Provincial Banking in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy and Successor States 1913 / 1925

Provincial banking in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy prior to the First World War was well developed. It fulfilled important economic and social functions as well as holding a significant share of the banking sector. In the successor states, after the collapse of the Monarchy, provincial banking lost some of its strength, but remained an important factor. However, the historiography of provincial banking remained underdeveloped due to the limits of archive material, the small number of case studies and a generally low level of knowledge about provincial banking. This thesis aims to fill the gap by reconstructing the broad structure of provincial banking and its place in the overall banking systems of several selected regions of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy and successor states for the sample years 1913 and 1925. General knowledge and understanding of provincial banking can be improved by analysing the business structure of the provincial banks based on the analysis of balance sheets and the reaction of provincial banking to economic, monetary and political disturbances caused by the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. This dissertation has two parts. The first part presents the general framework of the research, through a survey of the existing historiography and an outline of the methodology of the research. It also offers some necessary introductory information about credit cooperatives, provincial banking and the economic and financial framework in which provincial banks operated. The second part consists of an analysis of the database containing information on all financial institutions within the assessed territory and information from the balance sheets of provincial banks. The Appendix to the thesis contains a glossary of the terminology used in balance sheets, and the main database. The database and thesis is designed to serve as a useful foundation for future case studies of the historiography of provincial banking in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy.