Leslie Pressnell, monetary historian, dies at 88

Leslie Pressnell, who died on September 6 aged 88, was a leading monetary historian who kept the subject alive at a time when studying the role of money and banking in economic history had fallen from fashion.

His first book, Country Banking in the Industrial Revolution (1956), revealed how small rural businesses financed the Industrial Revolution and demonstrated how changes in the financial sphere preceded changes in the real economy. It would be almost another half a century before mainstream economists took this view seriously.

His academic career began at Exeter and ended at the University of Kent at Canterbury, where he was Professor of Economic and Social History. During the 1960s he established the London School of Economics’s Monetary History Group – whose influential seminars continue to this day.

In the late 1970s the Cabinet Office commissioned him to write the official history of Britain’s external economic policy after the Second World War. A first volume – The Post-War Financial Settlement, published in 1986 — is testimony to Pressnell’s attention to detail. A second volume dealing with the years up to 1961 was close to completion when he died....