Organisational Control and English Commercial Bank Lending to Industry in the decades before World War I

The years 1880–1914 were years of institutional growth and systemic consolidation for English banks. In the early and middle decades of the nineteenth century there had been a number of crises which had affected the banks of England and Wales. Ono effect was to raise anxieties about the liquidity of bank balance sheets, including fundamental questions about the composition of lending to the private sector. In particular, the paper discusses the procedures used by the banks to minimise risk and examines some aspects of actual lending practice as it applied to the industrial regions of Britain. There are three parts to the paper. The first briefly summarises the organisational and control structures that were introduced by the large joint-stock banks to standardise lending at their numerous branches. The second section introduces a schema for the assessment and monitoring of loans, and the third discusses some of the banks' pre-1914 practices with regard to loans to industry.