloutlets in the early period, despite a very lowprofit margin, were petrol stations, which envis-aged improved security in reducing the use ofcash, whilst Barclays took advantage of road-side advertising.

Launch‘The Barclaycard is the largest operation theBank has ever mounted’, declared Barclays’staff magazine.11

On 10th January 1966 the scheme was an-nounced to the public. The press releaseshows that Barclays carefully eschewed adver-tising it as a new means of unsecured borrow-ing.

Instead, Barclaycard was described,‘as a logical extension of the existing credit fa-cilities provided by the Barclays Group. Its pur-pose is to reduce the use of cash in shoppingand other transactions and the scheme is de-signed to appeal not only to those who musttravel and spend a good deal of money in res-taurants, but also to the everyday shopperthroughout the country. For retail and serviceestablishments it will provide a means of reduc-ing or eliminating the book-keeping now neededto maintain customers’ credit accounts. It willalso help reduce the amount of working capitalneeded.’12

Reduction in the use of cash was indeed a cor-nerstone of contemporary policy. British banksmade a concerted effort during the early 60s toextend bank accounts to the working populationwho, experiencing for the first time in history areal and significant increase in their standardof living, were still largely paid in cash at thefactories, offices and shops where they worked.Indeed, chairman Thomson saw Barclaycard as,‘…more of a development of existing retail bank-ing than an innovation…’13 As with automatedbranch accounting and cash machines,Barclaycard held the promise of reducing labourcosts which, with the advent of relatively fullemployment and strong trade unions, had beenrising steadily.14

Barclays set itself the daunting task of recruit-ing 1 million cardholders and 30,000 outlets bythe launch date. Although Barclaycard’s headoffice was in London, a derelict footwear fac-tory in Northampton was converted as the op-erations centre, while £500,000 was spent onadvertising and over 23 million forms were sentout to prospective customers. Barclays adaptedthe computer programme used byBankAmericard. Distribution of the 1m cardsinvolved extra Post Office and railway facilities.Despite the magnitude of the task, and thankslargely to the organisational skill of Ken Nuttall,the first Centre manager, all targets were metand the UK’s first credit card was launched ontime.

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Recruiting cardholders was achieved by branchmanagers supplying lists of credit worthy ac-count holders, and non-Barclays customerswere also approached. In the end, 1.25m cardswere sent, unsolicited, to those who had beenselected. However at first branches recom-mended their better off account holders, whowere less likely to need a credit card, rather thanpeople for whom monthly credit would be a use-ful way of purchasing necessities.Signing up merchant outlets was achieved byan organisational innovation. Dale recruitedsalesmen, mainly from within Barclays, who weretrained to call personally on prospective mer-chants. Again, many of these retailers had beenrecommended by the branches. The idea of aBritish bank undertaking ‘selling’ was still anath-ema to the traditional banker, even at this pe-riod. The sales staff were picked by inspectionteams and branch managers who were oftenpleased to transfer men they considered unsuit-able for branch work:‘When it started it was an opportunity to get ridof staff they didn’t want’(15)‘somebody from Barclaycard turned up at thebranch, was talking to the manager who’dpopped out to do something and I went in to putsomething on his desk, just got talking to this

chap who suggested that it might be worth look-ing into a career with Barclaycard and I even-tually went for an interview…’(16)These recruits were often glad to break free ofthe confines of branch banking and enter themodern world of marketing. External trainingwas also used by Barclays for the first time. Inthe words of one of these early sales staff,‘It was all direct selling and it was cold selling inmany ways. It was in actual fact, just walkingalong the streets and just looking at shops andsaying, yes, the average sale in that shop is acertain amount, that’s a good averagesale.’(17)

Acceptance - the triumph of plasticSome of the 1.25m unsolicited cards of 1966were either returned, destroyed or not used, butmost were accepted. However, holders werecautious about spending, averaging only £4 percard in the first 6 months of use ! Interest oncredit was set at 1.5% and remained unaltereduntil 1975, holders having 25 days in which topay the balance before being charged.There were many teething problems, some ofthem technical and logistical. One of the biggestwas the lack of suitable computer capacity, thetemporary solution during the first year being

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to fly the tapes every day to West Germany forprocessing. An example of a minor problem wasthat because many of the first million custom-ers had multiple bank accounts, these peoplewould receive as many cards as they had ac-counts, which caused some confusion. Then itwas discovered that the plastic would snapwhen exposed to body warmth in holders’ backpockets.Barclaycard steadily secured a place in retailculture. Its first operating profit was recorded in1972, by which time there were 1.7mcardholders and 52,000 merchants. As anothersalesman recalled of this period:‘Well, I would just go and say, have you everthought of taking Barclaycard ? It was such astrong product then that they either said yes orno. And if they said yes, you’d sign them up andif no, you’d go into the next shop. It was so easyto do then.’ 18

Consistent profitability was secured by 1977 andby 1980, with 5m holders, Barclaycard was gen-erating 3% of the Group’s profits. The acceler-ating boom in consumer credit saw, by 1990,personal borrowing exceed disposable income,

Britain being ahead of the rest of Europe in thisrespect.The move towards a plastic credit society wascautious in the early years. When in November1967 (following relaxation of the squeeze),Barclaycard granted extended or revolvingcredit to holders, this was done on the under-standing (with the Bank of England), that thecard could not be used to acquire credit formore than 3 months, and that advertising wouldbe suspended pro tem.19 This, it was recognisedby the Barclays at the time, was the only waythat the card would ever make a profit.(20) Ineffect card holders had a personal overdraftfacility, something the proponents of the infla-tionary argument had feared; but there was nogoing back - the genie was out of the bottle.By 1971 (by which time government policy hadreversed in favour of spending and credit), thebrake was off and Barclays was doing all it couldto encourage use of Barclaycard. Also in 1970the Post Office’s National Giro introduced apersonal loan scheme, which the high streetbanks saw as somewhat unfair competition ingiving credit.Competition also came from the other clearers.National Provincial had introduced its firstcheque guarantee card in 1965 and others fol-lowed, which eventually forced Barclaycard toincorporate a similar facility in 1974. Confirma-tion that credit cards were here to stay came in1972 with the launch of Barclaycard’s first ma-jor rival, Access, by Lloyds, NatWest and Mid-land.Another, perhaps unexpected, change fore-shadowed by Barclaycard was on the Group it-self. After Dale had been appointed as head ofthe new ‘department’, it became an increasinglyautonomous business and quite outside theBank’s existing structure. This signalled a trendnot only in Barclays, which between the 70s and90s reorganised itself as a series of distinctfunctions and businesses (for example mer-chant and investment banking, corporate bank-ing, global securities, project management), butin other banks too.

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AdvertisingAs in other areas, Barclaycard’s marketing hasbeen at the forefront of innovation for Barclaysand British banking as a whole.From the start use was made of modern tech-niques, including direct mailings and colourmagazine adverts. The initial recruitment ofholders in 1966 was helped by a mass cam-paign, including the first direct mail shot by aBritish bank and a complete list of all the mer-chant outlets, believed to be one of the largestnewspapers adverts ever published. High streetcampaigns were another radical departure fora Bank:‘….we would go to a town and set this promo-tion up with all the retailers. So we picked some-where big like Brighton or Manchester orLiverpool and you always needed one or two bigdepartment stores as a sort of corner-stone,and we persuaded all these stores and shopsto display Barclaycard material. We had col-lapsible display boxes, different sizes, whichwould go into shop windows. So, we lent theshops these display things for displaying all theirgoods on but of course, they all had slogans andmessages about Barclaycard and so on so,you’re basically getting brand awareness inshop window. Then we used ‘dolly girls’. Iworked with an external recruitment ‘dolly girl‘agency (sales girls or whatever they calledthem) and we would order how many girls wewanted. We might say right, we want 24 girls,sizes 10 and 12, half blondes, halfbrunettes….we had a uniform designed forthem, a very smart uniform; jacket or blouse,jacket and skirt, hat with Barclaycard emblemson it and we had one or two promotional cara-vans which we arrange to park in a city squareor something like that, you know, places whereyou get publicity - and the job of thesegirls….was to stop people on the street and sella Barclaycard. Now you couldn’t do that today,it’s illegal, but in those days you could actuallydo it, and, you know, we had targets to reach.’21

In 1968 an award-winning cinema film, ‘Travel-

ling Light’ featured a woman with a card tuckedinto her bikini:‘One of my jobs was to make sure that theBarclaycard always showed correctly and so on,so I had the job of positioning it in her briefs tomake sure it was all positioned correctly…. Ithad a very good message, because I think themessage at the end was, “All you need to goshopping is a Barclaycard”’22

The year 1972 saw the first television advertis-ing of Barclaycard (the first, too, for Barclays),which may have contributed to the recruitmentof the 2 millionth cardholder in 1973. By this timeone third of holders were customers of otherbanks, and advertising was also aimed at them,for example offering promotional items outsideother banks’ branches, another daring depar-ture from traditional British banking practice.

Records and research‘Plastic money’, a term first detected by thepresent writer from a Barclays report dated1967, has increasingly attracted attention fromresearchers in recent years.23 As far as BarclaysGroup Archives is concerned, external aca-demic interest has concentrated on Barclaycardas an example of technical and financial inno-vation, marketing success and market leader-ship. Much of this work remains in progress andis unpublished. As early as 1979 DerrickHanson recognised that, ‘The development of the credit card is probablythe most significant phenomenon of the mod-ern banking scene’,

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and the subject features increasingly in pub-lished accounts of modern banking.24

Most of the documentation of Barclaycard is tobe found with the Bank’s main record series,which have come to Group Archives by the usualmeans. By establishing contacts with the mar-keting teams, a good representative selectionof advertising material has also been captured,and this has been supplemented by donationsfrom former staff members.Research by Archives staff has established agood framework for the factual history ofBarclaycard. For developments within livingmemory, Group Archives is able to supplementthe written record by means of the oral historyprogramme begun in 1998, a few excerpts from

which have been quoted above. For the historyof Barclaycard this has been invaluable, withpersonal accounts from chief operating officers,marketing managers, computer experts andeven processing staff having been captured ontape and transcribed for the Bank’s archives.In just over a decade from conception in 1965,Barclays successfully embedded the credit cardin the retail economy of Britain, something thatis taken for granted today. The subsequentthree decades of development, beginning per-haps with the foundation of Visa, is anotherstory. Records from this period remain, ofcourse, confidential, but the archivists will striveto ensure that Barclaycard’s more recent his-tory is documented as well as that of its pioneer-ing years.

Nicholas WebbArchivist

Barclay’s Group Archives

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Footnotes1. Ackrill, M., - Hannah, L., 2001, Barclays: The

Business of Banking 1690-1996, Cambridge,University Press, p.186; Thomson, J., 1966,‘The Case for the Credit Card’, The Banker, vol.116, pp.444-446.

2. BGA [Barclays Group Archives] 754/81: Sykes,J., 1989, ‘The Origin and Development ofCredit Cards in Britain’, unpublished report, p.xi; BGA: 66/1.

3. Ackrill & Hannah loc. cit.4. Tuke, A. W., - Gillman, R. J. H., 1972, Barclays

Bank Limited 1926-1969: Some Recollections,Barclays Bank Ltd., p.46

5. Ward, M., 1966, ‘Are Credit Cards Inflationary?’, The Banker, vol. 116, pp.449-454.

6. BGA: HOC A 61727. ibid.8. BGA: 3/4046.9. BGA: 725/20, oral history interview.10. BGA: HOC A 6172

11. BGA: Spread Eagle vol. 41, p.266, July 1966.12. BGA: HOC A5,835.13. Thomson, op. cit., p.444.14. Lascelles, D., 2005, Other People’s Money:

the Revolution in High Street Banking, Instituteof Financial Services, p. 89

15. BGA: 725/47, oral history interview.16. BGA: 725/41, oral history interview.17. BGA: 725/53, oral history interview.18. BGA: 725/47, oral history interview.19. BGA: HOC A 6892, A 6907; Bank of England

Archives: C40/1291.20. BGA: 300/419, board papers 22/6/67.21. BGA: 725/20, oral history interview.22. ibid.23. Sykes, op. cit.24. Hanson, D. G., 1979, Service Banking: the Ar-

rival of the All-Purpose Bank, Institute of Bank-ers; see also Lascelles, op. cit.

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The former Director of The Rothschild Archive,Victor Gray, and his team remained intrigued bywhat they had yet to discover about the philan-thropic engagements of the family and wereconstantly encouraged to “do something aboutit” by Dame Miriam Rothschild, (1908-2005).Dame Miriam was fully aware of the scale of herfamily’s support for a wide range of socialprojects, as well as being conscious that manyof them remained obscure, partly because ofthe personal modesty of the individuals them-selves, and partly because of the principles of‘zedaka’, the religious commandment obligingevery Jew to engage in charitable works.“Doing something about it” has taken theArchive and its partners in a new projectthrough the following stages so far.An Academic Advisory Committee was as-sembled to define a structure for the research,and to consider sources of funding. The Archive,a registered charity with an educational remit,receives financial support for its mainstreamwork from the Rothschild business. The Com-mittee was confident that the strength of theproject made the Archive eligible for supportfrom grant-giving bodies to develop the projectin partnership with institutions of higher educa-tion. This confidence has been borne out to agratifying degree. Initial financial support wasgiven by Hanadiv, then by the Fritz ThyssenFoundation (Cologne), and, finally, by the Artsand Humanities Research Council, allowing theproject to assume a larger scope and envisageever more ambitious aims.

Scope of the projectThe research project, launched in 2004, usesthe charitable commitments of the Rothschild

family as a case study for the analysis of Jew-ish charitable activities in the context of anemerging welfare state. Formally based at TheRothschild Archive, the project has research-ers in the five European countries where theRothschild family were established, namelyGermany, Britain, France, Austria, and Italy. Itwas also found necessary to have a closer lookat the material held at The Central Archives forthe History of the Jewish People in Jerusalem,whose aim is the “reconstruction of an unbro-ken chain of historical documentation, reflect-ing the collective past of the Jewish people”, andwhich, as such, collects and preserves materi-als from all the countries under scrutiny.The research will lead to a number of diverse,but complementary, outcomes: the creation ofa database, the publication of a series of es-says and of a monograph, and the organisationof a number of conferences and workshops,exhibitions and a web site. The database1 ,which is already available online to the research-ers, will also be made accessible to the publicthrough the existing Rothschild Research Fo-rum 2 . It is divided into three volumes to reflect

“Jewish Philanthropy and Social Development in Europe 1800-1940”

The preparations for a Rothschild bicentenary celebration in 1998 included an extensive amountof research into every aspect of the Rothschild family’s activities, from banking to viticulture, artcollecting to horticulture, estate development to philanthropy – and it was this last category whichproved one of the most interesting to contemplate and which left many questions unanswered.

