New data covering 23 countries reveal that banking crises of the Great Depression coincided with a sharp international increase in deposits at savings institutions and life insurance. Deposits fled from commercial banks to alternative forms of savings. This fueled a credit crunch since other institutions did not replace bank lending. While asset prices fell, savings held in savings institutions and life insurance companies increased as a share of GDP and in real terms. These findings provide new explanations for the fall in credit and aggregate demand in the 1930s. They illustrate the need to consider nonbank financial institutions when studying banking crises.

The Classical Gold Standard period, with high capital mobility and fixed-exchange rates, is usually seen as the extreme case of international constraints on monetary policy. Contrary to this view, we show how central bank balance sheets offset the effects of international shocks on domestic interest rates. In contrast, in the United States, a gold standard country without a central bank, the reaction of money market rates was two to four times stronger than that of interest rates in countries with a central bank. Our study is based on the monthly balance sheets of all central banks in the world (i.e., 21) from 1891–1913.

A recent and influential research methodology, mainly endorsed by economists, proposes to renew historical analysis based on the notions of natural experiment and causality. It has the dual ambition of unifying various disciplines around a common understanding of causality in order to tackle major historical questions (such as the role of colonization, political regimes, or religion in economic development) and of making the analysis of history more scientific. The definition of causality it promotes—of the “interventionist” type—tends to liken historical events to laboratory experiments. This is articulated with a neo-institutionalist perspective aimed at measuring the long-term effects of past institutional changes, which are considered exogenous. In the first part of this article, we present the ambitions, contributions, methods, and hypotheses (implicit and explicit) of this approach, showing how it differs from more traditional quantitative economic history and placing it in the context of the recent empirical and neo-institutionalist “turns” of the economic discipline. In a second stage, we consider the criticism—often scathing—voiced by historians or economists against this method and its objectives. Finally, we emphasize the many difficulties posed by this approach when it comes to taking into account the historicity of phenomena, to producing general statements based on particular cases, and to providing a complete and coherent definition of causality in history.

The Gold Pool was probably the most ambitious case of central bank cooperation in history. Major central banks pooled interventions to stabilize the dollar price of gold. Why did it collapse? From at least 1964, the fate of the Pool was, in fact, tied to sterling, the first line of defense for the dollar. Sterling’s devaluation in November 1967 eventually spurred speculation and unbearable losses for the Pool. Inflationary U.S. policies were weakening confidence in the dollar. The demise of the Pool provides a striking example of contagion between reserve currencies and the limits of central bank cooperation.