![]() |
![]() |
Your cart is empty |
||
Books > History > History of specific subjects > Economic history
There is a standard belief that the modern theory of marginal utility originated in the UK with Jevons, Germany with Gossen, Austria with Menger and France with Walras. In this new book, John Chipman introduces new English translations of important writings from German economists such as Rau, Hildebrand, Roscher and Knies showing that the introduction of this concept originated with them. This ground breaking book comes with a long introduction from John Chipman analysing the theory.
When the British took control of the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius soon after the abolition of the slave trade, they were faced with a labour-hungry and potentially hostile Franco-Mauritian plantocracy. This book explores the context in which Indian convicts were transported to the island and put to work building the infrastructure necessary to fuel the expansion of the sugar industry. Drawing on hitherto unexplored archival material, it is shown how convicts experienced transportation and integrated into the Mauritian social and economic fabric.
The book evaluates the importance of constitutional rules and property rights for the German economy in 1990-2015. It is an economic historical study embedded in institutional economics with main references to positive constitutional economics and the property rights theory. This interdisciplinary work adopts a theoretical-empirical dimension and a qualitative-quantitative approach. Formal institutions played a fundamental role in Germany's post-reunification economic changes. They set the legal and institutional framework for the transition process of Eastern Germany and the unification, integration and convergence between the two parts of the country. Although the latter process was not completed, the effects of these formal rules were positive, especially for the former GDR.
Looking at the precedents set by the panic of 1907 and the Great Depression in America, this book investigates the causes of the 2007-2008 financial crisis. Pizzutto examines the effects of monetary policy, as well as of expanding and contracting financial cycles, in order to analyze the breakdown of the money market and capital market circuits. Not only exploring the impact of the Federal Reserve and central banking on monetary policy, he also analyzes the role of non-bank financial intermediaries. How can monetary policy resolve the instability of the US financial system? How can financial intermediation work effectively? This timely book highlights how historical lessons can be used to avoid the next financial crisis.
An investigation into farming practices throughout a period of seismic change. WINNER of the British Agricultural History Society's 2022 Thirsk Prize "This meticulously researched book gives a detailed and authoritative history of agricultural change in the second half of the twentieth century. The book skilfully weaves together the hitherto underexplored individual returns of the Farm Management Survey with oral histories of the farmers who enacted change on the ground to offer an incisive account of the complex technological, political and cultural developments which gave rise to some of the greatest changes in English farming history. It will stand as the key reference point for those with an interest in the history of agricultural change in Britain." Professor Mark Riley, University of Liverpool At the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939 British agriculture was largely powered by the muscles of men, women, and horses, and used mostly nineteenth-century technology to produce less than half of the country's temperate food. By 1985, less land and far fewer people were involved in farming, the power sources and technologies had been completely transformed, and the output of the country's agriculture had more than doubled. This is the story of the national farm, reflecting the efforts and experiences of 200,000 or so farmers and their families, together with the people they employed. But it is not the story of any individual one of them. We know too little about change at the individual farm level, although what happened varied considerably between farms and between different technologies. Based on an improbably-surviving archive of Farm Management Survey accounts, supported by oral histories from some of the farmers involved, this book explores the links between the production of new technologies, their transmission through knowledge networks, and their reception on individual farms. It contests the idea that rapid adoption of technology was inevitable, and reveals the unevenness, variability and complexity that lay beneath the smooth surface of the official statistics.
.
This book examines the work of Milton Friedman, which is amongst the most significant in modern economics and, equally, amongst the most contentious. Although Friedman became most famous for his views on money and monetary policy as well as his public writings, a large and important part of his work concerned other aspects of economics. All parts of Friedman's work are considered here, as is his account of his own life. By focussing on what Friedman wrote rather than what later authors have written about him, this volume seeks to analyse the character, qualities and development of the arguments he made. This text is important for anyone interested in this both celebrated and reviled figure in economics. James Forder clarifies messages in Friedman's writing that have otherwise so often been obscured by academic and public controversy.