Screenshot of the Fondation de Rothschild’s record onthe database, with a picture

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the various aspects of Jewish philanthropy inthe period. The first volume is a listing of Jew-ish philanthropic institutions in the five countriesunder consideration, and enables the user toview information about their date of creation,their purpose, the activity they were involvedwith, as well as information about their foundersor main benefactors. The second volume is apool of information about the main Jewish phi-lanthropists in the six countries, and will enablethe user to view biographical data on them, aswell as a listing of institutions and charitableorganisations with which they were involved. Thethird volume is a collection of sources, in whichusers can access information about where tofind the materials listed in other volumes andpotentially find leads for further investigation.Interestingly, the three volumes are linked to-gether so the user can navigate from institutionsto people by simply clicking on hyperlinks, andtherefore get a wider and more comprehensiverepresentation of philanthropic networks in theperiod under consideration. As a tool at theacademic researcher’s disposal as well as thepublic’s, the database will be enriched by arange of images of people and places, as wellas institutional and bibliographical essays, inthe many cases where additional information isavailable.

The project has a focus on Rothschild familymembers, but makes a point of also includingother Jewish philanthropies and philanthropists,which allows for a broader contextualisation ofthe Rothschild initiatives.In the two years since the project started, a widerange of materials has been uncovered andinvestigated by our researchers, and it quicklybecame clear that Jewish philanthropy had anextremely wide and varied scope. The rangeand value of individual donations fluctuatedgreatly, and included the promotion of a rangeof sectors, from arts and crafts to education, aswell as the provision of dowries, the establish-ment and running of hospitals and sanatoriums,the funding of academic research and of librar-ies, social housing projects, recreation homes,etc. An early analysis of the available recordswould suggest that each country had a specificphilanthropic tradition, which was reflected inthe way Jewish philanthropists distributed theirfunding. However, it is possible even at this earlystage, to identify some European-wide trends,reflecting the charitable activities with which theRothschilds and other Jewish philanthropistswere involved. Notably in the case of theRothschilds, family members were active on themedical sector in all five of the countries wherethey were established, and in three of these onthe social housing sector. These, which de-manded enormous capital sums, are a particu-larly interesting subject to concentrate on. Thisarticle will focus on their engagement in the fieldof hospitals and medical research.

Case studyAt the forefront of the scientific advances of theirtime and seeing themselves in the vanguard, theRothschilds created and ran hospitals through-out Europe, fiercely guarding them against po-tential takeover by the government, and mak-ing sure that they remained private, in spite ofthe large sums of money needed to keep themfunctioning. Julie, the widow of Adolphe Carl deRothschild, founder of the Geneva eye hospi-The Naples Hospital, created by Adolphe de

Rothschild in his will

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tal in 1873 / 1874, who always refused any typeof association with the public administration andproudly chose to pay for the taxes herself, evenstipulated in her will that the running of both theGeneva eye hospital and of its Paris equivalentshould both remain, after her death, privatelyfunded.The Geneva eye hospital opened in 1874 witha Dr Barde, who had treated the Baron AdolpheCarl for an eye injury in the past, as a medicaldirector. Admission and treatment were free forall people who could prove their indigence, with-out any distinction of religion or nationality. Withonly 20 beds when it opened in 1874, 10 formales and 10 for females, the hospital buildingwas extended some 13 years later to accommo-date children, and patients suffering from con-tagious diseases. Adolphe’s involvement in therunning of the hospital was a testimony to hiscommitment as a philanthropist. Not only did hepay for all the costs generated by the institu-tion, but he also paid particular attention to therecovery of the patients in the hospital, cater-ing, when necessary, for ‘his’ patients’ travelexpenses, and requesting that regular reportsbe made to him in person by the medical direc-tor.Adolphe de Rothschild died in 1900, leaving theplans for an even larger and more modern hos-pital unfinished. His will stipulated that his widowJulie should take the Geneva eye hospital asan example for the Paris hospital, which he hadplanned to create. Julie de Rothschild decidedthat Rue Manin, in the eastern part of the capi-tal and opposite the Parc des Buttes Chaumont,should become the location of the new clinic, forthe construction of which the Baron had left anamount of 1.8 million francs, to which a capitalof 8 million francs was added. The optimal ef-forts were made to accommodate the patients’needs in terms of comfort and well being, andto ensure that they were cured and recoveredwell, rather than trying to achieve large num-bers of admissions. Still, the hospital had a ca-pacity of 50 beds, and was run totally privately.

Later absorbed by the French public services,the hospital had nonetheless represented anincredible achievement by proving itself as suc-cessful as it had been ambitious.Not only did Adolphe de Rothschild virtually cre-ate the Paris and Geneva eye hospitals, but healso left some money in his will in 1900 for ahospital to be created in Naples.Adolphe was not the only one active in this field.Other Rothschild family members were involvedin the establishment and running of medicalinstitutions. In London, the Evelina Children’sHospital formally opened in 1869, three yearsafter the founder’s wife, Evelina de Rothschild,died in childbirth. Her widower, Ferdinand deRothschild, decided to perpetuate her memoryby building a hospital in Southwark, a deprivedarea of London, in which it was thought that thechildren would benefit most from the establish-ment of a hospital catering for their needs. Plan-ning for the construction of the hospital augured

The Bettina Pavilion of the Empress Elisabeth Hospi-tal, built by Albert von Rothschild, Vienna

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well: Doctor Arthur Farre, Physician Extraordi-nary to Queen Victoria, was commissioned toproduce detailed specifications to be presentedto the Architect. The hospital, thought to be bigenough to treat 100 patients, only had 30 cotsavailable to allow for the patients’ quiet andspeedy recovery. The hospital was open to visi-tors every day and in 1871, when in need forfunds for expansion, it received large donationsfrom the public, the majority of them Jewish. Thehospital was a success, with 12,000 patientsbeing treated in the Outpatients’ Departmentalone in the first two years.In Frankfurt, the Clementine Children’s Hospi-tal was founded by Baroness Louise vonRothschild in 1875 for girls aged 5-15 withoutdistinction of religion, or social background. Aswith the Geneva hospital, treatment was avail-able at no cost to the patient. With cutting edgetechnology and architecture respecting the lat-est quality standards, the Clementine hospital

hosted 18 to 20 young girls in bucolic surround-ings of 10000 m² lushly planted with trees, whichprompted the first chief doctor of the hospital,Dr. Johann Jakob de Bary, to state that “thanksto these sound surroundings alone, the hospi-tal meets all the requirements which modernscience can expect a hospital to meet”. Observ-ers noted her unlimited dedication to the hos-pital and her personal involvement in makingsure that all the individual needs of the youngpatients were being catered for in a context ofoptimal comfort.The planning for the construction of a hospitalin Vienna was the object of a thorough inquiryby its founder, Anselm von Rothschild, into themost modern, architectural and technologicaladvances. Two doctors were sent across Europeto review the requirements that the hospitalwould need to meet in terms of hygiene, venti-lation, and so forth, in order to be a most mod-ern and forward-looking establishment. Thehospital opened in 1873, and in the first tenyears of its running, had already treated some10,042 patients.

Initial findingsThese achievements, however, did not repre-sent co-ordinated attempts by the Rothschildsto make a mark in the respective communitiesin which they had settled, but were rather theresults of individual, personal initiatives. Eventsrelated to the founder’s personal historyprompted these individuals, in each case, toestablish medical institutions. Adolphe deRothschild, as mentioned previously, foundedthe eye hospital in Geneva because he hadbeen successfully cured by Dr Barde in the pastand probably wanted to “give something back”.The Evelina Hospital was founded in memory ofFerdinand’s wife. As for the Clementine Hospi-tal in Frankfurt, it was a grandiose and vibranttribute to the founder’s daughter, who tragicallydied aged 20. The Rothschilds’ grand projects,however, were a reflection of just how forwardthinking and, quite simply, how wealthy theyAdolphe de Rothschild

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were and, undoubtedly, represented examplesof the contributions they could make in the com-munity. The eye hospital in Geneva had suchhigh standards of excellence that it attractedpatients from all over Europe. The hospital inParis was the first to use laser technologies forthe correction of various eye conditions in the1970s. Such achievements, if incidentally, nec-essarily contributed to making a difference inthe way the Rothschilds were perceived in theircommunity. After all, who, in the late 19th cen-tury, apart from the Rothschild family, couldhave afforded the private running of a hospitalin Geneva, with state of the art equipment andtechnology, trained staff, and excellent stan-dards of comfort? The hospitals they estab-lished in all the European cities, in which theywere settled, was a testimony of their ability tomake a difference. A difference not only to theJewish population, but also to the general com-munity. It is no coincidence that the hospitalswere open to both Jewish and non-Jewish pa-tients, and that the people involved as admin-istrators or in management positions were also,more often than not, non-Jewish. Here, citizen-ship and the determination to help the commu-nity at large was paramount to the desire to helponly Jewish people; in other words, theRothschilds, as well as being the important Jew-ish family everyone knows, were eager to posi-tion themselves as citizens and members of anational and local community. The Rothschildinitiatives, however, were born not only from adesire to help the community at large but alsofrom opportunity. The absence of a welfarestate at the time made it possible for theRothschilds to make an impact through privateinitiative and privately funded institutions. Theemphasis put, in many cases, on young children,was no coincidence either. If social legislationwas progressively being eased and countrieswere starting to recognise the rights and needsof poorer classes, the start of the 19th centuryhad not seen much improvement in the condi-tion of children. The establishment of children’s

hospitals might have been a way of catering forthis lack of provision, in the same way as it ca-tered for the lack of a welfare state. Having theability to substitute one’s self for the state, pro-vide for needy people whom the state did nothelp, and cater for sectors of the population thathad remained untouched by legislative progres-sivism, was a mark of power and a complementof liberal initiative to state-run welfare.In this context, it is obvious that philanthropicactivities served a number of purposes ratherthan being motivated only by the principle ofzedaka. Through the example of the hospitals,it is clear how the Rothschild-sponsored insti-tutions represented a window on the Rothschildfamily’s fortune and wealth, and a proof of theirdedication to the local community and societyat large. This, in turn, guaranteed their integra-tion and conferred credibility and legitimacy ontheir business projects and endeavours. TheRothschild hospitals, often set up in remem-brance of members of the family and, even,carrying their names, engraved the name“Rothschild” in the urban landscape. This in-scription guaranteed its continuity and longev-ity, bringing it closer to the community and trulymaking it a “household name”, recognised byboth the rich and the poor. It is remarkable thatmany of the hospitals are still standing andoperative today. The Geneva and Paris eyeclinics, however, and also the Frankfurt andLondon children hospitals are now run by mu-nicipal bodies but family members are, notably,still involved, as active members on some of theboards, and through donations.

Future plansBy exploring these questions, the project willattempt to discuss issues such as the use ofcharity and welfare as instruments of entre-preneurial self-representation and the conflictbetween the welfare state and liberal voluntaryphilanthropy, which have a much wider scopethan the sole history of Jewish philanthropy, andwill have to be placed in the wider context of

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European philanthropy. Since the start of theJewish Philanthropy and Social Development inEurope project, a number of European initia-tives and research projects have been set up,demonstrating the potential of the project andits contribution to the historiography on thesubject. Not the least of these was a workshophosted by The Rothschild Archive in October2005, which examined the theory and practice

of Jewish and non-Jewish philanthropy in 19th

and 20th century Europe. The publication of theworkshop papers is currently being prepared,with the working title “Religion, Philanthropy, andCivil Society in Western and Central Europe”.Notes written by Martin Krieger, one of the par-ticipants in the workshop can be accessedonline at: http://hsozkult.geschichte.hu-berlin.de/tagungsberichte/id=971.

Claire-Amandine SouliéThe Rothschild Archive

Claire-Amandine Soulié has been based at TheRothschild Archive since January 2006 asProject Co-ordinator. A graduate of the Univer-sity of Lyon, she currently lectures on 19th and20th century European and Russian history atthe University of Essex while finishing her PhDon the controls over the press in Britain andFrance during the Boer War and the Fashodacrisis.

The project at the Rothschild Archive is directedby Klaus Weber, who was appointed Director ofthe Project in 2004 after spending a year at theNational University of Ireland, Galway. His recentbook “Deutsche Kaufleute im Atlantikhandel1680-1830” (German Merchants in the AtlanticTrade) is based on his PhD. He has written anumber of papers on various aspects of theproject, as well contributing to scholarly publi-cations and conferences on the subject of earlymodern transatlantic trade.

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1 The database was created by the IT department of N M Rothschild & Sons, whose support of the project is grate-fully acknowledged.

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The idea of organising a workshop dealing withcorporate culture first sprang up in the AcademicAdvisory Council. It had voiced the opinion thatthe EABH should provide a platform where no-tions and issues combining history and the ev-eryday life of its member institutions could beexplained and discussed, alongside the aca-demic conferences the EABH has organisedsince its foundation. Corporate culture was soonidentified as such an issue. As a result, the firstworkshop on corporate culture was launched in2004 in Athens before the main EABH confer-ence, organised by Ingrid Elferink, GabrieleTeichmann, along with Marnie Giuranna andGabriella Massaglia from the Frankfurt office.The record attendance of EABH membersshowed the vivid interest in the topic and led tothe decision to have a follow-up in Vienna 2005for which Charlotte Natmeßnig fromWirtschaftsuniversität Wien joined theorganisation team.This explains the organisational framework. Butwhat were the ideas behind the workshops? Theterm “corporate culture” is used in publicationson management, corporate marketing andmanagerial psychology. It emerged in the 1970sas a way of explaining the success of a com-pany, or the lack of it. From the point of view ofan enterprise, it deals with questions such as“Who are we?” “How should we behave?” as atool analysing specific assets and shortcomingswith the aim of achieving a higher businessperformance. Although answers differ and defi-nitions vary in detail, most academics agree thatcorporate culture, in Edgar Schein’s words, is“a cognitive framework consisting of attitudes,values, behavioural norms, and expectationsshared by organization members.” Since itsestablishment, the term has been widely usedby human resource managers to analyse and

improve motivation of employees, as a market-ing philosophy, and to underscore corporatesocial responsibility. However, the term has notmade its way into corporate history or businesshistory in general – and vice versa. This is sur-prising enough, given the fact that the individualcharacter of a company is inextricably linkedwith and shaped by its history.It was the explicit aim of the two workshops tostart filling this gap by showing that the histori-cal perspective is essential to answer the ques-tion “Who are we?” and to understand the waya company works: its business decisions; theway it treats its clients and employees; its im-age-making; branding; and so forth. Historyneeds to be firmly established as an integral partof corporate culture, making it clear even tobank managers without a specific historical in-terest that dealing with corporate culture meansdealing with corporate history.The target audience of the Athens and Viennaworkshops were, in the first place, banking andinsurance archivists. Hence the organisers hadset out to highlight the importance of corporatearchives in this context. We all know that ar-chives play a pivotal role as the repository of acompany’s past, its specific culture developedover time, its collective conscience and achieve-ments. If it is well-organised, an archive will bean efficient and high-quality supplier of complexinformation, if it is well-integrated into the insti-tution, it will be a high-powered commercial in-strument creating value and providing a com-petitive advantage. The term corporate culture,in all its many facets, can have a bridging func-tion between the perspectives of managers,corporate archivists and historians whenanalysing and assessing an organisation. This,in turn, is a perfect mirror of the overall aims theEABH has set for itself.

Athens 2004 and Vienna 2005Two Archive Workshops on Corporate Culture

A Look Back

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With these premeditations in mind theorganisers endeavoured to offer a programmecovering a large number of aspects on the twooccasions, hosted by Alpha Bank and BankAustria Creditanstalt respectively. In Athens,most contributers presented case studies ofsuccessful implementation of corporate archivesand corporate history within the image of a bank.Victor Gray gave an impressive account ofArchive Style and Corporate Culture at N.M.Rothschild & Sons showing how naturally his-tory has “entered the bloodstream of the Bankand become part of the overall corporate style.”Another private banker, Sal. Oppenheim ofCologne, had admitted a team of senior busi-ness school students to analyse and assess itscorporate culture, especially concerning itsfunction as a value creator. One member of theteam explained their academic approach andinterim results of the project which had just beenlaunched. A special kind of case study was putforward by Damir Jelic who presented the re-sults of a survey concerning corporate culturehe had carried out for the EABH Bulletin amongEABH members at the request of the workshoporganisers.A second group of presentations covered thetheme that corporate culture was an importantentrepreneurial concept long before the mod-ern term was invented. Monika Pohle-Fraserpresented her study, entirely based on archi-val records, showing how meticulously 19th-cen-tury bankers steered the creation and upkeepof their good reputation. Bankers’ conformitywith a certain code of bourgeois values wasregarded as the hallmark of respectability; it wasalso the main tool to assess business risks. JokeMooij explored what can be learnt about theculture of financial institutions, and centralbanks in particular, by analysing their historiog-raphy.Finally, two papers covered aspects of corpo-rate culture in times of change. A more imme-diate issue referred to what may happen to cor-porate culture after mergers. John Orbell pre-

sented an example of a well-organised archivecontaining highly valuable records and well-positioned within the bank that survived amerger, albeit with different tasks. His case wasthat of the Barings Archive, which became partof the ING Bank after the takeover of BaringBrothers by the Dutch group. Margarita Dritsasdealt with the theme of how political changesinfluence the way banks present themselves tothe public, showing the Greek case from the1920s to the present. Greek banks have re-cently become more involved in society, e.g. aspromoters of the idea of national heritage andthrough the emergence of corporate history.The three workshop sessions were rounded offby concluding remarks delivered by GurdonWattles from Deutsche Bank London who, as abanker, showed himself convinced that corpo-rate history matters for the commercial successof an institution. The striking example was thatof Deutsche Bank who would never have beenable to acquire the US bank Bankers Trust in1999 without having been transparent about itshistory, especially during the Third Reich.The Vienna workshop one year later continued,for one thing, in giving case studies. This timeparticipants learned about a Portuguese expe-rience presented by Carlos Alberto Damas fromBanco Espírito Santo in Lisbon which falls intomuch same category of family-dominatedhouses like Rothschild and Oppenheim. Theorganising team also tried to take up some dis-cussants’ remarks from Athens when some at-tendants had criticised that the first workshopsaw the role of archives in too optimistic terms.This time there were not just success stories. Itwas Christofer Stadlin from Zurich FinancialServices who showed that archivists may havegood ideas of how to make their company ben-efit from historical experience for recent situa-tions but that they cannot implement their ideasbecause senior management lack interest. Itshould be noted that Christofer Stadlin was thefirst-ever speaker from the insurance industryat an EABH event after its change of statutes.

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Besides accounts of individual companies theworkshop also offered more general investiga-tions. Christopher Kobrak delved into the inter-dependence of history, archives, corporate cul-ture and business ethics. He insisted on thevalue of history for the strategy of corporationsand advocated the integration of corporate andbusiness history in the training of business stu-dents. Manfred Pohl used the example of hiscareer at Deutsche Bank to show that the in-terest of companies in their corporate historyis by no means static and self-explanatory. Itdepends, to a great extent, on general trends.After boom years in the mid-1990s mainly dueto banks confronting the Nazi past, interestwaned in the heated atmosphere of the dotcomhype and as a result of the predominance of theshareholder value business philosophy.Also for the first time in EABH history, the themeof banking architecture was taken up. UlrikeZimmerl used the example of Bank AustriaCreditanstalt to illustrate the role of architecturein creating a visible public image conveyingidentity and integrity. Two papers dealt with theinterdependence of corporate history and cor-porate social responsibility, reflecting the factthat cultural and social engagement of banksis ubiquitous these days. Nadina Paphitou andYolanda Hatzi presented the cases of Cyprusand Greece. In both countries, banks play a veryactive role in cultural sponsoring, in fundingsocial and ecological projects and in helping topreserve the national heritage. Thus they fulfilsocial roles which are carried out by the statein other parts of the continent.Ferdinand Lacina, consultant of the hostingBank Austria Creditanstalt, gave the conclud-ing remarks from the viewpoint of a former poli-tician and finance minister. He concluded thatwhile history does have an impact on businessdecisions, it has become more difficult in ourever more profit-oriented world to reconcilebusiness and history. He believed that Pohl’squestion whether business history is in a crisiscannot be answered clearly yet. On the asset

side there are a number of well-establishedarchives in some major financial institutions inEurope which are here to stay. At the same time,there can be no doubt that in recent years manycompanies have rapidly lost interest in their his-tory.What can be condensed into the message ofthe two workshops? It has become clear that thearchive and the archivist’s work lie at the coreof a company’s culture. Striking examplesshowed their huge potential for image-making.A long and successful corporate history createstrust and underscores a good reputation. Thepossibilities to use archival records for actualbusiness purposes are ample. However, mostarchivists will agree that their archive’s poten-tial goes much beyond its actual use. To con-vince senior managers in this direction meansa great and ongoing challenge for everybodyjoined in the EABH. The workshop organisershope that the two events will encourage furtherdiscussion on how an archive should positionitself within a bank, the definition of its core tasksand its contributions to everyday business pur-poses. The papers presented on both eventswill be published in a joint volume in May 2006and will hopefully further fruitful discussion in thefuture.

Gabriele TeichmannSal. Oppenheim jr. & Cie.

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The program consisted of three sessions anda panel discussion. The first session focusedon the institutional cooperation of Central Banksin the 1950s and 1960s under the BrettonWoods system which led, inter alia, to the es-tablishment of the European Payments Union(EPU); the second session, dealing with thefollowing period 1960s-70s, shed light on theefforts undertaken by monetary authorities toprevent the eventual collapse of the BrettonWoods system; the third session explored Eu-ropean central bank cooperation after BrettonWoods. A panel discussion followed, aimed atexploring a number of archival issues concern-ing Central Banks' archives. In total, six paperswere presented, covering 45 years of crucialchanges in the international monetary coopera-tion field.The workshop was opened with a welcomingaddress by Peter Dittus, Secretary General ofthe hosting Institution, followed by Prof. ManfredPohl, the EABH Deputy Chairman.The study of the origins of European monetaryintegration couldn't but move from the post-warreconstruction, the Marshall plan and the earlycreation of the institutions that gave origin to themodern cooperation process in Europe. There-

fore, in the first session, chaired by GabrielFagan, Head of Monetary Policy Research atthe ECB, Juan Carlos Martinez Oliva, movingfrom a broader research project carried out inthe Bank of Italy, outlined the origins of Euro-pean cooperation by analyzing the EuropeanPayments Union from the Italian perspective.The mandate of the EPU, to provide a multilat-eral clearing system and to remove trade bar-riers in Europe, was fulfilled in only eight years:in 1958 the European economies adopted cur-rency convertibility and operated thenceforth ina fully cooperative context. The analysis of Ital-ian views and proposals on convertibility, basedon new archival evidence, contributed to a bet-ter understanding of the Italian authorities' atti-tude on European monetary cooperation in thatperiod. In the following paper, Piet Clement il-lustrated the changing nature of European cen-tral bank cooperation in the transition from thefifties to the sixties, based on two particularepisodes: the emergency credit granted by theEuropean Payments Union to Germany in thewinter of 1950-1951, and the central bank creditgranted to the Bank of England in the autumnof 1964. In contrast to the fifties, when the mainaim of Central Banks was to restore trade and

European Central Banks and Monetary Cooperation after 1945

Central Banks WorkshopBank for International Settlements

Basel, 2 December 2005

On the occasion of its 75th anniversary, the Bank for International Settlements hosted the 2005edition of the EABH Central Banks Workshop in Basel. The organising committee - consisting ofPiet Clement, BIS and Juan Carlos Martinez Oliva, Banca d'Italia, in cooperation with the staff ofthe European Association for Banking and Financial History - deemed that the subject of monetarycooperation under and after the Bretton Woods system until the introduction of the euro was par-ticularly important for its contribution to creating the present international monetary setting in Eu-rope, characterised by a European Central Bank and a single currency. The workshop also tookstock of the situation in the different Central Bank archives with respect to the treated topic by try-ing to establish a list of priority research subjects, and to link the main research topics to the rel-evant archive collections. The Basel workshop brought together 30 archivists and historians from21 different European central banks, international organisations and academic institutions.

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payments, within a framework of price and ex-change rate stability, in the sixties the focusshifted from institutional cooperation, based ona set of agreed rules, to the ad-hoc running ofa system that was supposed to operate largelyautomatically. While granting a higher degreeof freedom, the new system involved a soften-ing of discipline that required more frequentconsultation and discussion among CentralBanks, and, in the face of new challenges, ulti-mately led to the collapse of Bretton Woodssystem.In the second session, Philip Cottrell, Universityof Leicester, provided an example of the diffi-culties that the Bretton Woods system wasfaced with following the adoption of current ac-count convertibility in December 1958. The in-creased difficulties experienced by the dollarstarting from the sixties triggered the collectiveeffort by Central Banks aimed at defending thedollar that characterized the period. Anotherrelevant event in those years was the gradualdecline of the pound sterling, the other world'sreserve currency. Cottrell's paper examined theeffort of central bankers, acting through Basel,to sustain sterling at $2.80 during the currencycrises of 1961, 1963 and 1964-1967, with afocus on how the Bank of England employed'Basel assistance' in the technical operationsneeded to sustain the exchange rate and de-fend the Bank's currency reserves. The analy-sis of the same period was carried out from adifferent perspective by Olivier Feiertag,

Université de Rouen, who examined the role ofthe Bank of France from the return to currencyconvertibility in 1958 to the collapse of theBretton Woods system in the early seventies.The author investigated the global meaning ofinternational monetary cooperation in the six-ties, in order to understand the motives under-lying the authorities' attitude. According to theauthor, understanding whether internationalcooperation was a mere technical device,rather than the expression of nationalistic andindividualistic interests is the main historical di-lemma of international monetary cooperation.Finally, in the third session, Patrick Halbeisen,Schweizerische Nationalbank, considered thenegotiation, in 1975, for a possible accessionof Switzerland to the group of the so-calledSnake countries (European exchange ratemechanism). The arguments and evaluations ofthe time are presented in the paper, along witha discussion of the international political processinvolved. The conclusion is that the ultimatefailure of negotiations entailed critical conse-quences, and involved a monetary policy thatassigned a lower priority to the exchange rate.Moreover, the episode is relevant for a betterunderstanding of later developments concern-ing Switzerland and the European MonetaryUnion. Marzenna James, Princeton University,provided an analysis of central bank coopera-tion across the Iron Curtain before and after1989, looking particularly at the case of Poland.For a long time Poland aimed at integration

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within the network of international financial cooperation. The geopolitical changes in 1989 openedthe opportunity to move towards a market economy and to benefit from the contribution of Euro-pean banking institutions, and the FED. Poland could also benefit, during the transition, from use-ful policy advice from the BIS and the IMF, particularly regarding stabilization and convertibility ofthe currency, price liberalization, fiscal consolidation and privatization. The paper provided a use-ful example of the interplay of Central Banks with other actors in the international system, such asother financial institutions and international organizations.The main conclusions of the different research papers presented at the workshop were summedup lucidly by Aurel Schubert, Director of Statistics at the Austrian National Bank. He referred to themany different types of central bank cooperation and the perennial dilemma between flexibility versusrules facing monetary policymakers. Schubert also stressed that monetary history is not just aboutstructures and systems, but that even in this complex and often technical field individual people domatter.The panel discussion at the end of the workshop has been particularly helpful for an assessmentof the present situation of archival sources available in Central Banks, with a focus on monetarycooperation in Europe. The debate covered relevant issues such as the access of the public toarchival facilities, the availability of documents on digital media, the spread of archival informationvia the Internet, the declassification limits in different countries for various categories of informa-tion, confidentiality criteria for third party information. The general conclusion was that a wider useof archival information for research purposes is to be encouraged, in order to provide a better com-prehension of the actual functioning of the cooperation process through historical analysis. Pre-serving the documents from the past is the best means for a thorough understanding of the presentand the future.

