The British Government and the City of London in the Twentieth Century. Edited by Ranald Michie and Philip Williamson. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2004, xi + 381pp. ISBN 0-521-82769-8, £60.

Extract

As host to domestic and international money markets—which, as Joseph Schumpeter rightly observed, are the ‘headquarters of capitalism’—the City of London has arguably been the single most important place in the world's economy for much of the last two hundred years. Its roles and influence obviously experienced a relative decline with the emergence of the USA as the undisputed global economic superpower after 1945. But the City's endurance and revitalization, at a time when the British economy was experiencing a long period of dislocation and underperformance towards the end of the twentieth century, has been truly remarkable. Its businesses are now largely foreign-owned, but it must be remembered that it has always been truly cosmopolitan—it was the first ‘globalised’ economic hub long before the term had been coined. Today, London's foreign exchange markets consistently trade greater volumes than New York's; and challenges from European centres such as Paris and Frankfurt have been successfully seen off.