The British imperial matrix, India, the global economy and the rise of capitalism, 1850-1914
Appendix 1: Specifying place
The identification of the dates of establishment and closure of bank branches and agencies is central to the success of this project. Although original records survive for some periods for each bank, in practice data published in commercial magazines is easier to use and relatively reliable. The major sources were the Bankers' Magazine, 1862-1912 and the Economist, Weekly Commercial Times, Bankers’ Gazette: A Political, Literary and General Newspaper, 1843 - 1912. These publications used a reasonably consistent format for reporting on bank development which allows the tracing of branches. For this project a decision was made to collect data at ten year intervals, which provides a granularity of data sufficient for mapping and drawing conclusions about change in locational focus.
There are some problems in the data in consistently identifying a specific branch even though variant names are used for it. Occasionally there is a well-documented change of name at the specific date but in other cases the name varies inconsistently and could lead to the identification of phantom new branches. A specific problem with the banking data is the tendency to refer only to the country or region of a branch (for example, Australia, Straits Settlements) especially when it is newly established. it must be presumed that specific location mentioned later represent the same branch but this is not necessarily the case.
Another issue has been the distinction between a branch and an agency. As explained in the paper, despite a legal distinction between the two, it does not appear that the banks themselves used the terms consistently. Therefore branches and agencies have both been included in the data.