Piet ClementBank for International Settlements

Juan Carlos Martinez OlivaBanca d'Italia

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The First General Meeting of the SEEMHN tookplace on 13-14 of April, 2006 in Sofia. The topicof the meeting was monetary history of South-East European central banks and brought to-gether around 30 participants from 9 Europeancountries. Among independent economic re-searchers and historians from Bulgaria, Greece,Turkey, Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Austria,France and England, most of the Balkan cen-tral banks attended the meeting and acquaintedus with the history of their central banks andmonetary and fiscal policies pursued. Theprogramme was very intense and the 15 pre-sentations were grouped in five sessions.The first day of the meeting was opened by thedeputy governor of the Bulgarian National Bank– Mr. Dimitar Kostov, who congratulated theparticipants on their support to this initiative andencouraged them to extend their research ac-tivities in the framework of the Network. After theofficial opening, our guest-speaker - Prof.Sevket Pamuk (The Ataturk Institute for Mod-ern Turkish History, European Historic EconomicSociety) spoke about “Budget Deficits and Meth-ods of their financing in the Ottoman Empire,1750-1918”. The key conclusions which sum-marized the situation in the rest of the Balkan

countries of that time are that the governmentsare running huge deficits due to weak centralgovernments, limited capacity to collect taxes,financing of wars and increasing costs of tryingto keep a large empire together. In the secondpresentation Dr. Matthias Morys (Oxford Univer-sity) made an overview of the growth experienceof the South-East European countries in the 19th

and 20th centuries. In his research he was facedwith limitations on the availability of consistentset of GDP data for the region with a few excep-tions for Turkey, Greece and Bulgaria. However,the major findings of his study are that in spiteof some evidence that the convergence hypoth-esis holds for Pre-WWI and Golden Age period(1950-1973), the inter-war period is character-ized with divergence processes and after thepost-Golden age the economic developmentdepends on the country with some elements ofpath-dependence behaviour.The second session was dedicated to the goldstandard and stabilization after the First WorldWar. Prof. Dragana Gnjatovic (Serbian Re-search Centre for Balkan Monetary History) ac-quainted us with the introduction of the “limp-ing” gold standard in the principality of Serbia,which is an interesting period of Serbian mon-

South-East Europe Monetary History Network First General Meeting

13-14 of April, 2006, Sofia

Due to the weak knowledge about the monetary history of South-East Europe, at the joint initiativeof Dr. Nikolay Nenovsky (a member of the Governing Council of the Bulgarian National Bank, BNB)and Dr. Sophia Lazaretou (Economic Research Department, Special Studies Division, Bank ofGreece), the Bulgarian National Bank (BNB) came with the proposal for the establishment of South-East Europe Monetary History Network (SEEMHN) at the end of 2005.The objective of the network is to explore the monetary history of the Balkans (Bulgaria, Greece,Romania, ex-Yugoslavian countries, Turkey and Albania), which is a part of the common Europeanmonetary history. Our key aim is to extend our knowledge about the monetary policy pursued un-der different monetary regimes in these so called “peripheral” countries in the region back to the19th century. The goal is to bring together historians, economists and policy-makers in an attemptto analyze and rewrite South-East monetary history in a comparative perspective and to draw les-sons from particularly relevant past experiences. We believe that making monetary policy in a glo-bal environment can benefit from historical insights.

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etary history when although the state had theexclusive right to mint money according to therules of the Latin Monetary Union, it had neverjoined it. The second presentation delivered byKalina Dimitrova (BNB) compared the exchangerate stabilization in France and Bulgaria apply-ing econometric techniques. The analysis incor-porated a chronology of events in the pre-sta-bilization period for both countries, which hasdebtor-creditor relations after WWI and empiri-cally confirmed Aftalion’s psychological theorygiving a dominant role for the exchange rateand expectations on the price development pro-cess for that particular period.The following sessions were dedicated to themonetary history of the SEE central banks. Dr.Roumen Avramov (Centre for Liberal Strate-gies-Sofia and former member of the Govern-ing Council of the BNB) introduced the audienceto the history of the host, the Bulgarian NationalBank. He focused on two questions: how theinstitution was shaped; what has been its rolein the search for adequate monetary standards.The exhaustive institutional analysis empha-sized the vivid public debates concerning the“private versus public” and “dependent versusautonomous” statute of the BNB. Modern Bul-garian history started into a monetary chaosthat was followed by a bimetallic standard andby a difficult path to the gold standard in 1906-1912. During WWI the country adopted a pa-per money standard, restoring eventually for awhile (1928-1931), the monetary rule of the goldexchange standard. The planned communist

economy since 1947 lead to the building of asoviet-type monobank that boils down to a“monetary standard without money”. Centralbanks’ functions were restored in the outset ofthe transition, but the deep financial crisis of1996-1997 provoked a monetary regime shiftand the implementation of a currency board ar-rangement. The system is functioning smoothlyand features several common positive charac-teristics with the gold standard, as well as withthe European System of Central banks of theEMU.Dr. Sophia Lazaretou (Bank of Greece) sharedwith us the Greek monetary history. Shebrought together a chronology of events anddata analysis to find out that country’s choiceof monetary regime was defined according tothe preferences for gaining credibility and cheapforeign borrowing and according to the politi-cal realization of seigniorage smoothing policy.Her study came with the policy implications thatthe benefits of country’s adherence to the con-vertibility rule were macroeconomic stability,lower real exchange rate volatility, less persis-tent and more predictable inflation. The repre-sentative form the Central Bank of the Repub-lic of Turkey - Dr. Yuksel Gormez told us aboutthe evolution of the central banking in Turkeywhich is enriched with various monetary stan-dards going back to 1668 in the Ottoman times.The main lessons which he drew from the Turk-ish monetary history can be summarized as fol-low: we should respect our national currenciesto the extent of which printing money does notprevent wealth accumulation, monetization ofthe economy without price controls, law enforce-ment and observation of private ownership withlegal base and property rights, full commitmentcan eliminate inflation to a certain extent. Lastbut not least in importance, in this sessionchaired by Dr. Peter Mooslechner(Oesterreichische Nationalbank) were the rep-resentatives of the National Bank of Serbia –Milan Sojic and Ljiljana Djurdjevic. It was inter-esting to learn that the National Bank of Serbia

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was established in 1883 as a private bank withdomestic capital only and organized after themodel of the Belgian National Bank, which, atthat time, was considered to be one of the bestorganized institutions of its kind in Europe. Itchanged its name seven times and underwentdifferent institutional shapes with different func-tions as the central bank served different po-litical regimes.The second session devoted to the monetaryhistory of the South-East Europe was openedby Dr. Boris Vujcic (Deputy-Governor of theCroatian National Bank) who spoke aboutYugoslavia’s monetary policy legacy andCroatian Monetary Policy in retrospect. Theindependent Croatian monetary policy has ashort history since 1991, characterized by po-litical and macroeconomic instability, high infla-tion, frequent devaluations and partial savingsexpropriations which led to high currency sub-stitution. Since its independence, Croatian Na-tional Bank options are to a large extent deter-mined by the legacy of monetary history of Yu-goslavia, which in the post WWII period is aunique mix of communist and Latin Americanexperience, and will continue to be until the for-mal adoption of the euro. Zarko Lazarevic pre-sented the Monetary institute of Slovenia, whichwas established in 1944 as a note issuing bankby the slovene resistance movement during thesecond world war. The ambition was to replacethe other currencies in circulation in Sloveniaduring the war times, but it was not achieved.And the reasons: the emission of “resistencemoney” was too small to meet needs and therewere disputes with Yugoslav central leadershipover Slovene competences in issuing themoney. After the end of the Second World Warthe Monetary Institute of Slovenia understand-ably lost the right to issue money. All rights ofthis kind were transferred to the Yugoslav cen-tral bank and even the Monetary Institute ofSlovenia itself became more and more like amere branch of the central institution inBelgrade. The Monetary Institute of Slovenia

ceased to exist before the end of 1946, when itwas incorporated into the Yugoslav centralbank. Thus ended the story of a unique institu-tion that in wartime conditions had attempted toissue money for a resistance movement whichhad neither a clearly or firmly defined territorynor the material conditions to run its own mon-etary and issuing policy.The last session was devoted to building his-torical data and methods. Dr. GeorgeKostelenos (Centre of Planning and Economicresearch, Greece) acquainted us with with his-torical national accounts for Greece for thepreiod 1833-1939, which he constructed usingvalue added method and both Greek and non-Greek, official and unofficial sources of informa-tion. Dr. Martin Ivanov (History Institute, Bulgar-ian Academy of Science) presented his studyon long-run Bulgarian economic developmentfor the period 1892-1945, producing his ownGNP estimates for some years in the time spanand comparing them with some estimates avail-able by national and foreign sources. DamirJelic, Ph.D. student of Leicester University pre-sented the problem of using ballance sheets ofthe banks as source for understanding the pasteconomies. He highlighted advantages of bal-ance sheets information for obtaining spatial,cross borders and over time analysis, but of-fered some concerns about dificulties of suchanalysis as well. His presentation was based onhis experience on analysing provincial bankingin the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy and succes-sor states for mark years 1913 and 1925. After

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the interesting discussions, the chairman of thesession Dr. Matthias Morys summerised thatthe estimation of historical national accounts fig-ures faces the general problems inherent inmaking estimates for such a long period – eco-nomic life changes, new products appear, olderones disappear, quality changes, etc. Althoughsome can reject the usefulness of building GDPseries adherent to standard modern day defi-nitions, it seems quite useful to gause long runperformance of the economy, to determine itsgrowth rate and cyclical movements, to seeconvergence or divergence processes in thelong run. Although some can question the reli-ability of these estimates, improvements areeasier, having made the first step.As a result of the excellent and enthusiasticpresentations which triggered a lot of discus-sions, the Organizational Committee decided togive publicity to all high-quality papers in a con-ference volume, which will be published by theBulgarian National Bank. With respect to orga-nizational issues, Prof. Bertrand Blancheton(Member of the Scientific Committee of the His-torical Mission of the Bank de France) sharedhis experience with the establishment of thehistorical mission at the central bank, its orga-nizational form and management, activities and

outcomes. Concerning the future activities ofthe SEEMHN, there was a consensus that inorder to be able to conduct research in histori-cal and comparative perspectives, we needconsistent historical time series (data). For theobjectives of the Network, it was decided to starta medium-term project of historical data collec-tion and building historical time series, which willserve as a foundation for exploring the historyand policies of the Balkan region. All participantsagreed that all South-East European centralbanks would be interested in contributing to thisproject and we require their commitment to de-vote some of their time, efforts and expertise tothis process. For the successful and credibledevelopment of the Network, it is crutial to haveall Balkan central banks committed to its objec-tives.In order to extend cooperation the South-EastEurope Monetary History Network will commu-nicate and coordinate its work with other re-search networks studying the economic andmonetary history of Europe. Soon after the endof the First General Meeting, the OrganizationalCommitte started to plan the next annual meet-ing under the title “Experience of Exchange RateRegimes in South-East Europe” as the organi-zational details will be announced in near future.

Kalina DimitrovaEconomist

Economic Research andProjections Directorate

Bulgarian National Bank

tel: ++359/2/ 9145 [email protected]

www.bnb.bg

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The aim of the School is to function as a forumfor a comprehensive critical discussion of de-sirable research strategies and adequate meth-odologies for contemporary problems with em-phasis on the advantages provided by a goodhistorical background.The number of students attending is limited to15 and the school really acts as a workshop witha number of discussion groups and workshops,where researchers, teachers, and students fromdifferent backgrounds and countries discussideas presented in lectures. Papers in progressby students and research projects are also pre-sented and discussed. By restricting the num-ber of participants, everyone has the opportu-

nity to participate fully in all discussions and todevelop personal relations with both fellow stu-dents and staff. The mix of nationalities is im-pressive; students from most European coun-tries, as well as the United States, Brazil, Arme-nia, India, Korea, Rumania, Russia, Venezuela,and Japan have attended the programme. Par-ticipants have always proved very motivated andattentive. During the past sessions several stu-dents had the opportunity to develop a fruitfulcollaboration with the teachers they met duringthe school week.Usually, a lecturer devotes about an hour andhalf to introducing the specific background of atopic which is necessary to gain a good under-standing of the subject. After a break, somecase studies are presented and students areinvited to raise questions. Discussion is veryinformal. Participants are encouraged to com-ment from the perspective of their own researchwork and interests. Case studies that havebeen discussed at the School have ranged fromthe financial activities of Venetian merchants tocontemporary monetary problems of Argentina.The 2006 program will discuss the Baring cri-sis, the role of banks during the industrial revo-lution, the credit market in mediaeval Europe,the problems connected with financial liberal-ization in contemporary India, banks and debt

Finance and the “real economy”The 6th Venice Summer School in Finance, Institutions and History.

2006

The Venice Summer School in Finance, Institutions and History is in its 6th Year. The Summer Schoolconsists of a week-long intensive workshop on selected issues relating to monetary and financialhistory, and takes place in the first week of September. It is directed mainly at PhD students, al-though bank archivists and postdoctoral fellows have also attended. The lectures are held by ex-perts who work in universities, central banks and other financial institutions across the continents.Professors from the universities of Barcelona, Bologna, Buenos Aires, Columbia, Dublin, Geneva,Grenoble, Istanbul, Kolkata, London, Madrid, Mexico City, New Delhi, Oxford, Paris, Rutgers,Stanford, Trento, Urbana-Champaign and Venice have participated, as well as bankers from Cen-tral Banks situated in Argentina, Bulgaria, France, Italy and Spain and several members of theEABH.1

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during the Argentinian crisis and so on.Plenty of time, living in the same premises, hav-ing dinner together in Venice develops a quietand stimulating atmosphere and this proves agreat advantage for serious intellectual discus-sion. At most, eight lectures are given during aweek. This makes it possible to have the nec-essary institutional information about the vari-ous case studies presented and to allow stu-dents to participate fully in the discussion. Onelong afternoon is devoted to PhD students, whohave presented their research findings andprogramme. This session proves very importantto the students that devote a great effort topresent their research with passion and excite-ment.The Summer School is held in Venice in the his-torical setting of the island of S. Servolo. Theisland is very close to Piazza San Marco but, atthe same time, has a very different atmospherefrom the busy parts of Venice. It provides an

ideal place for a week of intensive yet informaldiscussions, which often continue, after a longwalk, during a dinner in Venice. Participantsreside in the premises of the Venice Interna-tional University and attend lectures in themorning and in some of the afternoons.Invited lecturers are required to stay all theweek and thus contribute to providing the nec-essary continuity associated with such develop-ment programmes. Students are asked to paya reduced fee that covers the cost of the roomon the premises of Venice International Univer-sity; some exemptions are available for studentsfrom low income countries. Activities start onMonday morning and end after a social lunchon Friday.

