Financial centres as fields: Reflections on habitus and risk in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries

This article develops a new understanding of the financial centre as a unit of analysis. It draws on Pierre Bourdieu’s generative structuralism to argue that financial centres constitute fields that possess a distinctive habitus through which risk is judged. Furthermore, Douglass North’s New Institutional Economics is used to argue that this distinctive habitus is the product of a combination of "hard" and "soft" forces: economic and business structures, the role of states, social networks, and cultural factors. It pushes beyond a simple geographical understanding of the financial centre while asserting that the financial centre is indeed a critical level of analysis. Moreover, the approach taken strongly suggests the need for historians of finance to incorporate broader macro-level political, economic, social and cultural developments into their analyses.