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Martin Daunton, The British Government and the City of London in the Twentieth Century, The English Historical Review, Volume CXXII, Issue 498, September 2007, Pages 1056–1058, https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/cem195
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Extract
THIS collaboration of a leading scholar on the economic history of the City and one on the political responses to economic issues, together with an outstanding team of specialists, has produced a major statement on the interplay between politics and finance. The picture that emerges is very different from the interpretation of Peter Cain and Tony Hopkins which still has so much influence. In their view, the financial elite of the City fused with the landed aristocracy in the later nineteenth century as ‘gentlemanly capitalists’ who had a ‘disproportionate’ influence on policy formation through the Bank of England and Treasury, against the interests of industrial capitalists. Similar interpretations were to be found in the writings of Sidney Pollard, who saw the return to gold in 1925 as a bankers' policy and argued that ‘industry has every time to be sacrificed on the altar of the City's and the financial system's primacy’. Somewhat differently, Geoffrey Ingham has argued that the Bank and Treasury had their own independent interests and were not simple instruments of the City; rather, Treasury, Bank and City had a common interest in preserving ‘stable money forms’. The theme was repeated in Will Hutton's The State We're In and beyond, and continues to inform much historical writing as well as popular perceptions. Although this collection has contributions from proponents of such interpretations—not least by Youssef Cassis in his reassessment of financial elites and by the late E.H.H. Green on the Conservatives and the City—the general impression is that their approach to the political and economic history of Britain must be reconsidered.
