This collection of essays presents insight and methodology that are highly relevant for readers today as they consider the future of the world they live in. Experiencing the COVID-19 pandemic, people have realized how fragile the current economy is and the necessity for reconstructing the socio-economic system. That system, which was considered the default for so long, was succeeded by the analytical framework of economics and regional science. The contents of this book are diversified, as are the achievements of Prof. Yasuhiro Sakai, to whom this volume is dedicated, and cover a wide area from mathematical and experimental economics to conventional and emerging fields of regional science. Some are timeless topics that have had new life breathed into them. Part I deals with, among other areas, risk management with uncertain events; the effectiveness and impacts of regulation and friction related to trading; the stability of strategic behavior and market equilibrium; and sustainable regional development and urban planning from the long-term perspective. Part II also presents a diversity of subjects, including input-output analysis and computable general equilibrium (CGE) modelling for internal as well as external structure and network linkage, such as a value chain; openness and creativity as related to competition among cities and regions; dispersion versus concentration; and inequality versus equality.

Gustavo Corni offers a balanced and comprehensive study of Nazi agricultural policies and German agriculture between 1930 and 1939. The author gives a full account of the decisive rural support for the Nazi party during this period and describes how the Nazi agrarian ideology was developed to gain mass support.

This book explores the changing boundaries and relationships between market and state from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. Money and Markets celebrates Martin Daunton's distinguished career by bringing together essays from leading economic, social and cultural historians, many being colleagues and former students. Throughout his career, Dauntonhas focused on the relationship between structure and agency, how institutional structures create capacities and path dependencies, and how institutions are themselves shaped by agency and contingency - what Braudel referred to as 'turning the hour glass twice'. This volume reflects that focus, combining new research on the financing of the British fiscal-military state before and during the Napoleonic wars, its property institutions, and thelonger-term economic consequences of Sir Robert Peel. There are also chapters on the birth of the Eurodollar market, Conservative fiscal policy from the 1960s to the 1980s, the impact of neoliberalism on welfare policy and more broadly, the failed attempt to build an airport in the Thames Estuary in the 1970s, and the political economy of time in Britain since 1945. While much of the focus is on Britain, and British finance in a global economy, the volumealso reflects Daunton's more recent study of international political economy with essays on the French contribution to nineteenth-century globalization, Prussian state finances at the time of the 1848 revolution, Imperial German monetary policy, the role of international charity in the mixed economy of welfare and neoliberal governance, and the material politics of energy consumption from the 1930s to the 1960s. JULIAN HOPPIT is Astor Professor of British History at University College London. ADRIAN LEONARD is Associate Director of the Centre for Financial History at the University of Cambridge. DUNCAN NEEDHAM is Dean and Senior Tutor at Darwin College, University of Cambridge. CONTRIBUTORS: Martin Chick, Sean Eddie, Matthew Hilton, Julian Hoppit, Seung-Woo Kim, Adrian Leonard, Duncan Needham, Charles Read, Bernhard Rieger, Richard Rodger, Sabine Schneider, HirokiShin, David Todd, James Tomlinson, Frank Trentmann, Adrian Williamson

Why did the 1917 American Red Cross Mission to Russia include more financiers than medical doctors? Rather than caring for the victims of war and revolution, its members seemed more intent on negotiating contracts with the Kerensky government, and subsequently the Bolshevik regime. In a courageous investigation, Antony Sutton establishes tangible historical links between US capitalists and Russian communists. Drawing on State Department files, personal papers of key Wall Street figures, biographies and conventional histories, Sutton reveals: the role of Morgan banking executives in funneling illegal Bolshevik gold into the US; the co-option of the American Red Cross by powerful Wall Street forces; the intervention by Wall Street sources to free the Marxist revolutionary Leon Trotsky, whose aim was to topple the Russian government; the deals made by major corporations to capture the huge Russian market a decade and a half before the US recognized the Soviet regime; and, the secret sponsoring of Communism by leading businessmen, who publicly championed free enterprise. "Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution" traces the foundations of Western funding of the Soviet Union. Dispassionately, and with overwhelming documentation, the author details a crucial phase in the establishment of Communist Russia. This classic study - first published in 1974 and part of a key trilogy - is reproduced here in its original form. (The other volumes in the series include "Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler" and a study of Franklin D. Roosevelt's "1933 Presidential election in the United States").

