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Books > Humanities > History > History of specific subjects > Economic history
The epic successor to one of the most important books of the century: at once a retelling of global history, a scathing critique of contemporary politics, and a bold proposal for a new and fairer economic system. Thomas Piketty’s bestselling Capital in the Twenty-First Century galvanized global debate about inequality. In this audacious follow-up, Piketty challenges us to revolutionize how we think about politics, ideology, and history. He exposes the ideas that have sustained inequality for the past millennium, reveals why the shallow politics of right and left are failing us today, and outlines the structure of a fairer economic system. Our economy, Piketty observes, is not a natural fact. Markets, profits, and capital are all historical constructs that depend on choices. Piketty explores the material and ideological interactions of conflicting social groups that have given us slavery, serfdom, colonialism, communism, and hypercapitalism, shaping the lives of billions. He concludes that the great driver of human progress over the centuries has been the struggle for equality and education and not, as often argued, the assertion of property rights or the pursuit of stability. The new era of extreme inequality that has derailed that progress since the 1980s, he shows, is partly a reaction against communism, but it is also the fruit of ignorance, intellectual specialization, and our drift toward the dead-end politics of identity. Once we understand this, we can begin to envision a more balanced approach to economics and politics. Piketty argues for a new “participatory” socialism, a system founded on an ideology of equality, social property, education, and the sharing of knowledge and power. Capital and Ideology is destined to be one of the indispensable books of our time, a work that will not only help us understand the world, but that will change it.
The global expansion of European colonization is commonly perceived as lawful according to the valid European colonial law of the time. This book is substantially challenging this belief by uncovering its legal justifications based on discovery and terra nullius as retrospectively created legal fictions and demonstrating its untenability in practice. Focused on the critical reconstruction of Spanish and Dutch colonization practices in northeastern South America, Trinidad and Tobago between 1498 and 1817, the book offers an illuminating view on the European shadow of the colonial past in the Americas. Based on the application of an innovative comparative spatio-legal Global History approach to 1,770 excavated European colonial written sources from archives of both sides of the Atlantic in comparison to the colonial legal provisions of Europes most influential legal writers, the book, moreover, provides a substantial argument to the contemporary Caribbean-European reparation debate in favor of the return of Indigenous Peoples historical territories. Therefore, the book calls for the extension of the traditional territory approach to reparations of the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIPs) and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR).
This Companion of nineteen essays, accompanied by the editor's introduction, investigates aspects of the philosophical foundations of Adam Smith's thought as well as his economic analysis and approach to policy. The authors view Adam Smith's work as an interconnected system of thought, which incorporates both moral philosophy and economics. His earlier work in moral philosophy, The Theory of Moral Sentiments receives significant consideration and the contributors also discuss important connections and insights into the sort of economics that Adam Smith is more widely known for in his Wealth of Nations. This book is distinguished from other collections of essays on Adam Smith in that all of the contributors are economists, and the coverage is determined by the interests of contemporary economists and scholars in the history of economic thought. A wide audience will find this Companion of great value and interest, including economists, the general economics profession, political scientists and political theorists, and philosophers with an interest in Adam Smith's work as well as historians of economics. Advanced undergraduate and post-graduate students in these fields will also warmly welcome the book.
