Youssef Cassis is Professor of Economic History at the European University Institute, Florence. He was previously Professor of Economic History at the University of Geneva (2004-2010) and at the University Pierre Mendes France, Grenoble (1997-04).He has held visiting professorships at the Cass Business School, the Graduate Institute in Geneva and the University of St Gallen. His work mainly focuses on banking and financial history, as well as business history more generally. His numerous publications on the subject include, A History of International Financial Centres, 1780-2005, (Cambridge University Press, 2006), and Crises and Opportunities, The Shaping of Modern Finance (Oxford University Press, 2011) among many others. He was the cofounder, in 1994, of Financial History Review (Cambridge University Press) and a member of the Academic Advisory Council of the European Association for Banking and Financial History and past President (2005-07) of the European Business History Association
Philip L. Cottrell was Professor of Financial History at the University of Leicester when he retired in 2010. He was a leading member of the European Association for Banking History, and in 1994 with Prof. Youssef Cassis, a founding editor of Financial History Review, published by Cambridge University Press on the Association's behalf. Cottrell had an international reputation as a financial historian of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His interests ranged widely, but he had particular expertise in English banking history in the nineteenth century and the financial reconstruction of Europe after the First World War. His main publications, notably Industrial Finance 1830-1914: The Finance and Organization of the English Manufacturing Industry (1980), remain standard works in their field. He died in 2013.