A comprehensive account of the rise and fall of the mortgage-securitization industry, which explains the complex roots of the 2008 financial crisis. More than a decade after the 2008 financial crisis plunged the world economy into recession, we still lack an adequate explanation for why it happened. Existing accounts identify a number of culprits-financial instruments, traders, regulators, capital flows-yet fail to grasp how the various puzzle pieces came together. The key, Neil Fligstein argues, is the convergence of major US banks on an identical business model: extracting money from the securitization of mortgages. But how, and why, did this convergence come about? The Banks Did It carefully takes the reader through the development of a banking industry dependent on mortgage securitization. Fligstein documents how banks, with help from the government, created the market for mortgage securities. The largest banks-Countrywide Financial, Bear Stearns, Citibank, and Washington Mutual-soon came to participate in every aspect of this market. Each firm originated mortgages, issued mortgage-backed securities, sold those securities, and, in many cases, acted as their own best customers by purchasing the same securities. Entirely reliant on the throughput of mortgages, these firms were unable to alter course even when it became clear that the market had turned on them in the mid-2000s. With the structural features of the banking industry in view, the rest of the story falls into place. Fligstein explains how the crisis was produced, where it spread, why regulators missed the warning signs, and how banks' dependence on mortgage securitization resulted in predatory lending and securities fraud. An illuminating account of the transformation of the American financial system, The Banks Did It offers important lessons for anyone with a stake in avoiding the next crisis.

Volume 22 of Research in Economic History contains six papers. Three are on agriculture and two on macro issues related to the Great Depression. A concluding paper examines trends in interstate migration in the United States.

Fred Pryor begins the volume with a provocative exploration of the degree to which the Neolithic revolution was in fact revolutionary. Pryor argues for a considerably lesser break with the past than has been commonly asserted. He maintains, in particular, that hunter-gatherer methods of procuring subsistence persisted alongside a continuum of agricultural practices. His evidence is drawn largely from records of surviving hunter-gatherer societies.

Moving forward 10 millennia, Gregory Clark provides details of his construction of an annual price series for English net agricultural output from 1209 to 1914. Clark incorporates fresh archival material with existing published series, using consistent methods to build and aggregate 26 component series.

In the third paper on farming, Giovanni Federico estimates world agricultural production from 1800 to 1938. He concludes that output grew more rapidly than population, and did so on all continents, although more rapidly in countries of Western settlement and in Eastern Europe than in Asia or in Western Europe. Federico also finds that output grew faster before World War One than in the inter-war years, and resulted over time in an increase in the share of livestock products.

Continuing into the twentieth century, we have two papers on the Great Depression. First, Barry Eichengreen and Kris Mitchener explore the degree to which the seeds of economic downturn were sown during the 1920s, particularly through "excessive" credit creation. The authors develop quantitative measures of credit expansion and ask how well these indicators account for "uneveness" in the twenties expansion as well as the depth and severity of the depression in individual countries. They complement this macro analysis with sectoral studies of real estate, consumer durables, and high-tech sectors.

Jakob Madsen's contribution is also based on an examination of depression macro history in a number of countries, but his focus is on output and labor rather than credit markets. he explores the perennial questions of how sticky were wages and prices and whether such stickiness played a significant casual role in the rise of unemployment. Contrary to many models that assume or assert that prices are inherently more flexible than nominal wages, Madsen finds the reverse: prices adjusted slowly to changes in nominal wages, and this stickiness played a role in propagating economic depression.

Finally, Josh Rosenbloom and Bill Sundstrom explore changing rates of interstate migration by examining individual-level data from population censuses available in the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS). Their central finding is that propensities to migrate within the United States have traced out a U-shaped pattern, tending to fall between 1850 and 1900 and then, during the twentieth century, rising until around 1970.

This book challenges conventional wisdom by revealing an extensive and heterogeneous community of foreign businesses in Australia before 1914. Multinational enterprise arrived predominantly from Britain, but other sender nations included the USA, France, Germany, New Zealand, and Japan. Their firms spread out across Australia from mining and pastoral communities, to portside industries and CBD precincts, and they operated broadly across mining, trading, shipping, insurance, finance, and manufacturing. They were a remarkably diverse population of firms by size, organisational form, and longevity. This is a rare study of the impact of multinationals on a host nation, particularly before World War One, and that focuses on a successful resource-based economy. Deploying a database of more than 600 firms, supported by contemporary archives and publications, the work reveals how multinational influence was contested by domestic enterprise, other foreign firms, and the strategic investments of governments in network industries. Nonetheless, foreign agency - particularly investment, knowledge and entrepreneurship - mattered in the economic development of Australia in the nineteenth as well as the twentieth centuries. This book will be of interest to students and researchers in Australian and international economic and business history, the history of economic growth and scholars of international business.

Read addresses the contributions of significant individuals to our understanding of financial decisions and markets. Great financial theorists created the basis for what we now know as personal finance and this volume describes four great minds in finance that forever established the role of the rate of return and life cycle decision-making.