Covering figures, events, policies, and organizations, this comprehensive reference tool enhances readers' appreciation of the role economics has played in U.S. history since 1776. A study of the U.S. economy is important to understanding U.S. politics, society, and culture. To make that study easier, this dictionary offers concise essays on more than 1,200 economics-related topics. Entries cover a broad array of pivotal information on historical events, legislation, economic terms, labor unions, inventions, interest groups, elections, court cases, economic policies and philosophies, economic institutions, and global processes. Economics-focused biographies and company profiles are featured as sidebars, and the work also includes both a chronology of major events in U.S. economic history and a selective bibliography. Encompassing U.S. history since 1776 with an emphasis on recent decades, entries range from topics related to the early economic formation of the republic to those that explore economic aspects of information technology in the 21st century. The work is written to be clearly understood by upper-level high school students, but offers sufficient depth to appeal to undergraduates. In addition, the general public will be attracted by informative discussions of everything from clean energy to what keeps interest rates low. Emphasizes an understanding of economics rather than of history that happens to touch on an economic event Opens with an overview that succinctly outlines U.S. economic history, preparing the reader to better understand and use the dictionary entries Provides comprehensive, integrated backgrounds on the most important innovations in U.S. economic history Gives readers a full picture of economic developments in the new economy by covering subjects such as the growth of Silicon Valley during the information revolution of the late 20th and early 21st centuries Ties people, places, and issues to innovations, helping students put technological change into a broader context
In 1918, the Soviet revolutionary government repudiated the Tsarist regime's sovereign debt, triggering one of the biggest sovereign defaults ever. Yet the price of Russian bonds remained high for years. Combing French archival records, Kim Oosterlinck shows that, far from irrational, investors had legitimate reasons to hope for repayment. Soviet debt recognition, a change in government, a bailout by the French government, or French banks, or a seceding country would have guaranteed at least a partial reimbursement. As Greece and other European countries raise the possibility of sovereign default, Oosterlinck's superbly researched study is more urgent than ever.
The Church and the Market is a vigorous and lively defense of the market economy and a withering attack on all forms of state intervention. It covers labor unions, monopoly, money and banking, business cycles, interest, usury, and much more. Although it makes a particular point of noting the moral arguments of the market economy and that Catholics are of course perfectly at liberty to support it, its audience is much broader than Catholics alone. Readers of all religious traditions and none at all have praised The Church and the Market, first-place winner in the 2006 Templeton Enterprise Awards, as one of the most compelling and persuasive defenses of capitalism against its critics ever written.
In the wake of the financial crisis in 2008, historians have turned with renewed urgency to understanding the economic dimension of historical change. In this collection, nine scholars present original research into the historical development of money and credit during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and explore the social and cultural significance of financial phenomena from a global perspective. Together with an introduction by the editors, chapters emphasize themes of creditworthiness and access to credit, the role of the state in the loan market, modernization, colonialism, and global connections between markets. The first section of the volume, "Creditworthiness and Credit Risks," examines microfinancial markets in South India and Sri Lanka, Brazil, and the United States, in which access to credit depended largely on reputation, while larger investors showed a strong interest in policing economic behavior and encouraging thrift among market participants. The second section, "The Loan Market and the State," concerns attempts by national governments to regulate the lending activities of merchants and banks for social ends, from the liberal regime of nineteenth-century Switzerland to the far more statist policies of post-revolutionary Mexico, and U.S. legislation that strove to eliminate discrimination in lending. The third section, "Money, Commercial Exchange, and Global Connections," focuses on colonial and semicolonial societies in the Philippines, China, and Zimbabwe, where currency reform and the development of organized financial markets engendered conflict over competing models of economic development, often pitting the colony against the metropole. This volume offers a cultural history by considering money and credit as social relations, and explores how such relations were constructed and articulated by contemporaries. Chapters employ a variety of methodologies, including analyses of popular literature and the viewpoints of experts and professionals, investigations of policy measures and emerging social practices, and interpretations of quantitative data.
You Spend It. You Save It. You Never Have Enough of It. But how does money actually work? Understanding cash, currencies and the financial system is vital for making sense of what is going on in our world, especially now. Since the 2008 financial crisis, money has rarely been out of the headlines. Central banks have launched extraordinary policies, like quantitative easing or negative interest rates. New means of payment, like Bitcoin and Apple Pay, are changing how we interact with money and how governments and corporations keep track of our spending. Radical politicians in the US and UK are urging us to transform our financial system and make it the servant of social justice. And yet, if you stopped for a moment and asked yourself whether you really understand how it works, would you honestly be able to say 'yes'? In Money in One Lesson, Gavin Jackson, a lead writer for the Financial Times, specialising in economics, business and public policy, answers the most important questions to clarify for the reader what money is and how it shapes our societies. With brilliant storytelling, Jackson provides a basic understanding of the most important element of our everyday lives. Drawing on stories like the 1970s Irish Banking Strike to show what money actually is, and the Great Inflation of West Africa's cowrie shell money to explain how it keeps its value, Money in One Lesson demystifies the world of finance and explains how societies, both past and present, are forever entwined with monetary matters.