The theme of the 2006 Summer School will beFinance and the real economy. The School willbegin on the 4th of September 2006. Applica-tions are expected by mid- June 2006.

For more information, please [email protected] or see the Universitywebsite at www.dse.unive.it/summerschool

The school has been promoted by the Facul-ties of Economics of the Universities of Bologna-Forlì, Geneva, Trento and Venice “Cà Foscari”with the cooperation of Venice InternationalUniversity. Financial support from the Bank ofItaly and the European Association for Bankingand Financial History e.V. is gratefully acknowl-edged.

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1 Lecturers: Marcelo de Paiva Abreu, Larwin Armstrong, Roumen Avramov, Amiya Bagchi, PatrickO’Brien, Michael Bordo, Mauro Carboni, Arturo O’Connell, Youssef Cassis, Marcello De Cecco,Kent G. Deng, Olivier Feiertag, Gerald Feldman, Albert Fishlow Niall Ferguson, MarcFlandreau, Giorgio Fodor, Alicia Garcia Errero, Giogio Gobbi, Curzio Giannini, Paola Masi,Carlos Marichal, Reiner Mueller, Larry Neal, Antoin Murphy, Larry Neal, Michael North, SevketPamuk, Luciano Pezzolo, Laure Quenouelle, Jaime Reis, Jean Laurent Rosenthal, JeromeSgard, Giuseppe Tattara, Pedro Tedde de Lorca, Eugene White.

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The Compagnia di San Paolo, the foundationwhich conserves the archives of an ancientcharitable fraternity and of the bank from 1563to 1991, together with the Piedmont and AostaValley section of the Italian National ArchivesAssociation has planned the organisation ofseveral seminars to provide archivists - who inItaly often have an Arts background - with use-ful tools for the archival identification and de-scription of the types of accounts produced bybanks and firms, illustrating the purpose anduse in the entity who produced them, with indi-cations on the evolution of rules and on ac-counting history.The first of these initiatives, “Reviewing the ac-counts”. The archival description of the entries,account books and balance sheets of banksand companies in the Modern and Contempo-rary Ages, which focused on the Modern Ageand on the nineteenth century, took place inTurin on February 17-18 2005, with about fiftyparticipants from all over Italy.Given the large number of participants in thefirst edition, the organisers decided to offer anew edition, which opened on January 19, 2006at Vigna di Madama Reale – the seventeenth-century residence of the Duchess of Savoy,Christine of France on the Turin hill, and nowthe home of the Compagnia di San Paolo’s his-torical archives, with the course continuing thefollowing day at the State Archives in Turin.There were over fifty participants: freelancearchivists or archivists working in companies

specialised in the cultural sector, archivists andcadres of banks and firms, State, University andlocal authority archivists as well as officers ofthe Cultural Heritage Office, historians and re-searchers.Alongside the general treatise on the subject,special attention was paid to the analysis ofsample documents, collected in a CD, comingfrom various public and private archives, fromfourteenth-century payment orders to balancesheets of the early twentieth-century. Further-more participants were able to see and “touch”the originals of statements and registers of as-sets, inventory books and ledgers, provisionalbalance sheets and final accounts, of theCompagnia and Istituto di San Paolo, from 1701to 1927.The course opened with a lecture by professorGiuseppe Felloni (University of Genoa) who,after an introduction on the history of credit andsingle and double entry accounting systems,illustrated, using reproductions of documents ofthe Banco di San Giorgio, the ancient bank ofthe city of Genoa founded in the fifteenth cen-tury (whose archive is kept at the State Archivesin Genoa) and of the Compagnia di San Paolo(founded in 1563), the main kinds of documentsused in the credit sector in the Modern Age fromirredeemable loans to annuities, from bills ofexchange to Genoese purchases, from terres-trial and maritime trade contracts to guarantees,from accounts to statements of assets and li-abilities. The sophistication reached as early as

A course for interpreting bank and company accounts and balance sheets in theModern and Contemporary Ages

As we know, accounting documentation, which is often to be found in considerable quantities in thearchives of any public or private institution, and especially in those of banks and enterprises, is animportant source for historical research. Balance sheets and account books are fundamental toolsfor reconstructing not only the activity and the financial situation of a firm, but also the economichistory of a geographical area or of a sector. They are often mines of useful information also forother fields of research, as art historians know when a payment record allows them to ascribe apainting or date a building. For the historian to study the sources requires the mediation of thearchivist, who has the delicate task of selecting, conserving and classifying the archives, providingtools which facilitate consultation.

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the late Middle Ages in the drafting and use ofthese instruments allowed the banker mer-chants to trade all over Europe, paying in Lon-don goods sold in Genoa, insuring a ship’scargo with a fully-fledged policy as well as ex-changing letters of credit at fairs. Of great in-terest were the types of loans, frequently “dis-guised”, as in the case of property-securedannuities, in order not to be affected by theChurch’s prohibition on lending money for in-terest. Some provisions of the contracts wereoften curious for us. A life annuity loan contractwas presented at the course; this had beengranted by several wealthy inhabitants ofGenoa to the viceroy of Sicily in 1592. Thiscontract set out that the interest would be paidas long as several children and young peopleindicated by the creditors were alive; this was avery common practice up to the French Revo-lution. The guarantee offered by the viceroyseemed less remote – income from taxes –usual also in the Contemporary Age for statesand municipalities.Claudio Bermond (University of Turin) contin-ued the theme for the next period, from theRestoration to the 1920s. The general part onbanking history and the legislation governingthe sector was followed by the analysis of docu-ments (provisional balance sheets and finalaccounts, daily transactions books, various led-gers, inventory books, auxiliary registers, day-books etc.) of two banks, one private, BancaSella and one born as a pawn institute, trans-formed into a charitable institute and then intoa public law credit institute, the Turin-based“San Paolo”. One can easily grasp, in the his-tory of San Paolo from the ancient fraternityfounded in Turin in 1563 to the present bank-ing group and the foundation, the close tie be-tween “credit” and “charity”, between financialinvestment and the social use of profits, be-tween the struggle against usury, throughpledged loans and assistance.In the third session which dealt with accountingin agricultural estates and manufacturing firmsin the Modern Age, Giuseppe Bracco (Univer-

sity of Turin) presented the sixteenth-centuryaccount books of Lucedio Abbey, which man-aged a large agricultural estate (Archives of theOrder of St. Maurice), the daily transactionsbooks and the cash register of the Royal SilkDying Works, the “plan of the accounting sys-tem” and the instructions of the Royal Glass andCrystal Works (both eighteenth-centuryTurinese firms, State Archives in Turin). Theparticipants were able to appreciate the valueof these sources also as a “picture” of societyof the period. For example, valuable facets ofmaterial and social life can emerge from thewarehouse lists of the glassworks, containingthe names of objects and their use, or from the“ledger of silk dyes”, which lists the productsfrom which the colours were obtained, whilstfrom other registers we can gather the workers’wages and hours.The final part of the course, held by prof.Claudio Pavese (State University of Milan) onindustrial enterprises in the late nineteenth andearly twentieth centuries opened with an ampletreatise on the evolution of the profession of theaccountant and of accounting, which paralleledthe economic development of enterprises, mak-ing a comparison between the traditional inter-pretation of the phenomenon with the latest his-toriographic developments. An examination ofcompany law, and not limited to Italian law, in theperiod considered, was followed by the analy-sis of the account books of two family-run firms,Lanificio Sella (wool mill) and Idroelettrica Sella(hydro-electricity plant) of Biella (FondazioneSella Archives), compared with the ledgers,statements of assets and operations as well asthe balance sheets of a large industry, SocietàEdison (Edison Archives, Milan).The course concluded with the participants ex-pressing the hope that the initiative could becontinued, to tackle the problems of account-ing documentation of the last century.

Anna CantaluppiCompagnia di San Paolo

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The Dutch Money Museum is young; it was bornon February 14th, Valentine’s Day, 2004. It is theresult of a merger between the three most im-portant collections in the Netherlands:Rijksmuseum het Koninklijk Penningkabinet (theRoyal Coin Cabinet), Het NederlandsMuntmuseum (the Museum of the Royal DutchMint) and de numismatische afdeling van deNederlandse Bank (the numismatic departmentof The Dutch Central Bank). It took ten yearsof debating before the merger was a fact.The Royal Coin Cabinet was founded in 1816,although the origins of the collections can betraced back to the 1750’s. This institution heldthe national numismatic collection and was themost all round. The Mint and Bank both startedcollecting in the mid 19th century, mainly but notexclusively concentrating on modern coins andbanknotes. At both the Mint and Bank over theyears, every now and then research had beendone by interested librarians and the like. How-ever, only in the last decades of the 20th cen-tury were some numismatists employed full-time, enabling a more intensive use of the col-lection for research and exhibition purposes. Atthe Cabinet this was more or less standard fromthe beginning, although in the 19th century thestaff was limited to one person. In the 20th cen-tury the number of specialist curators graduallygrew to four; one for medals; one for ancientcoins; one for medieval coins; and one for mod-ern coins plus paper money. Chairs in numis-matics were held at Leiden University by Van derChijs (1835-1865) and Van Gelder (1976-1983)who concentrated on the medieval and modernperiod. Numismatic teaching was sometimesalso done by professors in other fields.Now we manage and preserve a collection which

consists of approximately 400.000 objects; itconsists mainly of coins, medals and papermoney, but also of gemstones, production ma-terials and decorations. All these fields are alsorepresented in our research topics, and we alsoadded one more- a brand new field of interest:the culture of money. Or, to put it differently:What do people do with money and what doesmoney do with people?- in all its external andsociological manifestations.We all know that numismatics is not a very com-mon subject of research. In fact in the Nether-lands it is not even taught at universities any-more. The present Money Museum is the onlyplace in our country where numismatics arestudied and numismatic objects are preserved.That gives us a rather special place in the Dutchscholarly world. Therefore, the following ques-tion arises: What are we, a museum or a cen-tre of research? The Dutch government haslately shown a lack of interest in keeping numis-matics alive, but we consider it to be our dutyand our mission.Taking into consideration thisrather sceptical look of our financiers, we haveto prove that our research is valuable and thatit contributes to reaching our final goal: the sur-vival of the numismatic scholarship in the Neth-erlands and intercalating it in other sciences.We think the solution lies in the building of amodern research centre with a clear and mea-surable output.In our research department we have 8 research-ers (holding 6 posts) with the following fields ofexpertise:- Drs. Paul Beliën: ancient coins- Drs. Arent Pol: medieval coins and curator forthe collections

- Drs. Marcel van der Beek: modern coins and

The (re)Shaping of Knowledge:Creating a New Department of Collections and Research

in the Money Museum in the Netherlands.

In this article, I would like to explain in what direction the Geld & Bank Museum is heading; how weare transforming an old-fashioned research department into a ‘lean, mean knowledge machine’.

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production gear- Drs. Erik van der Kam: paper money- Mr. Jan Stuurman and drs. Jan Pelsonk: coin

finds- Drs. Carolien Voigtmann: medals- Drs. Gerard Borst: a sociologist for the depart-

ment for the culture of money, who describeshimself as a sociologist of money with a spe-cial interest in financial cultures.

We aim at deepening and enlarging our knowl-edge. Numismatics is our main discipline, but wealso carry out research in the fields of history,economics, archaeology, art history and soci-ology and one of our goals is to intercalatenumismatics into other sciences.

In order to get a clear vision on our departmentwe executed a SWOT:

Strengths:- largest numismatic collection in our coun-

try, largest collection of Dutch numismaticitems worldwide

- all the professional researchers joined inone institute

- digital portal on coin finds- experience in teaching ancient numismat-

ics at Leiden University- largest library on the subject- concentration of knowledge, collections

and sources

Weaknesses:- no successors to our researchers- not outgoing, no proper network- collections not totally accessible- lack of reputation- lack of visible output- internal knowledge management

Opportunities:- spider in the Dutch numismatic network- national and international joining of forces- external accreditation- finding a new market in elderly people

- chairs at universities- world wide web- 24-hour-economy- intercalation into other sciences- put on a new play: the sociology of money

Threats:- lack of money- lack of time- dependent on governmental financing- lack of discipline- recession- isolated position with regard to the rest of

the museum- decreasing interest in the numismatic

science

I will explain a few results of this SWOT.One of our weaknesses is that we lackvisibility.In order to survive it is necessary tomake all of our activities visible. We are obligedto have a measurable output in lectures, publi-cations, websites, databases, and conferences.We also want to act as an information broker:our researchers know where people can go toobtain additional knowledge. These ambitionsurge us to develop and manage a large(inter)national network in the world of universi-ties, archaeological institutions, other museums,research departments and of course the EABHe.V. With the introduction of the worldwide webthe circumstances in which the cultural heritageinstitutions operate have been changed, theyreach a larger audience, both national and in-ternational. This creates opportunities formultidisciplinary cooperation.New goals and new working methods demandnew skills from our researchers. In brief: it is timeto leave the study and move into the world. Ourresearchers will have to network and also haveto make sure that everything they do is docu-mented in some way. For instance: one of ourresearchers was asked to teach a group of chil-dren about numismatics on a very basic level.He prepared properly and the class was a suc-

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cess. In his view it was done and over with. Butwe need a visible output in order to show ourbosses and financiers what this particular re-searcher is doing. The solution is quite simple:write down the lesson, prepare an info sheet andwe have a visible product which can be used byothers. In fact, the work is not that different fromhow we used to work, but we have to sell it bet-ter. However, it is true that producing this kindof output is time consuming, but it is the onlyway to make sure that what we do is visible tothe outside world. Naturally the department ofeducation will play a role in translating researchinto education. Another example is how we dealwith congresses: Returning from a congress, weall prepare an article on the conference, and wediscuss it. We also exchange names of peoplewe have spoken to etc. It is all about the shar-ing of knowledge.In order to reach new audiences we also de-cided to explore a new field of science which hasto do with people and their financial behaviour,since the central motto of the whole DutchMoney Museum will be “What do people do withmoney and what does money do to people?”My colleague Drs. Gerard Borst newly defineshis field of research as the following: Culturerefers to the ways of financial acting and think-ing shared by people belonging to a certaingroup or society. We are not planning to putmany objects concerning this subject in thecollection, we decided to keep the collection asnumismatic as possible, but a few items however,crossed our path: a money exchanger, a safe,and also a dress made out of coins and a cloakmade out of banknotes. The latter two must beregarded as gadgets. The main part of this newsection will be documentary: newspaper clip-pings for instance, or film fragments, photo’s,account books of domestic house holding etc.This leads automatically to a new section of ourwebsite, the web-newspaper on financialbehaviour where it is possible to bring togetherall relevant, up to date information on the sub-ject.

