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Erika Vause, Niccolo Valmori. Banking and Politics in the Age of Democratic Revolution., The American Historical Review, Volume 129, Issue 2, June 2024, Pages 836–837, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhae126
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Extract
Despite the long-acknowledged role that finance played in the European Age of Revolutions as both a precipitant of revolt and a factor in military victory, studies of the financial sector remain surprisingly sparse outside of biographies. British historiography on eighteenth-century finance clusters around the earlier Financial Revolution, while French studies, beyond the now dated works of historians like Jean Bouchary, Herman Luthey, Robert Bigo, and Louis Bergeron, focus on ancien régime debt from a political, cultural, and macroeconomic standpoint. Moreover, the national silos in which these French and British financial histories are written obscure the transnational character of financial transactions, which often involved players across multiple European markets. Fortunately, the recent financial turn in the history of capitalism has prompted new interest in banking from a social and cultural as well as political and economic perspective. In this context, Niccolò Valmori’s Banking and Politics in the Age of Democratic Revolution provides a welcome intervention that departs from prior frameworks that pitted French financial “backwardness” against British “modernity” to focus instead on the interlinking personalities within and similar challenges faced by banking communities in Paris, London, and Amsterdam during an era of conflict and upheaval.