This open access book uncovers one important, yet forgotten, form of itinerant livelihoods, namely petty trade, more specifically how it was practiced in Northern Europe during the period 1820-1960. It investigates how traders and customers interacted in different spaces and approaches ambulatory trade as an arena of encounters by looking at everyday social practices. Petty traders often belonged to subjugated social groups, like ethnic minorities and migrants, whereas their customers belonged to the resident population. How were these mobile traders perceived and described? What goods did they peddle? How did these commodities enable and shape trading encounters? What kind of narratives can be found, and whose? These questions pertaining to daily practices on a grass-root level have not been addressed in previous research. Encounters and Practices embarks on hidden histories of survival, vulnerability, and conflict, but also discloses reciprocal relations, even friendships.
Commerce meets conquest in this swashbuckling story of the six merchant-adventurers who built the modern world It was an era when monopoly trading companies were the unofficial agents of European expansion, controlling vast numbers of people and huge tracts of land, and taking on governmental and military functions. They managed their territories as business interests, treating their subjects as employees, customers, or competitors. The leaders of these trading enterprises exercised virtually unaccountable, dictatorial political power over millions of people. The merchant kings of the Age of Heroic Commerce were a rogue's gallery of larger-than-life men who, for a couple hundred years, expanded their far-flung commercial enterprises over a sizable portion of the world. They include Jan Pieterszoon Coen, the violent and autocratic pioneer of the Dutch East India Company; Peter Stuyvesant, the one-legged governor of the Dutch West India Company, whose narrow-minded approach lost Manhattan to the British; Robert Clive, who rose from company clerk to become head of the British East India Company and one of the wealthiest men in Britain; Alexandr Baranov of the Russian American Company; Cecil Rhodes, founder of De Beers and Rhodesia; and George Simpson, the "Little Emperor" of the Hudson's Bay Company, who was chauffeured about his vast fur domain in a giant canoe, exhorting his voyageurs to paddle harder so he could set speed records."Merchant Kings" looks at the rise and fall of company rule in the centuries before colonialism, when nations belatedly assumed responsibility for their commercial enterprises. A blend of biography, corporate history, and colonial history, this book offers a panoramic, new perspective on the enormous cultural, political, and social legacies, good and bad, of this first period of unfettered globalization.
"State, Economy and the Great Divergence" provides a new analysis of what has become the central debate in global economic history: the 'great divergence' between European and Asian growth. Focusing on early modern China and Western Europe, this book offers a new level of detail on comparative state formation that has wide-reaching implications for European, Eurasian and global history.Beginning with a comprehensive overview of the historiography, Peer Vries goes on to extend and develop the debate, critically engaging with the huge volume of literature published on the topic to date. Incorporating new insights into the case of Europe, he offers a compelling alternative to the exaggerated claims to East-West equivalence, or Asian superiority, which have come to dominate discourse surrounding this issue.This is a vital update to a key issue in global economic history and, as such, is essential reading for students and scholars interested in keeping up to speed with the on-going debates.
This book reveals changing management paradigms with new normal in the maritime sector. Thus, maritime business has once again justified that it's one of the leading and ceaseless sectors of all times during hard times. Amidst the pandemic, employees of the maritime and logistics sector have continued their activities both on shore and on board in order to complete operations and supply continuity of logistics management in hard times. While organizations work on giving the best services to customers, the shipping industry has been affected by the work life changes of the pandemic. Remote work opportunities for employees of onshore maritime organizations has led to sustainable changes for the future of global maritime business. Therefore, changes have been felt in talent management in new shipping, changing maritime ethics and affected maritime industry psychology during Covid19 pandemic, employees' motivation, importance of seafarers, employee rights and responsibilities. The book addresses the future state of maritime organizations, the future of work in the maritime industry, seafarers, onshore employees, employers, definition of remote work amidst changes and new regulations in the new world normal to reveal how such change effected the global maritime industry. This book will shed light on the Leaders and Managers from maritime and logistics industries by sharing experiences, new paradigms, practices and strategies. This provides practical ideas and ways to cope with the consequences of the New Normal in the wake of the pandemic crisis worldwide. Furthermore, the book inspires other people, particularly in the maritime industry as well administrators, employees, leaders and those in senior management positions on how to survive during this period of uncertainties and challenges in operating their business and their human resources management activities.
