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City Bankers, 1890-1914, by Youssef Cassis, translated by Margaret Rocques; pp. xv + 350. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994, 40.00, $64.95.
Among late-Victorian institutions, few can match the City of London either in its claim to historical importance or its lack of solid documentation. Youssef Cassis's newly translated City Bankers provides English-speaking historians with an important first step towards understanding what made the City tick. Focusing on the banking sector, Cassis has delivered a scrupulous social history of the careers of the London financiers whose investment decisions and political influence did so much to shape the crucial quartercentury prior to the First World War. If his focus on family connections and career paths comes at the expense of an extended inquiry into the bankers' economic or political ideas, that is at least partly intentional on his part. One of the central points of the book is that behind-the-scenes social ties carried more weight in the City than any formal economic divisions or political disputes that appeared at the time.
Cassis defines "banker" broadly, including under that term Bank of England directors; general managers and directors of the companies which would jell into the "big five" British banks after World War I; heads of the once-stately private domestic banks, only a few of which were still in business by 1914; and the family dynasties who dominated the business of foreign lending. All these men, together with stockbrokers, insurance directors, and other traders, shared space in London's richest and most claustrophobic square mile, where "people...