Commercial Banking

Abstract

In considering the history and development of the Bank of England in Chapter 2, we inevitably became aware how commercial banking grew. Indeed, the Bank of England was at first a commercial bank itself, and only gradually took on the role of central bank at the expense of its commercial banking activities, leaving these to the joint stock banks which flourished once the 1833 Act gave them the freedom to do so and, through amalgamations, develop into the large High Street banks of today with networks of branches and deposits running into billions of pounds. But as yet we have not considered what the term ‘commercial bank’ means.