Annual Congress of the European Business History Association (EBHA) 2024 - report by Marianna Astore

The 30th Annual Congress of the European Business History Association (EBHA) was held in Carcavelos and Lisbon from the 11th to the 13th July 2024, marking the association's third decade of existence. This year's conference was dedicated to "Celebrating Business History as a Multidisciplinary Field: Prospects, Comparisons, and Contributions" and explored new areas of interest that have emerged in the field over the years. The conference featured over 150 scholars from across Europe, presenting a wide variety of contributions: narrative and quantitative, data-driven and interpretive, practice-oriented and theoretical. The keynote lecture, delivered by Stephanie Decker (Birmingham Business School), addressed the challenges of being a business historian outside of history departments.

Given the theme, the conference was an ideal forum for presenting papers related to the business of global banking and their relationship with payment systems, and for raising awareness of the GloCoBank project among European scholars and I was pleased to have the opportunity to represent the project, along with fellow GloCoBank associated researcher Jamieson G. Myles (University of Geneva). Both papers lie at the intersection of business and financial history and were very much in line with the conference theme.

My paper, co-authored with Paolo Di Martino (University of Turin) and entitled "Branching vs. Correspondents in ‘Cross-Border’ Banking Expansion? Evidence from Italy, 1880s-1936."  was part of a panel titled "Banking Industry and Investment Funds," chaired by Youssef Cassis (European University Institute) with Luciano Amaral (Nova School of Business and Economics) as discussant. The paper contributes to the limited literature on banks of issue business models, focusing on the model adopted by the Banca d’Italia (and its predecessor Banca Nazionale) from the 1880s to 1936, and examining the expansion of the commercial activity of the bank both internationally and at the national level. This work represents the first attempt to reconstruct the Banca d’Italia's network of banking correspondents — which grew at a significantly faster rate than its branch network — analysing their role in the emergence of national and international payment systems. The dual focus on both the international and national dimensions allows for comparing and contrasting the choice of different strategies in diverse contexts, also considering that the national expansion took place in areas characterised by deep and persistent cultural, institutional, and economic differences vis-à-vis the market of origin. Following the conference I plan to revise my paper over the coming weeks and months and publish it as part of the GloCoBank working papers series.

Jamieson’s paper, entitled "Elastic Infrastructure: Payments and Credit in Global Correspondent Banking", was part of a panel entitled "Credit from a Comparative Perspective," chaired by Agnes Pogány (ELTE Eötvös Loránd University) with Lisbeth Rodrigues (Nova School of Business and Economics) as discussant. Using both the secondary literature and the archives of prominent European commercial and merchant banks, the paper offers a critical perspective on the traditional divide between the payment systems’ monetary and financial dimensions and seeks to link the micro-level practice of correspondent banking to the macro-level payments infrastructure. It highlights the historical role of correspondent banking networks in providing payment system elasticity and reveals the importance of credit in interbank relationship management. It also documents the congruence of cash clearing and credit activities in banks’ relationship management and internal organization and reporting until late in the twentieth century. Based on these observations, the paper confirms that considering credit offers a fruitful means of improving our understanding of the historical dynamics of global correspondent banking and its role in the global payments system.

Last but not least, Paolo and I were delighted to be awarded the EBHA Best Paper Prize for the best paper on European Business History, broadly understood. The members of the 2024 Paper Prize Committee were Jan-Otmar Hess (University of Bayreuth - Chair), Valentina Fava (Venice School of Management), and Rafael Castro (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid). The prize includes a certificate and a cash award of 250 euros.