The Economic and Business History Society

Steam Engines of Credit: The Role of Banks in Switzerland’s Economic Development, 1850-1913

From the mid-nineteenth century to the beginning of World War One, the Swiss economy grew to be among the most advanced in the world. Economists however have not yet completely determined the reasons for Switzerland’s economic success. One source of this success may have been the Swiss banking system. This article explores the link between Swiss banks and Swiss economic development using historical analysis and time series econometric techniques. The evidence suggests that Switzerland’s banks contributed to Swiss economic success and that Switzerland’s universal banks in particular contributed to the country’s industrial development.

Historians have increasingly been using network and narrative analysis as a means by which to explore their data. By doing so, they are able to explore how actors of interest used their relationships to undertake business and economic endeavors, and how, in turn, these were shaped by the discourse to which they had access. This paper presents a novel methodology using visual analytics to combine both social network (relationship) and textual (sentiment) analysis to visualize the information contained in historical sources over time. The definition of network narrative posited in this paper allows the historian to quantify and therefore assess the impact of, and reaction to, endogenous and exogenous events on actor networks. In order demonstrate the applicability of this approach, we apply it to the case study of Joshua Johnson, an American merchant in London during the 1772 credit crisis. This paper builds on the more recent network studies which show that networks were not only complex, but changed over time in reaction to events.

This paper is a written version of the keynote speech presented at the Economic and Business History Society conference in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma on May 26, 2017. I summarize existing research on the distribution and impact of New Deal spending and lending programs and also discuss several new strains of New Deal research.