This article examines the development of offshore commercial and financial services in tax havens between 1955-1979. The geographic locus of this paper is the Caribbean region, mainly focusing on the island tax havens that had been part of the British empire prior to decolonization. The article examines the relationship between the development of tax havens and decolonisation, and explores questions of international capital movement, the institutional structure of tax havens, the development of banking and commercial services in tax havens, and other offshore business activities. The article presents new data on international capital investment and capital movement, and provides empirical evidence in relation to the structure and function of businesses located in tax havens. This evidence is used to engage with emerging debates with reference to the history of tax havens: specifically, the nature of capital movement and the importance of beneficial ownership rights, and the relationship between the (re)location of business to tax havens and the mitigation of political risk and instability. We demonstrate that the development of tax havens in this period was a consequence of substantial innovation by business and finance to create advantageous environmental conditions in relation to taxation and governance. This was supported by an isomorphic process that spread similarly favourable regimes of law and regulation between different tax havens, as well as the development of a range of supportive commercial and financial services. We conclude by discussing the implications for future research on this topic.

In the follow-up to the 1926 political and monetary crisis in France, a new government led by Raymond Poincaré attempted to restore monetary stability by restructuring public debt. A sinking fund was missioned to withdraw short-term public bills from money markets. This policy disorganized the largest Parisian banks of the time, as they relied on these bills to manage their liquidity. Without developed domestic money markets, no other asset could absorb the excess liquidity freed by the withdrawal of these bills, and these leading banks faced a low-rate environment. In search of yield, they expanded their activities abroad a few months before the 1929 crash. These findings renew our understanding of the expansion of France's banking sector in the 1920s. In addition, they shed new light on the role of public debt in financial stability in an open economy.

Since the mid-1970s, the U.S. commodity futures exchanges have increasingly been the focus of tight government regulation, which resulted in strong control by a specific agency: the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. In Europe, the regulation of futures diverged from the U.S. model. No regulation at the communitarian level was implemented; at the national level, the United Kingdom emerged as a model of self-regulation of commodity markets. This article explores the historical causes behind this lack of regulation in Europe, placing it in the context of global commodity trading and arguing that the European regulation of futures trading was reshaped by a dialogue established between the European Commission and big players of commodity futures trading in the City of London. Since the mid-1960s, the City of London has become a pivotal global market venue for commodity futures, which has increasingly attracted players from abroad, thanks to its financial integrity and self-regulatory model. Both established London merchants and emerging players in the global trade of financial products cooperated to stave off any attempt at regulating the London futures exchanges. The inference here is that those attempts were instrumental in setting the conditions leading to the regulatory fragmentation that still characterizes futures trading in the global market.

In this article I revisit the relationship between war and state making in modern times by focusing on two prominent types of war finance: taxes and foreign loans. Financing war with tax money enhances the capacity to assess wealth and monitor compliance, namely fiscal capacity. Tax-financed war facilitates the adoption of power-sharing institutions, which transform taxation into a non-zero-sum game, carrying on the effect of war in the long run. Financing war with external capital does not contribute to long-term fiscal capacity if borrowers interrupt debt service and, as part of the default settlement, war debt is condoned or exchanged for nontax revenue. The empirical evidence draws from war around the world as early as 1816. Results suggest that globalization of capital markets in the nineteenth century undermined the association between war, state making, and political reform.

How do firms protect themselves against infringements of their property rights by their own government? The authors develop a theory based on international law and joint asset ownership with foreign firms. Investment agreements protect the assets of foreign firms but are not available to domestic firms. This segmentation of the property rights environment creates a rationale for international financial relationships between firms. By forming financial relationships with foreign firms, domestic firms gain indirect coverage from the property rights available to foreign firms under investment agreements. If a government is less likely to violate the property rights of covered foreign firms, it is also less likely to violate property rights for assets held jointly by domestic and foreign firms. This article presents systematic evidence from data on the activities of firms in countries that have investment agreements with the United States. International financial relationships between firms, through mergers and acquisitions as well as through bond and equity issues, are more common where property rights are weak. The theory suggests a political logic to the fragmentation of firm-ownership stakes across jurisdictions, offers an institutional explanation of international financial flows, and identifies new distributional consequences of international law.

The most important lesson to be learnt from the financial crisis perhaps is that nation states cannot deal with the challenges of global financial markets on their own. As markets become more and more connected, sovereignty becomes increasingly fictitious. Although there seems to be little dispute about this, the implications for legal scholarship are far from clear. How can legal scholars contribute to solving the issues of global financial markets? Do we need a shift of paradigm in how to think about securities regulation? Which theoretical backgrounds should we rely on?

An answer to these questions might be found in the growing body of literature on transnational law. Transnational law defines a fourth category of law beyond the triad of national, international and supranational law which evolves beyond the nation state due to private ordering, social convenience and non-legal convention. Transnational law scholarship embraces the idea that nation states are in decline and that, as a result, legal scholars should turn their attention to such phenomena as soft law and indirect regulation, private ordering and self-regulation, regulatory competition, legal convergence and legal transplants. All of these phenomena can be seen as consequences of the globalisation of markets and as signs of the decline of the nation state. Although they are part of virtually any advanced securities regulation worldwide, they seem to be little explored from a legal perspective.

From 3 to 5 March 2010, the German Association for Law and Society and the University of Bremen hosted a conference on transnationalism in law, state and society. Part of this conference was a panel on transnational financial markets regulation. The aim of this panel was to ask some renowned experts on national, European and international securities regulation to analyse their fields of research from the perspective of transnational law.

This paper serves as an introduction to the topic and to the presentations given at the conference. It seeks to define the term ‘transnational financial markets regulation’ and to show why the study of transnational financial markets law promises to be rewarding. It concludes with a short summary of the presentations given at the conference.