Despite its political importance, the history of the European Jews between 1933 and 1945 was for decades after the Second World War a largely neglected area. German public opinion during the 1950s and 1960s was almost unanimous in rejecting the responsibility of the German people for the crimes which were committed against the Jews ‘in the German name’. While only a small minority flatly rejected the murder of about 6 million Jews and while German war crimes (including the Holocaust) were offset only under the surface against the bombing of German cities by the Anglo-Saxons and the expulsion of the German population from Poland and Czechoslovakia after the war, the Nuremberg War Tribunal was largely regarded as ‘Siegerjustiz’ (victors' justice) and the German courts were very negligent when it came to sentencing German war criminals. The German public during the 1950s was even more concerned about the perpetrators in prison than about the victims and their right to compensation.

Such an atmosphere scarcely allowed the mainstream historical sciences in (West) Germany to scrutinise the full extent of the involvement of the German people in the plunder, expulsion and murder of the Jewish population in Germany and in the German-occupied areas. But during the late 1960s and 1970s the situation changed. A new generation of historians began to be interested in German–Jewish history – not only before, but also during the Nazi era.

It is now just over twenty years since Rondo Cameron published, in 1967, his pioneering study on Banking in the early stages of industrialization in which he set out to reassess the role of banking and of the financial intermediaries generally in the phase of the industrial revolution. The conclusion he reached was that their significance was greater than had up to then been allowed. A second volume of essays followed five years later.

Not all financial intermediaries operating in the early stages could be properly called ‘banks’, but we shall, following Cameron's example, use this term as a shorthand for all the relevant institutions. We should emphasize also that we shall be concerned, as was he, with the early or breakthrough stages of industrialization, including what has come to be known as the ‘take-off’, which is a stage considerably earlier than is covered by most of the other chapters in this book. But we hope to be able to show that the discussion of the role of banking in the earlier phase has relevance to the wider discussion of the significance of banking in all phases of modern economic development.

In his introduction, Cameron described the stark contrast existing in the literature. There were those, ‘the majority of economists who have dealt with this question’, who assumed that financial intermediaries would appear as soon as they were needed – ‘a case of demand creating its own supply’. At the other extreme, there were actual historical instances ‘in which financial institutions constituted leading sectors in development: these institutions were “growth-inducing” through direct industrial promotion and finance’.