Uses of the past in banking and financial history

Many historians and archivists share a commitment to understanding
how the past can be constructed, how it can be used to reflect on the
present and how it can be useful to the organisations that preserve their
past through archival resources. This endeavour is often symbiotic: historians interpret the past, partly through discovery of original documentary material that has been curated in archives. But the relationship is complicated because these sources are almost always collected and kept for reasons other than academic research: e.g. legal requirements, corporate memory, accident. The academic and theoretical literature on how the past can be ‘useful’ or serve a social purpose as well as contributing to academic debates has generated a range of views that mainly reject a narrow idea of drawing direct ‘lessons’ from history, to focusing on what is ‘forgotten’ or whether the past is, in fact, so
different in its institutional, social and cultural contexts as to not be ‘useful’ at all. Nevertheless, the concept of the past as useful, whether for current institutional memory, as a contribution to answering strictly historical questions, or as a framing for critical understandings, links historians and archivists.