Abstract
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>The history of financial crises can be approached from several perspectives. This book considers the role played by memory, and its relationships with history, when it comes to financial crises. The book is not primarily interested in the lesson drawing process activated by the remembrance of past crises (even though there is also space for this element). It is interested, instead, in whether or not, and how, the memory of previous crises has persisted, faded, or changed over time. Intertwining memory and narrative representations of the reality, the volume investigates the reasons why some crises have been (selectively) remembered and others apparently forgotten. The book goes beyond the analogy Great Depression–Global Financial Crisis that has been suggested and analysed since 2007. Comparisons with the financial crises of the Great Depression are not avoided, and can be found in most chapters of the book, but the case studies gathered here are devoted to other important crises that have invested the international system since the early 1970s and the return to financial instability, in particular the shocks of the 1970s, the International Debt Crisis of 1982, the Stock Market Crash of 1987, the financial turbulences of the 1990s, including the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997, and the Global Financial Crisis of 2008. In addition, some chapters take a long-term perspective, going back to the 1930s or even the late nineteenth century, while others discuss thematic issues (regulation, bankers’ collective biography, economics education) related to financial crises.</jats:p>