The search for the pioneers of financial economics contained in this volume places the origins of financial economics well outside the conventional boundaries of the history of economic thought. Under the editorship of Geoffrey Poitras, a leading authority on the history of financial economics, these specially commissioned essays comprise contributions on the seventeenth to the early twentieth centuries, and include the work of both well-known and less familiar historical figures. The subjects studied display a variety of philosophical foundations and include: Jacob Bernoulli, Joseph de la Vega, Edmond Halley, Abraham de Moivre, Duvillard de Durand, Jules Regnault, Henri Lefevre, Louis Bachelier, and Vincenz Bronzin. Life annuity valuation, the modified internal rate of return, the nineteenth-century science of financial investments, and the early development of option pricing models are just some of the issues dealt with by these early thinkers and explored in depth within these pages. An outstanding volume of original analysis, Pioneers of Financial Economics is an essential reference source of seminal contributions on the early history of financial economics.
THE UNTOLD STORY OF HOW WOMEN MADE THE WORLD WEALTHY
This book aims to study, from an approach linked to epistemology and the history of ideas, the evolution of economic science and its differing seminal systems. Today mainstream economics solves certain problems chosen within the scope of "normal science," without questioning the epistemological foundations that support the paradigm within which they were conceived. Contrary to a Neoclassical interpretation, the historicist interpretation shows that, from the incommensurability of the different paradigms, it is impossible to conceive of a progress of economic science, in a long-term perspective. This book ultimately reveals, from the different economic schools of thought analyzed, that there is no pure form of episteme, or system of understanding. Each concrete episteme in the history of economic thought is by nature hybrid in the sense that it contains components from preceding systems of knowledge.
The period between the close of the Kennedy Round and the opening of the Uruguay Round replaced a decade of fast growth in world output and trade - and of prevailing harmony in trade relations across the Atlantic - with twenty years of currency and trade turmoil and strains between the US and the EC. Giuseppe La Barca provides a comprehensive account of these trade developments and the measures adopted by the US and the EC to cope with them; in doing so, he draws a wider picture of international trade policy-making during the period. The aftermath of the Kennedy Round witnessed the undoing of the Bretton Woods regime, but the consequent overheating of the world economy resulted in an acceleration of international trade while settlement in the currency area contributed to the launching of the Tokyo Round negotiations. The first oil shock heralded an unprecedented slump along with a jump in unemployment and inflation rates. The Tokyo Round resulted only in a first step in eliminating non-tariff barriers, leaving contentious issues between the two transatlantic trading partners unsettled. The second oil shock led to growing calls for protectionism and unilateralism particularly in the US, and the Reagan administration pressed for the launch of the Uruguay Round only partially supported by the EC. Providing an in-depth analysis of trade developments involving the two most important economic actors, and placing these developments in a multilateral, international context, this book offers new insights to scholars of economic history and international political economy.
In recent years, due to the increasingly aggressive market competition, it is essential to evaluate the role of logistics and supply chain management skills and applications for the success of any organization or business. The COVID-19 pandemic revealed the fragility of the sustainability of economic organization, production, and supply chains globally. Cases on Supply Chain Management and Lessons Learned From COVID-19 collects compelling case studies, theoretical and empirical research, experiences, and applications on numerous aspects of logistics and supply chain management. It not only focuses on industry and digital transformation and the critical nature of organizational agility, but also presents different methods, techniques, models, and competitive advantage prospects, providing an extremely relevant and current view of the subject matter. Covering topics such as green supply chain management, organizational performance, and supply chain disruptions, this book is the ideal reference source for managers, supply chain specialists, entrepreneurs, business professionals, consultants, researchers, academicians, educators, and students. |
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