This study chronicles the unique relationship between the Federal government and the American multinational corporation, integrating it into the mainstream of American political history. It is a record of continuous adjustment on the part of both parties as each side navigated the unchartered waters of this unconventional partnership. What makes it so relevant historically is that while the Federal government was adjusting to its postwar global responsibilities, corporate America in its multinational dimension was taking on new roles which redefined the international political economy. It involved international oil companies impacting our relations with the volatile Middle East, an economic Watergate of global dimensions, and an unresolved debate on public versus private responsibilities toward the Third World and its multiple economic and social problems. Objectively presented, " America and the Multinational Corporation" provides the historical context for tracking the various presidential perspectives from Truman to Bush as well as the various congressional initiatives to redefine business-government relations in terms of corporate America's most aggressive offspring--the multinational.

Professor Reardon moves beyond the initial assessments of the multinational corporation vis-a-vis the Federal government, refusing to view it as a threat to the continued survival of the nation-state or as a force that the Federal government must tame at all cost. Rather, the partnership is a complex and continuously evolving relationship that may well be acquiring a new configuration as the world's economy becomes global rather than international. His study will be of interest to all students of contemporary American history as well as scholars in international political economy.

American households, businesses, and governments have always used intensive amounts of credit. The Engine of Enterprise traces the story of credit from colonial times to the present, highlighting its productive role in building national prosperity. Rowena Olegario probes enduring questions that have divided Americans: Who should have access to credit? How should creditors assess borrowers' creditworthiness? How can people accommodate to, rather than just eliminate, the risks of a credit-dependent economy? In the 1790s Alexander Hamilton saw credit as "the invigorating principle" that would spur the growth of America's young economy. His great rival, Thomas Jefferson, deemed it a grave risk, inviting burdens of debt that would amount to national self-enslavement. Even today, credit lies at the heart of longstanding debates about opportunity, democracy, individual responsibility, and government's reach. Olegario goes beyond these timeless debates to explain how the institutions and legal frameworks of borrowing and lending evolved and how attitudes about credit both reflected and drove those changes. Properly managed, credit promised to be a powerful tool. Mismanaged, it augured disaster. The Engine of Enterprise demonstrates how this tension led to the creation of bankruptcy laws, credit-reporting agencies, and insurance regimes to harness the power of credit while minimizing its destabilizing effects.

This book provides a systematic account of the development of agriculture and agricultural civilization in ancient China. It mainly discusses the birth of traditional agriculture, the characteristics and advantages of traditional agricultural economy, traditional agricultural knowledge and technology system, flexible land relations and ownership structure, extensive irrigation system and water conservancy projects, complete policies and measures to emphasize agriculture, the three agricultural expansion processes, the value pursuit of revering agriculture, and the plight and decline of traditional agriculture.

In his book War Finance and Logistics in Late Imperial China, Ulrich Theobald shows how the Qing dynasty (1644 - 1911) overcame the tyranny of logistics and successfully enlarged the territory of its empire. A detailed analysis of the long and expensive second Jinchuan war (1771 - 1776) in Eastern Tibet demonstrates that the Chinese state ordered its civilian officials as well as the common people, merchant associations, and different ethnic groups to fulfil and to foot the bill for the "common cause". With increasing military success the state gradually withdrew from its responsibilities, believing that a War Supply and Expenditure Code (Junxu zeli) might offset the decreasing skill in and readiness to imperial leadership.

This book presents and uses a major, new database of the most serious forms of internal resistance to the Nazi state to study empirically the whole phenomenon of resistance to an authoritarian regime. By studying serious political resistance from a quantitative historical perspective, the book opens up a new avenue of research for economic history. The database underpinning the book was painstakingly compiled from official state records of treason and/or high treason tried before the German People's Court (Volksgerichtshof) between 1933 and 1945. It brings together material on resistance groups stored in the archives of the Federal Republic of Germany and Austria with previously inaccessible files from the former German Democratic Republic, Czechoslovakia and Soviet Union. Through searching these records, the authors have been able to reconstruct in hitherto unattainable detail the economic, social, political, ethnic and familial profiles, backgroun ds, and influences of all 4,378 civilians of the Third Reich active in Germany, Austria and the outside territories for whom there are complete records. The findings of their research afford fresh, new interdisciplinary insights and perspectives, not only on the configuration, timing, impact and profile of resistance to the Nazi state, but also on a range of real-world behaviours common within authoritarian states, such as defection, reward and punishment, and commitment to group identities. The book's statistical analysis reveals precisely the who, how, where and when of serious resistance. In so doing, it advances significantly our understanding of the overall pattern and nature of serious resistance within Nazi Germany.

