FRESH PERSPECTIVES ON CROSS–BORDER BANKING IN THE 20TH CENTURY: NEW EVIDENCE OF ITALIAN CORRESPONDENT BANKING
March 2025 | Global Correspondent Banking 1870–2000 Working Paper Series, Vol. 1, No. 4 | University of Oxford.
Abstract
The global payments system forms the essential plumbing of globalisation, but it has attracted remarkably little attention from historians or economists and remains an underexplored dimension of bank internationalisation. This paper provides new micro evidence on how the structure of the system evolved in Italy. This is a fresh approach, examining the pattern of thousands of bilateral payment connections between banks in Italy and London over the 20th century at a much more granular level than existing approaches. Moreover, this perspective enhances our understanding of the geography of cross-border economic activity by reaching beyond the national scale of most existing analyses of trade and payments to expose the very local dimension. Thus, the data reveal how smaller banks in towns and cities across Italy were connected to the global payment system to provide services to local migrants, traders, and investors. The data also reveal the variation between regions over time in the intensity of their direct connection to the global payment system. We map the connections and relate them to regional economic activity to demonstrate the potential for further analysis.
Keywords
Payments, Italy, International Banking, Correspondent Banking
