the world of private banking

LONDON’S FIRSt ‘BIG BANG’? 63
Figure 4.1 Volume of bills, inland and foreign, £m
than inland bills. Nishimura has cogently argued that the inland bill’s increasing
disuse was primarily due to reductions in inventories and the chain of commercial
middlemen that serviced them. These developments were a consequence of the
further growth of the national railway system during the 1860s. They had a
marked impact upon the composition of banking assets, to such an extent as to
provoke comment from the 1880s about the shortage of ‘good bills’. The impact
Data drawn from S. Nishimura, The Decline of Inland Bills of Exchange in the
London Money Market 1855–1913 (Cambridge, 1971), Table 15, p. 93 and Table 17, p. 97.
Nishimura, Decline of Inland Bills of Exchange, pp. 77–9.
J. Dick, ‘Banking Statistics of the U.K. in 1896’, in Journal of the Institute of
Bankers, vol. 17, 1897; ‘Business in the United Kingdom – Its Progress and Prospects’,
Bankers’ Magazine (1894); and P.L. Cottrell, Industrial Finance 1830–1914: the Finance