In order to explain to what point the specialistof this section can stretch his investigations I willpresent you two examples of recent research:The first one is an investigation into the Surinamphenomenon of KASMONI. It is an informal sys-tem of banking, in which a great number ofSurinam people save money, get credit andtake insurance against financial risks. Briefly itworks as follows: a small group of about 12people who trust each other donate a certainamount of money to the cashier once a month,who remits the whole amount at once to one ofthe contributors. Who that will be is decided inadvance, either by lottery or by mutual consul-tation. This process is repeated until each mem-ber has had his turn. Due to the fact that thecash is remitted on a monthly basis, the respon-sibility to pay in time rests very heavily on theshoulders of the participants. The question forthe investigator is of course why do people puttheir trust in this system and not in the regularbanking system? The answer has to do withdiscipline: because of the firm social control ofthis system, people have to end up with theirpart of the deal, with less social control theywould not save money at all. In the end it hasnothing to do with trusting banks or not; it hasto do with self-discipline and that is exactly themost interesting part of this system.Another subject of investigation is domesticaccounting. Inspired by a donation of house-keeping account books, my colleague GerardBorst, who is interested in the spread of disci-plined use of money in the Dutch society, inves-tigates the question how more and more peopletook to household accounting in the course ofthe 20th. century.Both subjects are very well suitable for use inexhibitions as well. We also organised a Money-Cultural café, in which we have a speaker whotalks informally about his/her subject of re-search, with discussion afterwards. The infor-mal atmosphere is very important because itleads to easy accessibility for all kind of inter-ested parties.

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As you can see, we hope this department canbe the connecting link between the traditionalnumismatic science and the more outgoing sub-ject of financial behaviour.Traditionally, a curator is responsible for thecare of collections in all their aspects. However,nowadays physical and administrative elementsof care for the collections has been taken overby registrars and collection managers. Since wehave seven researchers – not curators- wethought it might be handy to appoint one of theresearchers as collection-curator. We wantedthe care for the content of the collections in onehand instead of having seven people respon-sible for seven small parts. So now we have acollection-curator who is responsible for all thebusiness concerning the content of the collec-tions: he is the first contact for all questions withregard to lending, borrowing, acquisition, photodeliveries, inquiries about collection-parts etc.Naturally, in matters where a specialist isneeded, he will consult the other researchers.He is the link between management, registrars,the collection manager, the researchers and thepublic. We chose to entrust this function to Drs.Arent Pol, a man who has worked at the RoyalCoin Cabinet for more than 25 years. The re-searchers therefore, are free from the daily carefor the collections, but can be consulted whenneeded. He also will be supervising registrationand database management.We consider one of our great strengths to bethe digital portal on coin finds: called NUMIS.NUMIS originally started out as a database solelyto keep a record of our processed identificationsof coin finds and hoards. Gradually, we addedphotos of all processed coins and we noticed itwas an increasingly helpful tool in the processof identification itself. We also put it aboutamong archaeologists and it became a success.Last year we developed an internet module inwhich finders can try to identify their finds bythemselves and leave us behind an announce-ment so we can keep track of all Dutch coinfinds. We also joined a European project in or-

der to develop a European portal for mainlyancient coin finds. For this particular project wehope to get funded by the European Union. TheNUMIS –project is so successful, we can barelymanage to keep up with the amount of coin findreports we get. It can not be excluded that wewill have to ask for money for this service in thefuture, although that entails the risk of peoplenot reporting their finds anymore. We are yetnot sure what to do. If anyone here has a sug-gestion, I will be very glad to hear it.On the subject of interdisciplinary cooperationwith other sciences, we have taken some stepsfor improvement: We organise, on a yearly ba-sis, a lecture on an interdisciplinary subject,called the Van Gelder –lecture, named after aformer director of the Royal Coin Cabinet. Westarted the series in 2002, with an expose aboutthe flows of private money within the VOC-mo-nopoly, held by a historian. In 2003 we had alecture on the pitfalls and theoretical aspectsof coins find interpretation, by an archaeologist.Last year it was called: ´Numismatics and her-aldry: a colourless history´ in which a specialistin late medieval literature explored heraldry oncoins. This year we will have a historian aboutsymbolism on medals from the Eighty YearsWar. As you can see, the subjects arenumismatical, but they are being explored byspecialists in other fields. Of course, we pub-lish these lectures every year.

Conclusion: in order to survive, our traditionalnumismatists will have to adapt to the demandsof modern society, expand their view, network,and make it clear what it is that they do and makesure that other scientists in other fields see thebenefits that numismatic research can add totheir studies.

Christel SchollaardtManager of the Department of Collections

and Research of the Money Museum inUtrecht, the Netherlands

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Over the past two years the NBG/HA has orga-nized educational visits and viewings for sec-ondary school students –be it from Attica orother provinces of Greece- as well as for uni-versity students. The goal of this is to presentthe students with an active scientificorganisation capable of motivating their inter-ests in history, economy, society and ultimatelythe civilisation of their country.The objectives of the educational programs ofthe NBG/HA are:§ To familiarise students with archival ma-terial of historic importance and with the meth-ods of its processing.§ To render them sensitive to the useful-ness of archiving and the multiple uses of thevarious collections.§ To re-instate a dynamic interaction be-tween the students and the historical & socialenvironment of their country while at the sametime letting them learn and understand themutual relationship between economic and so-cial history.The visits of students at the modern installationsof the NBG/HA not only establish a contact be-tween them and Archival science, the scienceof History and their importance in maintainingthe collective memory of a country; they sup-port the teaching of various cognitive subjects.This is why the contents of a visit arecustomised and follow the requests of the pro-fessor heading each student group. Hence, theviewing is adapted to the age, educational leveland the goal of their visit: supporting their His-tory, Occupational Guidance, Technology andPolitical Economy courses or their inter-disci-plinary projects.

Schools are given a number of options:

1. Visit of the modern installations, refur-bished in 2002The students can visit the researchers’ room,the library, the micro-photography anddigitisation laboratory, the clearing and initialsorting room, as well as the area of final stor-age and archival processing of the material.

2. Visit and viewing of the exhibition areasExhibition areas have been created in theground floor area of the NBG/HA, in which twopermanent exhibitions are hosted as well astemporary ones.The exhibition of archival material and otheritems allow the NBG/HA to present the varietyof its collections. It is through these collectionsthat the students are given the opportunity toget acquainted with original items, to appreci-ate their value and realise the richness of in-formation included in them, so as to becomemore interested in archiving. The exhibitions atpresent are:

National Bank of Greece Historical ArchivesOPEN DOORS

The activities of the National Bank of Greece Historical Archives (NBG/HA) are not only restrictedto banking interests. In its eagerness to produce social and cultural work the NBG/HA is active ina plethora of projects: exhibitions, publications, conferences, research programs, participation inscientific and sectorial societies and companies, educational activities and transfer of know-how.

Visiting and viewing a permanent exhibition

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a. Permanent Exhibition: The historical journeyof NBG through its archival items and its col-lections

The goal of the permanent exhibition is topresent in a concise and implied way the his-tory of NBG since its foundation, but also its rolein the economic, political, social and cultural lifeof the country. The choice of the items exhib-ited is specifically designed in order to promotethe eclectic information existing within the archi-val material and the items which NBG has sal-vaged and which one would hardly believe theycould actually exist within a bank’s archive.

b. Permanent Exhibition: Typographic ma-chines

The main exhibition contains typographicalmachines, most of which once belonged to theAspiotis-ELKA Graphical Arts Company (1873-1996), as well as interim products from the vari-ous phases of production of typographic mate-rials, especially of high security ones, such asbanknotes, coin notes, pass books, chequebooks, letters of guarantee, bills receivable etc.All of the above is accompanied by vast photo-graphic and archival material.

c. Periodical Exhibition: Greek Banknotes –A Journey 1822-2002

The recently inaugurated exhibition on theGreek banknotes is made-up by the collectionof the Welfare Foundation for Social and Cul-

tural Affairs (KIKPE), one of the most importantand complete collections of Greek banknotes,and that of NBG, which includes unique speci-mens of its own first editions.Visitors of this exhibition can observe not onlythe banknotes of the five Greek Banks who hadthe right to issue banknotes in Greece in cer-tain periods (National Bank of Greece, IonianBank, Privileged Bank of Epirothessaly, Bank ofGreece and The Bank of Greece itself), but canalso discover banknotes and other means oftransaction that circulated during the GreekRevolution (1821), the Capodistrian years andthe periods of Occupation when both occupantsand revolutionaries circulated their ownbanknotes.The totality of these items make up the mostcomplete collection of Greek banknotes everpresented in public.The viewing of this exhibition will bring impor-tant periods of the history of the modern Greekstate to the visitors’ memory while at the sametime it will provide them with information on his-tory, public finances, economic and artistictrends, printing techniques etc.Each of the above areas (a-c) will soon be avail-able for a virtual visit through a CD-ROM.

3.Presentation of the System of Archivaland Historical Information of the NBG/HAThe database of Archival and Historical Infor-mation of the NBG/HA is based on the Interna-tional Standard of Archival Description of the CAThe aim of this project is to present to studentsthe information fields concerning the documentsand the collections of the NBG/HA (banknotes,office machines, architectural designs etc.)

Visiting the storage rooms

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Study and research facilities of the NBG/HAVisiting the areas of aranging the archival material

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...Introducing the NBG-HA to students in the conferenceroom

Future goals of the NBG/HA are:

a. The creation of specific educational projectsb. The extension of activities now only offered to students of secondary and tertiary education,

to students in primary education too.c. The production of supportive educational material (leaflets for use before, and/or during the

viewing, memorabilia and educational material for parents and teachers)d. Last but not least is the aim to provide students with computer facilities in order to search the

digitised collection and documents of the archive system of the NBG/HA.

The NBG/HA is not an isolated institution providing specific knowledge. It is a part of the totality ofGreek museums-archives that have realised the importance of opening their collections to the publicin a new way, in order to provide an imaginative trip to the past and inspire the visitors in a creativeway that will be useful in their every day life.

Maria LebessiHistorical Archives of NBG

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Changes within the EABH Boards

First of all the EABH is delighted to welcome Mr. Jean-Claude Trichet, President of the EuropeanCentral Bank as our new Chairman of the Board of Management, following his official registration inthe Frankfurt Charities Register. As Chairman, Mr. Trichet kindly hosted the 8th Board of Manage-ment Meeting on the 27th March 2006 at the European Central Bank in Frankfurt at which someimportant decisions about the future of the EABH were reached.

At this meeting the Members of the Board of Management accepted the resignation of Mr. JavierSantillán who has decided to step down as Treasurer of the EABH after many years of successfulcooperation. The EABH would like to thank Mr. Javier Santillán for his wonderful collaboration sincehis appointment in 2000. Dr. Luís Nunes has agreed to take over the position of Treasurer and, inorder to avoid any conflict of interest, Dr. Nunes left the Academic Advisory Council. Dr. Nunes’withdrawal allows a well-known colleague, Roger Nougaret, Crédit Agricole SA, Paris, who is a longstanding member of the EABH, to rejoin the AAC.

The EABH would also like to welcome three new members to the Board of Patrons. Mr. TakisArapoglou, National Bank of Greece, Dr. Carlos Santos Ferreira, Caixa Geral de Depósitos and Mr.Michel Pébereau, BNP Paribas have agreed to join the Board.

Forthcoming events

Lisbon Workshops

The EABH will hold two workshops at the forthcoming Conference kindly hosted by the Caixa Geralde Depósitos.

An archives workshop will take place on Thursday 25 May at the Caixa Geral de Depósitos on thetheme of Banking and Financial Archives: Priorities for the Future. The committee responsible forthe programme is composed of Edwin Green (HSBC Holdings plc) and Francesca Pino (Banca Intesa).We have had a wonderful response to this workshop and we trust it will be a great success.

The second workshop on Art and Cultural Activities in Financial Institutions is a new endeavour forthe EABH and will run concurrently to the EABH conference on 26-27 May. The workshop will pro-vide a platform for discussion among curators of the most prestigious corporate art collections infinancial institutions in Europe and it will also give the chance to the representatives of institutionswhich have not set up a collection, or which are currently in the process of doing, to profit from theexperience of experts in this field. The workshop will provide an insight into the cultural activities ofleading institutions in Europe.

