Search arXiv⌕ Search
Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · 2511.10715

HSBC until 1950: From its colonial cradle past the World Wars

Christopher Mantzaris·Ajda Fošner
View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

Europe's largest bank by assets as of 2025 started out in the 1860s in one of Europe's colonies: The Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Co (HSBC). Multiple wars forced Qing China and later the young Republic of China into a series of unequal treaties, one of which was the forced legalisation of the opium trade from parts of the British Empire into China, another was opening several cities, including Shanghai, for trade and granting extensive civil, property and business rights to non-residents and yet another was the annexation of Hong Kong by the United Kingdom. These are the conditions that created HSBC and in which it thrived, including from opium-related profits. During periods of relative calm, the bank grew geographically and made profits -- whether in moral or unethical, whether in legal or unlawful ways -- which helped HSBC weather the storms of civil and world wars. Other aspects contributed to HSBC's survival and success, such as its global nature, which allowed it to diversify and shift away from regions when danger emerges there and find shelter in safer havens. Yet the resilient survival abilities and the financial success of HSBC until 1950 should not distract from the fact that in addition to its tainted cradle and early profits from facilitating the poisoning of a whole society, its human resource system was also discrimination based, attempting to divide the one human race into different groups -- in spite of such practises being opposed to medical and biological facts. What is particularly interesting to see is that not only has HSBC yet to apologise for the early drug-related blood money it made: it even fails to mention its colonial, drug profits tainted past on any of its many history-themed pages sighted. Later sections contain possible reasons for HSBC's resilience and success, particularly interesting for entrepreneurs.

Explore related subjects

econ.GNq-fin.ECq-fin.GNq-fin.RM

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Christopher Mantzaris, Ajda Fošner. 2025-11-13. HSBC until 1950: From its colonial cradle past the World Wars. https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.10715

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

Local Media and the Shaping of Social Norms: Evidence from the Ebola outbreak

Media's influence on norms and behavior is widely recognized. Less is known about the role played by media being local. I examine this in a high-stakes context, the Ebola outbreak in Guinea. I exploit quasi-random variation in access to radio and the timing of a public-health campaign aired on community radio. I find that 12-17% of Ebola cases could have been prevented if places with access to a neighboring community radio station had instead had their own. Impacts are driven by radio being local rather than by ethno-linguistic belonging. Local media facilitates coordination in behaviors observed and sanctioned locally.

econ.GN↗
arXiv2026

Productivity Shocks and Input Misallocation: A Decomposition

This paper asks how much input misallocation productivity uncertainty generates and at which stage of input decisions it arises. I separate revenue productivity by when each component is revealed and trace each into the gap between an input's marginal revenue product and its price. In six European countries, shocks revealed after an input is committed account for 20 percent of capital gap dispersion and 5 percent of labor gap dispersion. An unanticipated one percent rise in productivity raises the capital gap by 0.92 percent and the labor gap by 0.19 percent, because most of the shock passes into the wage.

econ.GN↗
arXiv2026

When Do Type-Specific Wages Buffer Distributional Incidence in TANK?

When do relative wages buffer the unequal incidence of aggregate shocks? I derive a consumption-gap decomposition and a present-value condition for partial offset in a TANK model. An extension separates wage-setting demand elasticity from substitution between labor segments and allows each segment to contain both financial types. With a zero inherited wage gap and a same-sign discounted wedge, substitution above one gives offsetting earnings reallocation; substitution below one gives amplification. The channel disappears when financial types have identical segment exposure. Numerical experiments assess these mechanisms, shock persistence, policy feedback, and aggregate-IRF matching. In the nested perfect-alignment monetary benchmark, the peak consumption gap is about two-fifths smaller under type-specific wages than under the common-wage closure. These are conditional model comparisons, not empirical effect estimates or welfare rankings.

econ.GN↗