International Conference, taking place at Mansion House, London in late 2026/early 2017
London is a unique city. Despite its unremarkable origins as a Roman town built on the riverbanks of the Thames in AD47, established as a useful commercial hub for European trade, and despite its geopolitical status as the most important town in England from this moment forward, London maintained an independence and sense of autonomy greater than any other urban centre in the world. As the story goes, when Pope Gregory I sent missionaries to England to establish London as the ecclesiastical centre of England, they were met with such fierce independence and ill-will that they swiftly reconsidered, settling in Canterbury instead. Four centuries after the Romans left, by the 9th Century, London was still not the seat of government, and even Alfred the Great knew better than to challenge its independence. In 1066, when William the Conqueror arrived on the English throne, still London’s independence from the Crown was facilitated, and in 1075 William signed the Charter of London, which guaranteed its autonomy as a self-governing entity. Internally, London was governed by the various guilds which regulated trade and taxation in the city, but which were in many ways constitutionally supervised by the Crown. It was according to this often-fractious relationship between the guilds and the Crown that the parliamentary system materialised in the 13th Century. At the same time, the rise of the Inns of Court, themselves modelled on the blueprints of the trade guilds, created an utterly unique legal system in England.
This conference asks, what is the relationship between the historical circumstances of London’s uniqueness and its unfolding as the economic hegemon of the world by the 19th Century?
Characteristic of London’s relative autonomy, between the 16th and 18th Centuries the city’s money market grew independently from state direction. But such progress was frequently necessitated owing to interferences from the Crown (for instance, Charles I seizing bullion from the Mint in 1640 to redress his bankruptcy), and so the economic development of the City of London, and by extension Great Britain, was strongly influenced by the unfolding of its historical and political conditions. By the 18th Century, when European nations, and in turn major European banks, were becoming increasingly centralised, London bucked the trend and formed a decentralised, market-based financial system, driven in part by Britain’s imperial ambitions overseas and in part by the Crown’s requirement of excessive capital to fund its various and constant wars. In the 19th Century, Napoleon’s economic reforms in mainland Europe crippled London’s main rival, Amsterdam, after which London and its market-based system dominated the continent.
Throughout the 20th and early 21st Centuries, Great Britain’s loss of empire, the decline of the British economy after the Second World War, and the declining importance of the Pound Sterling theoretically should have produced a similar decline for London’s status as the leading international banking centre, and yet still today it stands shoulder to shoulder with the larger, more dynamic economies, such as New York, Tokyo and Frankfurt.
This conference asks, why? How and in what ways did the uniqueness of the City of London determine the direction of world economics? What, today, is the relationship between financial regulation and constitutional structure? These fundamentally historical questions give way to a more essential and pressing question: what remains unique about the City of London today? And how might London’s peculiar uniqueness still yet influence the economic and political unfolding of the world?