Financial Panic, Famine and Contagion:

Savings banks in the United Kingdom lack the glamour of contemporaneous innovations such as the power-loom or the railway engine. What could be duller that the story of institutions that didn’t even expose themselves to the risk of lending money and which for the most part were cautiously and competently run? Yet savings banks are worth studying, if less for their own sake than for what they can tell us about the economy and economic behaviour more broadly. This paper uses the records of a nineteenth-century Irish savings bank to shed some light on the role of financial institutions and financial panics associated with them in backward economies. This section offers a brief introduction to the history of savings banks in Ireland (Part 1). I then describe one well-documented bank, the Thurles Savings Bank (Part 2). In Parts 3 and 4 I discuss the impact of two financial panics on the Thurles Savings Bank. Part 5 concludes. During the Industrial Revolution there was no shortage of schemes particularly directed at ‘industrious and frugal ’ servants and tradesmen, and more generally at those who might easily be reduced to destitution by unemployment, illness, or old age. In 1793 the British parliament passed a scheme to promote friendly societies, but such societie