Central bank history
This page contains to links to various sources on central bank history.
Note: the term central bank was rarely used before the 20th century. Nonetheless there existed, in many cities and later countries, privileged institutions that served as de facto central banks in their respective jurisdictions. This page applies the term central bank to such institutions.
Occurrences of the term "central bank," 1800-2009 (Google Ngrams)
Bank of Amsterdam (Amsterdamsche Wisselbank)
The Wisselbank was the most successful (de facto) central bank in Europe until it was displaced by the Bank of England in the mid 18th century. A compact description of the Wisselbank can be found Book IV, chapter 3 of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations:
Stephen Quinn and I have written a number of papers and a book on the Wisselbank. Our research program has been made possible by the miraculous existence of a very extensive and accessible archive of the Wisselbank's records, held in the Stadsarchief Amsterdam (Amsterdam City Archive). Many items in this archive are now available as scans. The homepage of the Wisselbank archive is here :
Steve and I are not the only ones to have made use of this archive. The most famous scholar of the Wisselbank is the renowned Dutch economic historian Johannes Gerard van Dillen (1883-1969). Van Dillen compiled many of the original documents from the Wisselbank archives into an encyclopedic reference, Bronnen tot de Geschiedenis der Wisselbanken (Amsterdam, Middelburg, Delft, Rotterdam) 1603-1820 ("Sources for the history of the exchange banks"), which is available online from the Huygens Institute for the History of the Netherlands:
More recently (2012) my Dutch colleague Pit Dehing has published his Ph.D. thesis on the Wisselbank: Geld in Amsterdam: Wisselbank en Wisselkoersen, 1650-1725. Pit's book focuses on the emergence of the Wisselbank's ledger money, the bankgulden, as a dominant form of money within Amsterdam, the Dutch Republic, and Europe. It contains many interesting facts, charts, and figures available nowhere else.
Even more recently, the Bank of Amsterdam has attracted the attention of mainstream economists. This paper by Wilko Bolt, Jon Frost, Hyun Song Shin and Peter Wierts analyzes the policy bankruptcy of the Bank from 1780:
Stein Berre, Paul Kosmetatos, and Asani Sarkar have used data from the Bank's archive to analyze a major financial crisis that gripped both Amsterdam and London in 1772-1773.
More central bank history
Central banks have been around for a long time. The most famous central bank in the English-speaking world is the Bank of England, which was founded in 1694. The first public bank in Europe, Barcelona's Taula di Canvi, was however already in existence in 1401.
My survey with François Velde
François Velde and I made several attempts to survey the literature on early (pre-Napoleonic) central banks and central bank-like institutions. Here is a link to a working paper version of one survey:
Preparing such a survey is a challenging task since it involves an enormous literature written in many different languages. Inevitably, a few inaccuracies have crept into our work. Our surveys have also left out a few early central banks. Nonetheless we hope that papers like this will prove useful to people with an interest in early public banks.
Even broader surveys, of early central banks and central banking history more generally
Stefano Ugolini has recently (2017) published a broad and insightful survey of central banking history, from its beginnings in medieval city-states to modern-day institutions:
A nice feature of Ugolini's book is that the history is organized by different functionalities of central banks: payment, supervision and lender of last resort, money issue, and monetary policy. Despite its depth of coverage, it is a short (330 pages) and very readable book.
Even more recently, Ulrich Bindseil (2019) has published an informative work on pre-1800 central banks. The main text of Bindseil's book describes the problems, both conceptual and practical, faced by early central banks and contemporary approaches to their solution. As in Ugolini's book, the discussion is organized by functionality. An annex provides a systematic catalog of early central banks.
Banco Publico (Nuremberg)
The history of central banking contains more failures than successes. An interesting early attempt to create a central-bank-like institution was the Banco Publico, chartered by the city of Nuremberg in 1621. The Banco Publico never achieved the stature of similarly structured institutions in Amsterdam, Hamburg, and Venice. In a recent (2012) monograph, Markus Denzel of the University of Leipzig shows how a sequence of bad management decisions contributed to the Banco's mediocre track record. The Banco was however ultimately able to recover from some of its early mistakes and to continue operations until the early 19th century. Prof. Denzel's book synthesizes the earlier literature on the Banco Publico, and presents new quantitative information drawn from the journals and other records of the Banco.
Bank of England
The Bank of England has been in continuous operation since 1694. The Bank was not the first issuer of bearer banknotes, but popularized the model of a central bank funded by the issue of circulating currency--the same model that is in effect in most countries today.
Banknotes as money
There is an immense literature on the history of the Bank. A notable recent contribution is Christine Desan's book Making Money: Currency, Coin, and the Coming of Capitalism. Desan describes in detail how the Bank was able to foster a "revolution" in payments technology. She argues that this was less of a revolution than an evolution, with many small victories each contributing to the public's acceptance of circulating notes as money. These victories combined with generally favorable English monetary traditions to create the "banknote revolution":
Historical balance sheets
The Bank of England has compiled a number of interesting historical datasets, including annual balance sheets of the Bank from 1696, and weekly balance sheets from 1844. These can be downloaded as Excel spreadsheets.
How the Bank managed the classical gold standard
How did the Bank manage the "classical" gold standard (late 19th - early 20th centuries? Stephano Ugolini of the University of Toulouse has compiled detailed balance sheets for the Bank over much of that period (1889-1910). The Bank was much more active over this time than is commonly supposed. Somewhat surprisingly, the Bank made extensive use of reverse repos over this period, perhaps a first in central banking history.
Wiener Stadtbank (Vienna Municipal Bank)
Austria's history offers a wealth of central banking experience. Austria's first serious attempt at a central bank was the Wiener Stadtbank (also called the Wiener Stadtbanco), an institution nominally under the control of the city of Vienna, but de facto a national central bank. The Stadtbank was founded in 1705 and performed reasonably well for the first half century of its existence.
Things started to go downhill in 1762 when the Stadtbank began issuing circulating currency. From 1796 to 1811, it ran one of the first paper-money hyperinflations that ended with a 92 percent devaluation of its banknotes relative to their par value. The collapse of the Stadtbank led to the 1816 founding of the Oesterreichische Nationalbank (Austrian National Bank), which exists today as part of the Eurosystem.
Much of Austria's monetary history has traditionally only been accessible through German- (and Hungarian-) language sources, and so has remained relatively unknown in the English-speaking world. However, on the occasion of its 200th anniversary, the OeNB commissioned Clemens Jobst and Hans Kernbauer to write a book on Austria's central banking history. Jobst and Kernbauer's book both surveys the literature and offers much original analysis. An English edition is available from University of Chicago press:
Purists may prefer the original German version (note the somewhat different title).