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Narratives of monetary change and transformation, as well as work on international financial centres such as London, are by no means new within geographical research on money and finance. Respatialising Finance takes this literature as its starting point. Indeed, in many ways, processes of change and transformation have always characterised the development of the international financial system. For example, the collapse of the gold standard in the early 1970s and the associated move to floating exchange rates was a transformative moment in global finance and, as such, acted as a key development around which heterodox social scientists mobilised to create several of the key texts and seminal understandings of the contemporary international financial system (Corbridge et al. 1994; Leyshon and Thrift 1997; Strange 1986). One of the most significant insights to be developed within this work was an approach to the international financial system that emphasised its networked properties from a distinctly geographical perspective. In this work, the international financial system is understood as a series of networks of people, money, expertise, policy and regulation that are choreographed through a small number of international financial centres (Cassis and Wójcik 2018; Sassen 2001). This work is reflected in work in a range of social scientific disciplines adopting networks as a metaphor, theoretical approach and methodology to the study of money and finance including in geography (Pollard and Samers 2007), political economy (Fichtner et al. 2017) and cultural economy approaches to money and finance (MacKenzie 2004).

Influenced by wider thinking on networks drawing on actor network theory as well as assemblage thinking (Callon 1986; DeLanda, 2016), network approaches to global finance emphasise the range of actors, institutions and materialities, and crucially the interdependencies between them, in shaping the international financial system. Most importantly for my focus on international financial centres (IFCs), a considerable body of work has developed that emphasises the role of financial districts within global cities in choreographing international financial networks (Castells 2009; Friedmann 1986; Lavery et al. 2018; Sassen 2001). In order to fulfil this role in shaping a range of different types of global financial networks, these international financial districts contain significant clusters of financial and related advanced producer services firms notably law, accountancy and insurance firms. They also typically include a range of regulatory functions that shape the nature of financial processes and practices (Hall 2018). Given the significance of IFCs to the contemporary international financial system, a range of different literatures have developed that includes examining: the changing nature of their elite labour markets (Beaverstock and Boardwell 2000; Hall 2009; McDowell 1997); detailed accounts of everyday working life within these centres (Thrift 1994); and understandings of their political economic power beyond the realm of financial markets (Augar 2001).

Whilst the power of IFCs within global finance clearly pre-dates the 2007–2008 financial crisis, these centres serve to crystallise and reveal some of the most profound changes taking place within global finance. For example, during the 2000s, a focus on the financial labour markets within IFCs revealed a growing trend for quantitatively skilled financiers capable of working on the securitised financial markets that were central to both the period of finance-led growth in the 2000s and the ensuing financial crisis (Hall 2006; Hall and Appleyard 2009). Building on this work on elite financial labour markets, the initial motivation for the research project that underpins this book came from a growing recognition that the geographical composition of these labour markets was changing quite profoundly. In particular, I was struck by the growth of Chinese nationals working in IFCs, notably in London from the early 2010s onwards. This became the subject of several national newspaper headlines as headhunters struggled to recruit the number of mandarin speaking financiers demanded in London’s financial district and Chinese state-owned banks began operating in the heart of London’s international financial district (see, for example, Stafford 2015). Previous work has clearly demonstrated how other waves of internationalisation have shaped London as an IFC and by extension the international financial system, most notably the rise of investment banking business models led by US and later European banks at the expense of British merchant banking (Kynaston 2002). However, in the mid-2010s, very little had been written about the rise of Chinese financial institutions in London.

In Respatialising Finance, I explore how work on the changing nature of international finance as read through IFCs can be used to understand how and why London’s financial centre became the partner of choice for both Chinese state policy regarding RMB internationalisation and Chinese financial institutions who sought to benefit from it. In so doing, I use the case of RMB internationalisation in London to develop a sympathetic critique of existing work in economic geography and more widely within the social sciences on international financial centres. This work has done much to explain how and why a small number of financial districts play a vital role in shaping global monetary and financial relations. However, processes of RMB internationalisation reveal that more attention needs to be paid to the political as well as the economic relations that underpin international financial centres. As the analysis in the rest of this book shows, it is very hard to understand RMB internationalisation without studying the role of the Chinese state and the People’s Bank of China in particular in initiating the process, and through regulatory decisions, continuing to shape the parameters of its size and scope. As such, whilst private sector advanced producer services firms are involved in the process, actors which are heavily studied within extant work on IFCs, the case of RMB internationalisation suggests that a broader range of actors – including policymakers and regulators as well as the political contexts in which financial markets are made – need to be given more attention than has typically been the case hitherto.

The case of RMB internationalisation also indicates how work on the spatial imaginaries of IFCs themselves can also be helpfully developed. In much of the work on IFCs to date, they are assumed, albeit implicitly, to be facilitators of global financial flows through the networks of advanced producer service (APS) firms that cluster within them. However, if we attend to the politics of these networks, by extension the analysis in Respatialising Finance calls for a more active understanding of IFCs beyond that of more passive containers. This approach draws attention to the ways in which IFCs themselves are changed by as well as changing global finance.