Abstract

"“Fiction In the Archives”? Writing the Early History of the European Financial Crisis of 1931"

Per H. Hansen, Copenhagen Business School (phh.mpp@cbs.dk)

“Fiction In the Archives”? Writing the Early History of the European 1931 Financial Crisis.

In her fascinating book Natalie Zemon Davis contrasts the way she was taught to do history as a student by peeling “away the fictive elements in our documents so we could get at the real facts” with seeking to understand how her subjects “accounted for motive, and how through narrative they made sense of the unexpected and built coherence into immediate experience.”
There is a long way from Davis’s ordinary 16th century peoples’ letters of pardon to the topic of this paper that focuses on central bankers’ and economists’ explanations of the financial crisis of 1931. Nevertheless, the question of how actors made sense of and explained their world is pertinent in the case of the 1931 crisis as well.
In this paper I analyze the early narrative emplotment of the European 1931 crisis in texts from the Bank for International Settlements, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the Bank of England, and two more general and publicly available texts by historian Arnold Toynbee and economist R.G. Hawtrey respectively. I then discuss this analysis in the context of the historiography of the crisis.