The Rise of London as a Financial Capital in Late Medieval England
Pamela Nightingale
Additional contact information
Pamela Nightingale: University of Oxford
A chapter in Financing in Europe, 2018, pp 21-45 from Palgrave Macmillan
Abstract:
Abstract Nightingale discusses which factors explain why London emerged in the late fifteenth century as the financial capital of England. She concludes that in the fourteenth century, warfare, plague, and the control exercised over trade by England’s strong monarchy contributed to London’s rise, while in the fifteenth, falling wool exports, and bullion famines, reduced provincial credit. When Italian merchants returned to London in greater numbers after free trade was imposed on the city in 1351, to buy English cloth they financed their purchases by importing the raw materials that the industry needed. These imports drew provincial merchants to London because they enabled them to profit from a double trade to and from the city which allowed them to exchange their cloth for the raw materials and other goods provided by London’s greatly expanded import and distributive trade. These so enriched its merchantile class that they were able to make the city into the financial capital of England. When new supplies of bullion eventually allowed provincial credit to expand again, London’s position was unassailable.
Date: 2018
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:
There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pal:psitcp:978-3-319-58493-5_2
Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.palgrave.com/9783319584935
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-58493-5_2
Access Statistics for this chapter
More chapters in Palgrave Studies in the History of Finance from Palgrave Macmillan
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().