In the second half of the nineteenth century, finance became globalized to an unprecedented degree. States, markets, and firms all had to adjust to the novel pace, reach, and depth of interconnected economic development. New technologies connected financial markets together, spurring financial integration but also making the economic world more susceptible to the contagion of financial crises. New norms pertaining to state-investor interactions also emerged. States solicited public capital from abroad to fund economic growth, but also had to find new ways to regulate financial markets at home. Processes of structural change and reinvention in the financial system only intensified as the century progressed. After the unification of Germany and its adoption of the gold standard, other nations throughout the world were forced to play by a new set of monetary rules. Countries ravaged by war, like the United States and France, reoriented their financial systems and schemes for national economic development, tapping into domestic and international capital markets in lieu of taxation, while Britain finally began to see its financial and economic hegemony seriously challenged.
This panel takes the changes ushered in during the second half of the nineteenth century as its starting point to think about shifts and reinventions of financial “standards” from a comparative perspective. We use “standards” in a capacious sense to think through these structural changes in global finance. How did a globalized financial system impose new standards of behavior and governance on sovereign states? How did states, in turn, attempt to impose new standards of behavior and regulation within the financial markets inside their borders? How did firms operating globally navigate the un-standardized market structures of the various financial markets they operated in? How did local differences in market structure affect the financial system in an age of globalization? This panel adopts a comparative framework to examine these questions and to analyze how the financial system reinvented itself in a moment of globalization, technological change, and economic transformation.