The bubble burst. Within months, dot-com once-millionaires were scratching around for jobs. Nevaer proves that the laws of classical economics were never repealed, and that the New Economy was more Old Economy than many people believed. His briskly provocative new book shows how the return of common sense is opening fresh opportunities for wealth creation in badly battered industries--the entertainment industry especially--and offers five keys to understanding the online economy overall. The crash, says Nevaer, was inevitable. Characteristics of the New Economy created market imperfections that led to total failures. The negative effects were not isolated. They hurt the whole economy. The online community also fostered undesired social outcomes--pathological consumer behavior--but the potential for more beneficial gains is still indisputable.

Nevaer applies the fundamental theories and ideas of classical economics to the world online, providing a concise understanding of what properly belongs to the Old Economy, and what belongs to the New. He examines the real--that is, sustainable--components of the New Economy centered on five industries: publishing, music, video games, and, to some dismay, gambling and adult entertainment. Meticulously researched and documented, Nevaer's book is an authoritative, probing account for analysts, researchers, students, and scholars. As a study of American culture and society, it is an entertaining read for knowledgeable people everywhere.

This volume presents eighteen papers by leading Roman historians and archaeologists discussing trade in the Roman Empire during the period c.100 BC to AD 350. It focuses especially on the role of the Roman state in shaping the institutional framework for trade within and outside the empire, in taxing that trade, and in intervening in the markets to ensure the supply of particular commodities, especially for the city of Rome and for the army. As part of a novel interdisciplinary approach to the subject, the chapters address its myriad facets on the basis of broadly different sources of evidence: historical, papyrological, and archaeological. They are grouped into three sections, covering institutional factors (taxation, legal structures, market regulation, financial institutions); evidence for long-distance trade within the empire in wood, stone, glass, and pottery; and trade beyond the frontiers, with the east (as far as China), India, Arabia, the Red Sea, and the Sahara. Rome's external trade with realms to the east emerges as being of particular significance, but it is in the eastern part of the empire itself where the state appears to have adapted the mechanisms of taxation in collaboration with the elite holders of wealth to support its need for revenue. On the other hand, the price of that collaboration, which was in effect a fiscal partnership, ultimately led in the longer term in slightly different forms in the east and the west to a fundamental change in the political character of the empire.

This study offers a distinctive new account of British economic life since the Second World War, focussing upon the ways in which successive governments, in seeking to manage the economy, have sought simultaneously to 'manage the people': to try and manage popular understanding of economic issues. In doing so, governments have sought not only to shape expectations for electoral purposes but to construct broader narratives about how 'the economy' should be understood. The starting point of this work is to ask why these goals have been focussed upon (and differentially over time), how they have been constructed to appeal to the population, and, insofar as this can be assessed, how far the population has accepted these narratives. The first half of the book analyses the development of the major narratives from the 1940s onwards, addressing the notion of 'austerity' and its particular meaning in the 1940s; the rise of a narrative of 'economic decline from the late 1950s, and the subsequent attempts to 'modernize' the economy; the attempts to 'roll back the state' from the 1970s; the impact of ideas of 'globalization' in the 1900s; and, finally, the way the crisis of 2008/9 onwards was constructed as a problem of 'debts and deficits'. The second part of the book focuses on four key issues in attempts to 'manage the people': productivity, the balance of payments, inflation, and unemployment. It shows how, in each case, governments sought to get the populace to understand these issues in a particular light, and shaped strategies to that end.

In the most comprehensive analysis of Taiwan's economic development available to date, Y. Dolly Hwang traces the economic, political, and historical factors that enabled the island to transform itself from a poor country burdened with heavy foreign debt and rampant inflation into an emerging world economic power in a period of only forty years. Hwang explores the role played by the cultural and individual aspirations of the Taiwanese; the improvements in political, social, and educational life that were made possible by the island's economic growth; Taiwan's growing contribution to the global economy; and the country's ability to rapidly narrow the technological gap between itself and the industrialized nations. Throughout, Hwang emphasizes the dynamic interrelationships among the various factors that have created Taiwan's phenomenal success. Following an overview of Taiwan's postwar economic development, Hwang surveys events in Chinese history which laid the groundwork for Taiwan's rise to a world economic power. Hwang then devotes separate chapters to the influence of Taiwan's struggle for survival on its economic development, the role of government and the technocrats, and the contribution of specific economic policies, particularly the drive to develop an export-based economy. Subsequent chapters address industrialization, international trade, Taiwan's monetary, fiscal, and financial system, Confucianism and the capitalist spirit in Taiwan, entrepreneurs and small- to medium-sized enterprises, and the parts played by the United States and Japan in Taiwan's economic development. The concluding chapter looks at likely future scenarios for the island nation, including a possible reunification with mainland China. Students of economic history, economic development, and Asian Studies will find Hwang's study enlightening reading.

