Conclusion

Although a conclusion is mostly thought of as a recapitulation of findings in the preceding chapters and as an indication of the legitimation with regards to the way in which these findings build on one another, this is not my intention here. Instead, I am inclined to expatiate on what has been an encompassing interest that preoccupied many of the above findings, yet which I was not able to include because of the difficulty of proof. It concerns the question whether the ‘even keel’―a hedging strategy pertaining to the bank branch network level of analysis―can be believed to have been conducive to strengthening trade ties between the gold standard Western countries and the East, either through...