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Friday, 26 May 2006

Welcome AddressCarlos Santos Ferreira, Chairman, Caixa Geral deDepósitos, LisbonJean-Claude Trichet, President of the European Cen-tral Bank, Chairman of the EABH e.V., Frankfurt amMain

Opening SessionThe Portuguese Financial System since WWIIJoão Salgueiro, The Portuguese Bankers Association,Lisbon

Panel Discussion on Finance and RegulationModerator: Manuel Jacinto Nunes, School of Econom-ics and Management, Lisbon

Clemens Börsig, Chairman of the Supervisory Board,Deutsche Bank AG, Frankfurt am MainVítor Constâncio, Governor, Bank of Portugal, LisbonMalcolm Knight, General Manager, BIS, BaselGertrude Tumpel-Gugerell, Member of the ExecutiveBoard, ECB, Frankfurt am Main

Before the Reversal: The Political Economy of Fi-nance in the 19th CenturyChair: Jaime Reis, University of Lisbon

Conservative Abroad, Liberal at Home: British BankRegulation in the 19th CenturyPhilip L. Cottrell, University of LeicesterThe State, Economic Institutions and the EfficiencyIssue: Bankruptcy Laws and Procedures in Italy, En-gland, and the US, ca. 1870-1939.Paolo Di Martino, University of ManchesterThe Emergence of Central Banks and Banking Regu-lation in Comparative PerspectiveRichard Grossman, Wesleyan University

The Defining Moment: The Great InterwarReversal of Financial DevelopmentChair: Stefano Battilossi, Carlos III Univer-sity of Madrid

The Cost of Banking RegulationLuigi Zingales, University of ChicagoWhen Small was Beautiful: Banking Regula-tion and Small Firms in Interwar EuropeFrancesca Carnevali, University of BirminghamRegulation and Supervision: The Rise ofCentral Banks’ Research DepartmentsMaria Teresa Tortella, Bank of Spain, Madrid&Pablo Martin-Aceña, University of Alcalá,Madrid

Saturday, 27 May 2006

State Ownership and Regulation in the 20thCentury: Comparing Western Europe andthe USAChair: Gerald D. Feldman, University ofCalifornia, Berkeley

Regulation and Governance: a ecular Per-spectiveEugene White, Rutgers UniversityThe London Stock Exchange and the BritishGovernment in the 20th CenturyRanald Michie, University of DurhamThe Role of the State in the French FinancialSystem during the 20th Century: A SpecificCase?Laure Quennouëlle-Corre & André Straus, CNRS,Paris

Overcoming the Legacy of the Great Re-versal: Financial Reforms at the End of the20th CenturyChair: Nuno Valério, School of Economicsand Management, Lisbon

Banking Crisis in the North. A ComparativeAnalysis of Finland and Sweden in the 1990sPeter Englund, Stockholm School of EconomicsThe Efficiency of the Banking Sector in the EU:a Cross-Border ComparisonDalia Lasaite & Sigitas Skuodas, former Stock-holm School of Economics in RigaThe Missing Link. International BankingSupervision in the Archives of the Bank forInternational SettlementsPiet Clement, BIS, BaselThe Regulation of International Banking fromthe 1950s to the 1990sCatherine Schenk, University of Glasgow

Panel Discussion on Basel II, PrudentialRegulation and Deregulation of Banking,Merging of Capital MarketsModerator: David Marsh, David Marsh &Co. Ltd., London

António Borges, Vice Chairman, GoldmanSachs International, LondonDavid T. Llewellyn, Professor, LoughboroughUniversityLiliana Rojas-Suarez, Senior Fellow, Centrefor Global Development, WashingtonRichard Sylla, Professor, New York University

Lisbon ConferenceThe State and Financial Services: Regulation, Ownership and Deregulation

26 – 27 May 2006Caixa Geral de Depósitos, Lisbon

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New Members

Corporate Members

Sveriges Riksbank(joined the EABH in April 2006)The Riksbank is the central bank of Sweden and an authority under the Riksdag (the Swedishparliament). The bank’s objectives are to safeguard the value of money (inflation target 2%) and topromote a safe and efficient payment system. The Riksbank was founded in 1668 and is the world’soldest working central bank. It is managed by an Executive Board with a Governor, Stefan Ingves,and five deputy governors. The Riksbank is a member of the European System of Central Banks(ESCB) but Sweden has not adopted the euro (currency:krona). The Riksbank is located inStockholm and has 400 employees

Individual Members

Adrian Tschoegl(joined the EABH in January 2006)Dr. Tschoegl has a PhD in International Business from the Sloan School at MIT, and a Masters inPublic Administration and a BA in Political Science, both from UCLA. He currently teaches as Lec-turer in Management at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and is the Manage-ment Department Undergraduate Advisor. His research interests center on international banks –who they are, where they go, when they go there, what they do there, how they go, and why theygo. Dr. Tschoegl has published numerous monographs and articles in scholarly journals on inter-national banking, Japanese finance, gold prices, and international trade and business. Prior toteaching at Wharton, he worked for the Tokyo branch of SBCI Securities, a subsidiary of then SwissBank, as a macro-economist following the Japanese economy. Prior to working in Tokyo, Dr. Tschoegltaught at the University of Michigan Business School. We are delighted to welcome him as an indi-vidual member.

Catherine Eagleton(joined the EABH in April 2006)Catherine Eagleton is Curator of Modern Money at the British Museum, a role which involves look-ing after more than 100,000 coins, banknotes, credit cards, and many other kinds of objects relat-ing to money from 1700 to the present day. Her research currently focuses on money in Africa, andon money and empire, and she also has a strong interest in the history of collecting. At present,she is working on a revised and updated new edition of the book Money: A History and on a num-ber of articles, exhibitions, and educational programmes. We are delighted to welcome her to theEABH.

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Financial History ReviewVolume 13, Issue 01

April 2006

Published in April, the first part of Volume 13 of the Financial History Review is a special issue onthe formation of an American monetary union, offering readers a fascinating choice of articles comple-mented by a substantial review section.

AbstractsDavid F. Weiman: Introduction

Research ArticlesRonald Michener and Robert E. Wright, ‘Development of the US monetary union’Farley Grubb, ‘The US Constitution and monetary powers: an analysis of the 1787 constitutionalconvention and the constitutional transformation of the US monetary system’Richard Sylla, ‘The transition to a monetary union in the United States, 1787-1795’Peter L. Rousseau, ‘A common currency: early US monetary policy and the transition to the dollar’

Archive ReviewGary Richardson, ‘Records of the Federal Reserve of Governors in Record Group 82 at the Na-tional Archives of the United States’

Book ReviewsMira Wilkins, The History of Foreign Investment in the United States, 1914-1945 (reviewer: AlbertA. Broder)Michael P. Costeloe, Bonds and Bondholders, British Investors and Mexico’s Foreign Debt, 1824-1888 (reviewer: Albert A. Broder)Bernard Desjardins, Michel Lescure, Roger Nougaret, Alain Plessis and André Straus (eds.), LeCrédit lyonnais (1863-1986) (reviewer : Giuseppe Conti)Kozo Yamamura and Wolfgang Streeck (eds.), The End of Diversity? Prospects for German andJapanese Capitalism (reviewer Sebastien Lechevalier)

We hope that you enjoy reading this issue.Subscriptions for non-members may be sent directly to the publisher:

Cambridge University PressThe Edinburgh Building

Shaftesbury RoadCambridge CB2 2RU

[email protected]+44 (0) 1223 326096

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The San Francisco Earthquake of 1906: UrbanReconstruction, Insurance, and Implications for the Future

The Institute of European Studies and the European Association for Banking and Financial Historywere pleased to sponsor an International Panel presenting some new perspectives on the SanFrancisco Earthquake and Its Implications on Wednesday, March 22, 2006

This panel brought together three German experts to provide a historical and contemporary per-spective on the 1906 earthquake.Dr. Christoph Strupp, German Historical Institute, Washington: “Dealing with Disaster: The San

Franciso Earthquake of 1906”·Barbara Eggenkämper, Head, Center for Corporate History, Allianz AG, Munich: “The San Fran-

cisco Earthquake of 1906 and its Effects on the European Insurance Business”·Gerhard Berz, Munich Reinsurance Company and Head of the Munich Re Geoscience Group: “Natu-

ral Disasters and Climate Change: Concerns and Possible Countermeasures ofthe Insurance Industry”

Dr. Strupp has conducted original historical research earthquake and has produced an originalstudy of the management and recovery from the disaster. Although it is not generally well known,European insurance and reinsurance companies were hard hit by the San Francisco earthquakeand, as Barbara Eggenkämper showed using sources from Allianz and Munich Re archives, thisled to important changes in the organization of the industry and its policies. Finally, Gerhard Berz,a leading figure in the international insurance business, who has been heralded as the “master ofdisaster,” discussed the role of the insurance business in the present situation.

Non-EABH Announcements and Forthcoming Events

Association of Business Historians 2006 Conference ‘Globalization and Business History’ willtake place on 16-17 June 2006, at Queen Mary, University of London. The importance of the topichas made it a widely studied subject by scholars in many academic fields. The primary aim of thisconference is to encourage specific business history contributions to the subject. The conferenceprogramme and more information is available at www.busman.qmul.ac.uk/abh.

The tenth annual conference of the European Business History Association will take place inthe Copenhagen Business School, Copenhagen August 17-20, 2006. The conference will be con-cerned with the dynamics of capitalism and business enterprises. You are welcome to submit pro-posals for papers or panels dealing with the three conference-themes. Papers dealing with otherissues are also welcomed. The conference is organised by Centre for Business History, Copenha-gen, Centre for Business History, Aarhus, and Department for History, International and SocialStudies, Aalborg. More information is available at www.ebha.org.

The 26th Société Universitaire Européenne de Recherches Financières (SUERF) Collo-quium will take place in Lisbon on 12-14 October 2006 “Money, Finance and Demography: theConsequences of Ageing” It is a 2½ day Colloquium in co-operation with the Universidade Nova deLisboa jointly organized with and sponsored by the Banco de Portugal and by Millennium bcp. TheCall for Papers and further information is available on the SUERF website www.suerf.org

The Institute for Corporate Culture Affairs (ICCA) will be holding a workshop on “The Historyof Brands” to take place at the Leon Kozminski Academy in Warsaw 19 – 20 March 2007. Thisevent will be aimed both at academics as well as management and opinion formers working in thisfield. Companies and brands to be presented and discussed will include those from luxury goods

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such as Champagne to industry and will include larger global companies such as Siemens andPhilips to small highly specialised Niche brands. ICCA welcomes those interested in attending, par-ticipating or holding presentations at this event to contact Nick Tolhurst at [email protected] further information or to regularly consult ICCA’s website at www.cca-institute.org for informationupdates.

On September 9 – 10, 2005, the Ottoman Bank Museum hosted the European Historical Eco-nomics Society Conference , organized by the European Historical Economics Society.Aproximately 150 economic historians - among them several Turks - participated in the conference,which was moderated by the president of the society, Prof. Sevket Pamuk. The two-day conference,at which a total of 100 individual papers were submitted and the results of the doctoral dissertationcompetition announced, was held in 6 sessions. Among the academics, attending the 6th EuropeanHistorical Economics Society Conference, were internationally renowned economic historians as,Robert Allen (Oxford University), Jeffrey Williamson (Harvard University), Patrick O’Brien (LondonSchool of Economics), Marc Flandreau (Paris), Giovani Federico (Florence) and Leandro Pradosde la Escosura (Madrid). These international conferences are held once every two years, at differ-ent locations. The conference has previously been held in Spain, the United Kingdom, and Portu-gal. By encouraging research in European economics and economic history, the European Histori-cal Economics Society aims to promote education in European economic history and make it moreaccessible. The society’s goals include the organization of conferences and summer schools andthe publication of periodicals to further study and research on the topic.Infomation about the program, the papers to be presented and other details concerning the confer-ence, can be obtained at the following link: http://www.ata.boun.edu.tr/ehes/ehes_frame.htm

The Ottoman Bank Museum is hosting a series of monthly seminars entitled “Economy and Soci-ety on Both Shores of the Aegean”, organized in collaboration with Alpha Bank and the HistoryDepartment of Boðaziçi University. The first seminar was held on October 22, 2004. The first semi-nar started with the opening speeches of, Mr. Hector Verykios, Prof. Ayþe Soysal and Prof. SelimDeringil. The three papers presented were as follows: Dr. Alexis Alexandris, Consul General ofGreece in Istanbul, discussing new perspectives in Greek-Turkish relations; Prof. Kostas Kostisfrom the University of Athens telling about the Ottoman and Turkish history studies conducted in hiscountry; Prof. Edhem Eldem from Boðaziçi University giving details on the Modern Greek studiescarried out in Turkey. This first seminar ended with the closing speech of Tolga Egemen and thescreening of a short film, “Double Memory”, a film about the political conjuncture of the two coun-tries and their cultural similarities. Focusing on the Greek-Orthodox populations during the lateOttoman period and the first decades of the Republic, the seminars address issues concerningethnic and civic identity, inter-communal relations, urban culture, educational policies, commercialactivities, social networks, the exchange of populations, and the Patriarchate. Since November2004, the Ottoman Bank Museum hosted Assoc. Prof. Athanasia Anagnostopoulou from PanteionUniversity, Prof. Selim Deringil from Bogaziçi University, Prof. Haris Exertzoglou from the Universityof the Aegean, Assoc. Prof. Arzu Öztürkmen from Bogaziçi University, Assist. Prof. Socrates Petmezasand Dr. Antonis Anastasopoulos from the University of Crete, Assist. Prof. Elçin Macar from YýldýzTeknik University, Assist. Prof. Akis Papataxiarchis from University of the Aegean, in Mytilene, Prof.Filiz Yenisehirlioglu from Baskent University, in Ankara, Prof. Alexandra Yerolympos, from the Schoolof Architecture at the Aristotelion University of Thessaloniki, Assist. Prof. Meltem Toksöz from theBosphorus University and Dr. Dimitrios Stamatopoulos from Aristotelion University of Thessaloniki,who provide comprehensive information on the historical past of the region.The seminars will last until the end of 2006 and conferences will be published in 2007. Informationabout the details of the seminars can be obtained at the following link: http://www. obarsiv.com/english/news.html

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Winners of the Prize Competition forResearch on the History of Banking and Finance Announced

The results of the third Prize Competition for Research on the History of Banking and Finance,sponsored by Garanti Bank and organized by the Ottoman Bank Archives and Research Center incollaboration with the European Association for Banking History and the History Foundation (TarihVakfý), were announced on December 27 at an awards ceremony held at the Museum. Among thosehonored at the ceremony were Assoc. Prof. Erol Özvar, winner in the best monograph category,Filiz Dýðýroðlu, winner of the prize for best master ’s thesis, and Uri M. Kupferschmidt andMustafa Erdem Kabadayý, joint recipients of the prize for the best scientific paper. Assoc. Prof.Tahsin Özcan received an honorary mention in the monograph category and Hüseyin Al wasawarded one in the Ph.D. thesis category.

Assoc. Prof. Erol Özvar’s study, Osmanlý Maliyesi’nde Malikane Uygulamasý, in which he exam-ines the Malikâne tax farming system used in the Ottoman Empire, was awarded the prize for bestmonograph. Filiz Dýðýroðlu received the best master ’s thesis prize for her dissertation, Reji’ninKaradeniz Bölgesi’ndeki Uygulamalarý, describing the activities of the Reji company which held themonopoly on tobacco in the Ottoman Empire.