This anthology honors the life and work of American economist John E. Murray, whose work on the evolution of the standard of living spanned multiple disciplines. Publishing extensively in the areas of the history of healthcare and health insurance, labor markets, religion, and family-related issues from education to orphanages, fertility, and marriage, Murray was much more than an economic historian and his influence can be felt across the wider scholarly community. Written by Murray's academic collaborators, mentors, and mentees, this collection of essays covers topics such as the effect of the 1918 influenza pandemic on U.S. life insurance holdings, the relationship between rapid economic growth and type 2 diabetes, and the economics of the early church. This volume will be of use to scholars and students interested in economic history, cliometrics, labor economics, and American and European history, as well as the history of religion.

This open access book uses an interdisciplinary approach that not only focuses on social organization but also analyzes how societies and ecological settings were interwoven. How did early modern indigenous Sami inhabitants in interior northwest Fennoscandia build institutions for governance of natural resources? The book answers this question by exploring how they made decisions regarding natural resource management, mainly with regard to wild game, fish, and grazing land and illuminate how Sami users, in a changing economy, altered the long-term rules for use of land and water in a self-governance context. The early modern period was a transforming phase of property rights due to fundamental changes in Sami economy: from an economy based on fishing and hunting to an economy where reindeer pastoralism became the main occupation for many Sami. The book gives a new portrayal of how proficiently and systematically indigenous inhabitants organized and governed natural assets and how capable they were in building highly functioning institutions for governance.

This book examines the work of Adam Smith and his interest in the science of the legislator. Smith's criticism of the mercantile system and the political dimension of capitalism is discussed, alongside insight into what institutions he saw as necessary to transform the mercantile system into a system of natural freedom. Through insights into Smith's analysis of the political threats of capital accumulation and the growth of inequality, the point at which he discovered capitalism is highlighted. This book aims to explore Smith's belief set out in The Wealth of Nations that the mercantile system was a viable, if dangerous, economic model. It is relevant to students and researchers interested in the history of economic thought.

This book is the first comprehensive study of debts and credit system at Emar. It focuses on the socio-economic aspects of credit access and indebtedness as well as on the motivations behind debts and debt settlement in the city of Emar. The credit system is analyzed through several factors: the purpose of debts, i.e., productive or consumptive; the procedures for granting loans; the strategies put in place to meet an obligation and to cope with economic difficulties; the consequences of non-fulfillment, which may lead to servitude or slavery; the different types of slavery; slave prices; the mechanisms of enslavement; and termination of slavery. Moneylending practices and the formation of servile conditions at Emar are studied in the context of the Syrian economy aiming to understand whether the Emar evidence conforms with a socio political and economic crisis that is generally acknowledged to have struck Syria, Anatolia and Northern Mesopotamia at the end of the Late Bronze Age. This work is of sure relevance for scholars interested in socio-economic history, not only of the pertinent historical-geographical area.

This open-minded, multidisciplinary approach challenges existing world views on the endogenous and exogenous forces that drive markets and economies. Nine narrative chapters and a conclusion provide an accessible history of key premises and assumptions in the mental models proposed by several major economists since the 1776 publication of Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations and show how-and why-those models and their underlying assumptions have changed over time. The book addresses the legacies of major economists, describes their historical and analytical influence, documents the interaction among various schools of thought as well as how they differ, and the implications that this history has for economics and the policy sciences in the decades ahead. The author focuses on the mental maps economists have created in an attempt to understand the forces that destroyed "order," explaining how these maps incorporate a non-mathematical presentation of evolving dictionaries, novel analytical perspectives, new evidence, and a reliance on value assumptions. He traces the underlying assumptions, continuities, and differences among major economists including Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, David Ricardo, Alfred Marshall, John Maynard Keynes, Karl Marx, Thorstein Veblen, and Joseph Schumpeter. Readers will grasp how the classic theories still influence economists' mental models today and come away with a basic economic literacy that puts this important social science in historical context. This is essential reading for all the social and policy sciences. Explores how economists described the forces that drive markets and economies, explains why these descriptions have changed over time, and identifies the impacts that historical events and the growth of the economics profession have had on these descriptions Questions whether the mental models and economic assumptions initially proposed by Adam Smith should continue to be used Examines not only historic events and the development of economic and socio-political theories but also addresses questions about the future of economics and other social sciences