Crossing Continents: A History of Standard Chartered Bank

Description

A magnificent history of one of the world's most distinctive financial institutions For almost a hundred years from the 1860s, the City of London's overseas banks financed the global trade that lay at the core of the British Empire. Foremost among them from the beginning were two start-up ventures- the Standard Bank of South Africa, which soon developed a powerful domestic franchise at the Cape, and the Chartered Bank of India, Australia and China. Merged in 1970 as Standard Chartered, the modern Group has weathered countless storms, including the City's Big Bang and the Great Crash of 2008. A breakneck rate of growth in this century has tracked the resurgence of China and the Asian marketplace where Chartered Bank had once thrived. Crossing Continents recounts Standard Chartered's story with a wealth of detail from one of the richest archives available to any commercial bank. The book also affords a rare and compelling perspective on the evolution of international trade and finance, showing how Britain's commercial influence

Duncan Campbell-Smith is a former Financial Times and Economist journalist. He has worked in the City and with McKinsey, and is a Senior Fellow at the Institute of Historical Research. His previous books include Follow the Money- The Audit Commission; Public Money and the Management of Public Services, 1983-2008 and Masters of the Post- The Authorized History of the Royal Mail, which won the Wadsworth Prize as Business History Book of the Year in 2011.

excellent ... Duncan Campbell-Smith's sparkling new account of Standard Chartered Bank ... is a door-stopping, desk-breaking heavyweight tome ... of patient text and brilliantly evocative photographs. Campbell-Smith, a former banker and journalist, had access to Standard Chartered's rich archive, and what emerges is work of painstaking scholarship. Multiple sources are woven together into a compelling record of imperial and post-imperial banking -- Philip Augar * Financial Times *