Uri M. Kupferschmidt, one of the recipients of the prize for the best scientific paper, relates the riseand fall of the 19th century middle eastern department store chain, Orosdi-Back, in his article, Eu-ropean Department Stores and Middle Eastern Consumers: The Orosdi-Back Saga , while co-re-cipient Mustafa Erdem Kabadayi, drawing on state archival material, retraces the successful ca-reer and abrupt decline of the moneylender Mikirdiç Cezayirliyan, who lived in Istanbul between1805 and 1861, in his study, The Sharp Rise and Sudden Fall of an Ottoman Entrepreneur: TheCase of Mikirdich Cezayirliyan.

Assoc. Prof. Tahsin Özcan was awarded an honorary mention in the monograph category for hiswork, Osmanlý Para Vakýflarý: Kanuni Dönemi Üsküdar Örneði, which focuses on the Ottoman cashwaqfs that functioned as the period’s credit and social security institutions. Hüseyin Al was anotherrecepient of an honorary mention for his Ph.D. thesis, Ondokuzuncu Yüzyýlda Ülke Riski, FinansPolitik, Ýngiliz Tahvil Sahipleri ve Babýali, a comparative analysis of state borrowing in the begin-ning of the 19th century.

The three winning papers and theses of the 2002-2003 prize competition were published this yearand are available both as single publications or in packs of three. The books are obtainable at theMuseum or can be purchased from bookstores.

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PRIZE FOR BEST MONOGRAPHErol ÖzvarOsmanlý Maliyesi’nde Malikane UygulamasýKitabevi, Istanbul, 2003.

PRIZE FOR BEST MASTER’S THESISFiliz DýðýroðluReji’nin Karadeniz Bölgesi’ndeki Uygulamalarý (1884-1914)Master ’s thesis, Institute of Turcology Research, Marmara University, Istanbul, 2004.

PRIZE FOR BEST SCIENTIFIC PAPERUri M. KupferschmidtEuropean Department Stores and Middle Eastern Consumers: The Orosdi-Back SagaSeptember, 2005.Mustafa Erdem KabadayýThe Sharp Rise and Sudden Fall of an Ottoman Entrepreneur: The Case of Mýkýrdich Cezayirliyan,September, 2005

HONORARY MENTIONMONOGRAPH: Tahsin ÖzcanOsmanlý Para Vakýflarý: Kanuni Dönemi Üsküdar ÖrneðiTürk Tarih Kurumu, Ankara, 2003.PH.D THESIS: Hüseyin AlOndokuzuncu Yüzyýlda Ülke Riski, Finans Politik, Ýngiliz Tahvil Sahipleri ve BabýaliPh.D. thesis, Department of Economic History, Institute of Social Sciences, Istanbul University,Istanbul, 2005.

JURYProf. Ali Akyýldýz, Prof. Edhem Eldem, Prof. Murat Çizakça, Prof. Seyfettin Gürsel, Prof. ªevket Pamuk,Ergun Özen.

PUBLICATIONS AND AWARDS OF THE SECOND PRIZE COMPETITIONYavuz Selim Karakýþla, Women, War and Work in the Ottoman Empire: Society for the Employ-ment of Ottoman Muslim Women (1916-1923), Best Ph.D. Thesis Prize.Ö. Faruk Bölükbaþý, Tezyid-i Varidat ve Tenkih-i Masarifat, II. Abdülhamid Döneminde Mali Ýdare,Best Master ’s Thesis Prize.Aliye F. Mataracý, Trade Letters as Instances of Economy, Ideology and Subjectivity, HonoraryMention in the scientific paper category.

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Book Releases

Hubert Bonin, Les banques du grand Sud-Ouest. Système bancaire et gestion des risques (desannées 1900 à nos jours), Paris, p.l.a.g.e, 2006 (524 pp.).

Hubert Bonin, Les coopératives laitières du grand Sud-Ouest (1893-2003). Le mouvementcoopérateur et l’économie laitière , Paris, p.l.a.g.e, novembre 2005 (350 pp.).

Isabelle Cassiers and Philippe Ledent (2005), Politique monétaire et croissance économique enBelgique à l’ère de Bretton Woods (1944 - 1971), (Brussels: National Bank of Belgium). http://www.nbb.be/pub/Banners/20051124+Bank+Frank+Euro.htm?l=en&t=ho

Isabelle Cassiers and Philipe Ledent, ‘Belgian monetary policy under Bretton Woods’, in M. Muller(ed.), Small European Countries Responding to Globalisation and De-globalisation (Peter Lang,Forthcoming).

Herbert H. Kaplan, Nathan Mayer Rothschild and the Creation of a Dynasty- The Critical Years1806-1816 Stanford, Calif. : Stanford University Press, 2006

Ledent, Philippe & Isabelle Cassiers. Learning to manage external constraints: Belgian monetarypolicy during the Bretton Woods era (1944-1971).Paper presented at the Sixth conference ofEHESS, downloadable on:http://www.ata.boun.edu.tr/ehes/ehes_frame.htm

Corry van Renselaar (DNB) has defended her thesis. This study has been published in a book,entitled Partij in de Marge. Oorlog, goud en De Nederlandsche Bank, Boom-Amsterdam, 2005.(with an English summary.)

Wim Vanthoor (DNB) has published his English edition of the history of the Dutch central bank,also Boom publishers. Now the history of the bank is also accessible for an international audi-ence.

Klaus Weber Far-sighted charity: Adolphe and Julie de Rothschild and their eye clinics in Parisand Geneva http://www.rothschildarchive.org/ib/articles/AR2005Fondation.pdf

Klaus Weber One hundred years of the ‘Bluff Rothschildien’: housing the poor in Paris http://www.rothschildarchive.org/ib/articles/AR2004Bluff.pdf

Forthcoming Publications

Archives and Corporate Culture

Workshops’ Proceedings

The EABH organised two workshops in 2004 and 2005, specifying on the relationship betweenhistory, corporate culture, and archives. Publication of the workshops’ proceedings is scheduledfor May 2006. The EABH trusts that archivists will derive fresh ideas and encouragement fortheir tasks from the forthcoming book.

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European Association forBanking and FinancialHistory e.V.

2/2006

In late summer 2004 the Jewish MuseumBerlin presented the special exhibition “MaxSteinthal: A Banker and his pictures”. A fasci-nating group of paintings, prints and documentshad been found - quite unexpectedly - duringthe removal of material from the basement ofthe Dresden Gemäldegalerie at the time of thedevastating Elbe floods of 2002. Its history wassubsequently traced back to the Steinthal fam-ily and the extraordinary sequence of eventsthat led to its being deposited in Dresden wasthereby unravelled. The collection comprisedOld Master, 19th-Century and Impressionist pic-tures and prints, as well as decorative works ofart and documents. Chief among the highlightsof the collection was an important 19th-centurywork - Las Tras Velas (The Three Sails), by theSpanish artist Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida,painted in 1903. Another outstanding objectwas the first share certificate of Deutsche Bankfrom 1871, with the number 00001.

Who was the man behind the collection? Whowas Max Steinthal? Along with Georg von Si-emens and Hermann Wallich, Max Steinthalwas one of the most important figures from thefirst decades of Deutsche Bank existence. Alland all he was linked to the bank for more thansix decades. He was born in Berlin on Christ-mas’ eve 1850 the son of a Jewish merchant.In the ninety years of his life he never left thecity for longer than four weeks. After schoolfollowed a banking apprenticeship withBankhaus A. Paderstein. An intelligent, hard-working young man, he rose quickly throughthe ranks. After the liquidation of Padersteinas a result of the so called “Gründerkrise” in1873, he was left searching for a new job. Atthis time he made the acquaintance ofHermann Wallich, manager of an up-comingjoint stock company which had been foundedonly three years previously and which hadsurvived the economic crisis – Deutsche Bankin Berlin. Wallich, also a Jew, liked the youngman and thought about whether there mightnot be a function for him within Deutsche Bank.When Georg Siemens, first spokesmen ofDeutsche Bank, first met 23 year old Steinthalhe asked him: “So, you want to become headclerk here?” Steinthal replied self-confidently:“Not at all, I want to be a director.” And so itwas that Steinthal was made a board directorof Deutsche Bank. One of Steinthals earliertasks in the late 1870s and 1880s was to pushDeutsche Bank’s foreign exchange businessinto a better position. At the same time he be-came responsible for the bank’s stock ex-change transactions and cared for the domes-tic financing business. The major role of thearbitrage business in Berlin was also a resultof Steinthal efforts.

Continue on page 81Max Steinthal, 1903 (1850-1940)

Max Steinthal (1850-1940) - a forgotten banker

Continue from cover page

In 1889 he married Fanny Lindenthal, a youngViennese of Jewish origin. After two decades ofexistence Deutsche Bank began to expand itsposition as an investment bank by financing bigindustrial firms. Steinthals time was mostly oc-cupied as head of industrial syndicats at thistime. One of his major projects was the trans-formation and reorganisation of theMannesmann Röhrenwerke into a joint stockcompany. He played a decisive role in pushingthe extension of the Berlin underground andelevated railways. He combined the financing ofthe urban railway system with the developmentof new residential quarters by founding severalproperty companies. Later on he was called“Father of the Berlin underground”. He was fur-ther engaged with the Goerz-Companies(South-African gold-mining), the Deutsch-Ostafrikanische Eisenbahngesellschaft (Ger-man-East African Railway Company), and theBayerische Stickstoffwerke (Bavarian NitrogenIndustries).

Steinthal was often characterized as a man withenormous persistence. He was able to managedifficult tasks over decades. While his col-leagues travelled all over the world to checkDeutsche Bank’s major engagements on thescene, Steinthal kept the bank on course “athome”.

Steinthal left the Management Board ofDeutsche Bank in late 1905 and was appointedto the Supervisory Board, from 1923 until 1932as its chairman. But that official change did notmean that he really reduced his workload forDeutsche Bank, it was more that he could bet-ter concentrate on some of the most importantprojects.

Beside his numerous activities as a banker,Steinthal made significant donations for philan-thropic purposes and began to set up a privateart collection (for which his wife Fanny was pri-marily responsible). But he was also a promoter

for Deutsche Bank’s corporate culture. Thechoral society and the orchestral society, as wellas the fencing club of Deutsche Bank werefounded on Steinthal’s initiative. He remaineda loyal sponsor over the years and often madegenerous donations.

Finally, in May 1935, when he was 85 years old,his Jewish faith became a political embarrass-ment. Steinthal resigned from the DeutscheBank’s Supervisory Board with the words: “I don’twant to make any trouble for the bank”. Emigra-tion wasn’t a real option for a man of his ageeven though the living conditions for him andhis wife became worse and worse. After the socalled “Reichskristallnacht” he was urged to sellhis fashionable villa in Berlin-Charlottenburgand his idyllic property at Maxsee east of theGerman capital. On 8 December 1940 twoweeks before his 90th birthday he died in Berlinin a hotel-room, Fanny Steinthal survived herhusband by only ten month. Most of their sevenchildren had already emigrated from Germany,but one son died in a concentration camp.

Max Steinthal did not leave memoirs and whenhe died in 1940 it was unthinkable to publish anobituary for a Jewish banker. This remained sountil 2002, when the Berlin municipality restoreda commemorative plaque for the “Father of theBerlin underground” at the Alexanderplatz sta-tion, which had been replaced after 1933, andin 2004 – corresponding to the above men-tioned exhibition – a publication came out whichintroduced Steinthal as a banker and collector.

Reinhard Frost

Historical Institute of Deutsche Bank

Dear Colleagues,

More than fifteen years after its foundation, the EABH’s purpose remains to promote dialoguebetween archivists, historians and representatives of the banking and financial sectors from all overEurope and provide a network for the exchange of ideas and experiences while promoting the pres-ervation of historically valuable archive material and fostering research into financial history. Theremarkable quality of the articles in this 17th edition of the EABH Newsletter shows that this objec-tive is being achieved on a continuing basis.

The wealth of reviews of bank archives illustrates that the archives remain the most important ob-ject of the EABH interest. Indeed, the promotion of archives is now more important than ever. In themodern age banking and financial archives are facing two serious threats. The first threat is posedby the prevalence of mergers, takeovers and liquidations. As there is never a merger of equals, itis inevitable that when a merger takes place one institution’s identity and cultural memory will beoverwhelmed and destroyed. The archives themselves are also in danger of being lost if the insti-tution does not consciously operate a preservation policy. In the case of a takeover, this is an evenmore likely occurence, and when a company is liquidised unavoidably so.

The second threat posed to the preservation of historically relevant material is that of technologi-cal advancement. The development and prevalence of information technology- internet, email, SMS-in the world of banking and finance has led to the destruction of much material of historical inter-est. Information, previously conveyed by letter, is now transferred via electronic media. There areno longer originals which means information has a very short lifespan and is thus rarely stored forlong periods of time. Though valid forms of conveying information, emails and SMS ensure there isno way of archiving historically relevant material contained within them. The same can be said ofWebsites whose contents change frequently but which are not recorded. Of course, informationpassed through these media could be saved, but for most companies the costs are too high. Theforthcoming Workshop on Banking and Financial Archives: Priorities for the Future will deal morespecifically with these challenges and ways of combating them.

The review in this Bulletin of the challenges facing the Geld + Bank Museum in Utrecht demon-strates the difficulties facing many historical banking associations and bank archives in the age ofmergers and takeovers. However, it is reassuring to see several international banks showing anactive interest, and also a financial interest in their archives.

However, as well as concerning ourselves with archives, the EABH must be willing to grow and de-velop in line with the needs and interests of its members. The EABH is working on developing itsrole in the cultural activities of financial institutions- a very important and contemporary subjectmatter which is intrinsically linked to the cultural memory of banking and financial institutions. Thefascinating results of the survey on Art and Cultural Activities in Financial Institutions publishedhere illustrate the great interest our member institutions have in this field. Let us not forget: thetopic of cultural activities in financial activities ties in perfectly with one of the EABH’s main objec-tives: to reinforce our collective European culture and identity.

Manfred Pohl

Deputy Chairman

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