This dissertation examines responses to financial crisis over the last two hundred years. It identifies the actors that have provided responses and chronicles how those actors have changed over time. To examine these issues this research considers response actors in historical cases of financial crisis from 1800 to 1997. The study constructs a model of financial crisis response derived from these cases, and suggests that there is a general three-stage pattern of crisis response. The first stage is called response, where various actors attempt to alleviate the crisis through providing liquidity. At this stage many institutions attempt to address the crisis conditions, including private banks, governments, central banks and international institutions. The second stage is called reliance. In this stage actors and institutions are reformed, given greater responsibility to respond to subsequent crises, or replaced. Certain actors are privileged and relied on to respond to future crises. The final stage is called expansion. Due to the change in size, scope and density of financial interactions existing arrangements are overwhelmed and crises become larger over time. The Global Integrative Dynamic (GID) causes response to change since response actors lose their ability to mitigate crises as financial interactions expand.; This dissertation concludes that crisis response is an ever evolving process punctuated by specific key crises where lack of adequate response becomes clear. Furthermore, this dissertation concludes that responses have become more multilateral and public over time. Early responses in the nineteenth century privilege domestic central banks which slowly become domestic public actors. Responses in the interwar period privilege international central bank cooperation through the Bank for International Settlements. From 1982 onward, global multilateral institutions are privileged. These findings add to our understanding of the construction and refinement of global financial architectures and suggest that financial architectures change over time to privilege different sets of actors.
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