The cross-border payments system is the fundamental plumbing of globalisation, allowing day-to-day movement of money across borders, but it has not attracted much attention from historians. The GloCoBank project offers an initial attempt to map the shape of the cross-border payments system through a new dataset on correspondent banking relations between 1920 and 1985. This data allow us to trace the bank-level bilateral contractual connections between banks (at the country and city level), which formed the foundations of cross-border payments. This allows a more detailed observation of how the structure of the system evolved, particularly through changing geographies, and can be contextualised with archival evidence on the contemporary strategies of banks and central bank supervisors as well as economic variables of the countries themselves.
Catherine R. Schenk FRHS, AcSS, FRSA is the Professor of Economic and Social History at University of Oxford and fellow of St. Hilda's College. She has held posts in Wellington, New Zealand, Royal Holloway University of London and University of Glasgow. She has also been visiting professor at University of Hong Kong, Nankai University Tianjin and visiting research fellow at the International Monetary Fund, the Bank for International Settlements and the Bank of England. She is a fellow of the CEPR. Her research is focused on international money and banking and she is Principal Investigator for the ERC-funded project, GloCoBank, Global Correspondent Banking 1870-2000.
