Complexity in history: modelling the organisational demography of the British banking sector

Using a new historical data set on the ‘population’ of British Banks for the last 200 years, we consider why, since its peak of approximately 1100 banks 1810, the population of British banks has declined to its present day population of less that 100. We hypothesise that amalgamation became an advantageous way for banks to expand, and use an agent-based simulation to test this hypothesis against the baking data. We are unable to falsify the hypothesis and show that the simulation reproduces many aspects of the real data with the minimum of assumptions.