Dr Sabine Schneider’s research interests are in the history of economic governance, state-building, and political economy since 1800. She was awarded her PhD and MPhil from the University of Cambridge, and prior to joining the LSE held the Rank-Manning Research Fellowship at New College, Oxford.
Dr Schneider’s key publications cover the history of financial crises and central banking (Economic History Review, 2022), and the intersection of monetary and trade policy. She is currently completing her first book War, Finance and Diplomacy: Germany and the Politics of the International Gold Standard, 1834-1914. The study examines the political economy of Germany’s path to monetary union, from the creation of the Zollverein in 1834 to the outbreak of the First World War. Based on extensive new archival research, the book investigates Germany’s transition to a national gold currency, and its far-reaching impact on the country’s financial and trading relations with Britain, Europe, and Asia. It advances a revised account of Germany’s role in the world monetary system that emphasizes the country’s institutional legacy, its financial competition with Britain, and its export-oriented development policy. Casting fresh light on modern financial globalization, the study illuminates how Anglo-German rivalry and interdependence critically shaped the world monetary order before 1914.
The ESRC-funded PhD research on which War, Finance and Diplomacy is based was awarded the Ellen McArthur Prize in Economic History and was a Finalist of the Economic History Society’s Thirsk-Feinstein Prize. A chapter informed by its research has been published in the edited volume Money and Markets: Essays in Honour of Martin Daunton, and showed how German policymakers drew extensively on British institutional practices and Victorian economic orthodoxy when designing the Reich’s monetary constitution.
Dr Schneider is an Affiliated Researcher of the Oxford Centre for Economic and Social History and an Associate Researcher of the Oxford Global Correspondent Banking Project.
Current Teaching
In the Department, Dr Schneider teaches MSc papers on financial, monetary and global economic history, as well as supervising BSc and MSc dissertations in her research areas.
Graduate Courses:
EH439 – History of Banking Systems (2024-2025)
EH430 - Monetary and Financial History (2022-2024)
EH483 - The Development and Integration of the World Economy in the 19th and 20th Centuries (2022-2025)
Research Supervision:
EH498/499 – MSc Dissertation (2022-2025)
EH390 – BSc Dissertation (2022-2025)
She has been nominated for the LSE Class Teacher Award (Highly Commended) and for the LSE Student Union Award for Outstanding Teaching (2022/23).
Publications
The Politics of Last Resort Lending and the Overend & Gurney Crisis of 1866 The Economic History Review, 75 (2022), pp. 579-600
‘The Bank of England and the Crisis of 1866’, The Long Run (October 2021)
Imperial Germany, Great Britain and the Political Economy of the Gold Standard, 1867-1914
in Money and Markets: Essays in Honour of Martin Daunton, eds. Julian Hoppit, Duncan Needham, and Adrian Leonard (Boydell & Brewer, 2019), pp. 127-144
‘The Oxford Handbook of Banking and Financial History, edited by Youssef Cassis, Richard S. Grossman & Catherine R. Schenk’, The Economic History Review, 70 (2017), pp. 693-695
‘Credit, Currency & Commerce: New Perspectives in Financial and Monetary History’, The Long Run (December 2016)
Current projects
War, Finance and Diplomacy: Germany and the Politics of the International Gold Standard, 1834-1914 (Book project)
‘Monetary Schisms: The Gold Standard and the Bimetallic Controversy in Britain, 1881-1901’
‘Inflation, Uncertainty and the Price Stability Mandate in Germany’ (invited paper delivered at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas)
‘“Universal Money”: The Political Economy of Currency Integration in the Nineteenth Century’
Photograph: © John Cairns