Revised and updated throughout, this brilliant survey of European financial history from the earliest times to the present by internationally renowned scholar and author Charles P. Kindleberger offers a comprehensive account of the evolution of money in Western Europe, bimetallism and the emergence of the gold standard, the banking systems of the Continent and the British Isles, and overviews of foreign investment, regional and global financial integration, and private and public finance in Western Europe. The new edition features expanded coverage of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and important new material on recent developments in European monetary integration.