George Rublee (1868-1957), was an eastern establishment lawyer and corporate liberal who made a significant contribution to economic reform legislation on the state and national levels during the progressive era. He was also involved in a number of important international events from 1917 to 1939. Despite his achievements, he has been largely overlooked. In this first biography of Rublee, McClure contends that any understanding of the history of the Federal Trade Commission and of U.S. foreign relations in World War I and the interwar period is incomplete without an understanding of Rublee's experiences. Rublee's influence on domestic policy includes his role as advisor to New Hampshire governor Robert Bass, his influence in the development of Theodore Roosevelt's 1912 New Nationalism platform, and his conversion of Woodrow Wilson to a Bull Moose approach to antitrust with the creation of the FTC in 1914. His contribution to international relations ranges from his participation on the almost forgotten Allied Maritime Transport Council; to his success in bringing the US into a consultative pact with Great Britain and France at the 1930 London Naval Conference, to his courageous role as director of the controversial Intergovernmental Committee, created at the 1938 Evian Conference to deal with the German Jewish refugee crisis.
This book traces the emergence of the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) from 1955 to 1963 amid the broader reshaping of the institutional architecture of post-war Europe. It considers the ill-fated Free Trade Area (FTA) proposal, the subsequent creation of EFTA, and the resulting division of Western Europe into two distinct trading blocs. At its core, the book provides an international history of a formative moment of post-war and European integration history, and explores the intense technical discussions among European states as they grappled with the prospect of deeper economic and political unity. It thus provides the first detailed analysis combining the FTA and EFTA negotiations, considering both state and non-state actors. Drawing on archives from Britain, Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland, Norway, the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, and the US, as well as the records of the OEEC and EFTA, it examines the decision-making processes of those intimately involved as well as the institutional settings within which they were forced to reconcile their positions. At a key moment of contemporary European friction, the book offers a dialogue between the past and those trying to make sense of events that continue to shape Europe today.
Medium-Sized cities in the Age of Globalisation provides a brand-new perspective on academic discussions of globalisation through exploring urban development outside of select global cities including Paris, Tokyo, and London, and instead focuses on medium-sized cities in the context of a globalising world. Combining the author’s expertise with extensive research, this book fills a gap in the scholarly debate on globalisation and urban development, with chapters of the book giving detailed insight on urban governance and economy, local identity, and urban representation. Through a range of visual sources including maps, tables, and graphs, the book is applicable and accessible, and offers a specialised analysis of medium-sized cities through assessing urban regeneration policies as well as promotional activities and their role in promoting positive change in an era of great inter-urban competition. This book contains valuable historical insights and is excellent specialised material for scholars and postgraduate students in the disciplines of Urban History, Urban Studies, and Geography, as well as being a significant source for Professionals working in urban planning and place promotion
Through an examination of election campaign propaganda and various public relations campaigns, reflecting new electioneering techniques borrowed from the United States, this work explores how conservative political and economic groups sought to construct and sell a political meaning of the Social Market Economy and the Economic Miracle in West Germany during the 1950s.The political meaning of economics contributed to conservative electoral success, constructed a new belief in the free market economy within West German society, and provided legitimacy and political stability for the new Federal Republic of Germany.
A pathbreaking history of art that uses digital research and economic tools to reveal enduring inequities in the formation of the art historical canon Painting by Numbers presents a groundbreaking blend of art historical and social scientific methods to chart, for the first time, the sheer scale of nineteenth-century artistic production. With new quantitative evidence for more than five hundred thousand works of art, Diana Seave Greenwald provides fresh insights into the nineteenth century, and the extent to which art historians have focused on a limited-and potentially biased-sample of artwork from that time. She addresses long-standing questions about the effects of industrialization, gender, and empire on the art world, and she models more expansive approaches for studying art history in the age of the digital humanities. Examining art in France, the United States, and the United Kingdom, Greenwald features datasets created from indices and exhibition catalogs that-to date-have been used primarily as finding aids. From this body of information, she reveals the importance of access to the countryside for painters showing images of nature at the Paris Salon, the ways in which time-consuming domestic responsibilities pushed women artists in the United States to work in lower-prestige genres, and how images of empire were largely absent from the walls of London's Royal Academy at the height of British imperial power. Ultimately, Greenwald considers how many works may have been excluded from art historical inquiry and shows how data can help reintegrate them into the history of art, even after such pieces have disappeared or faded into obscurity. Upending traditional perspectives on the art historical canon, Painting by Numbers offers an innovative look at the nineteenth-century art world and its legacy.
This book explores the twists and turns in Argentina's modern economic history and the debates that raged there around a problem common to all former colonies: how to achieve a level of economic growth for its population in a world characterized by unequal economic relations between the industrialized nations of the north and the commodity producers of the south. This new perspective examines the history of ideas surrounding industrialization and economic development in Argentina, drawing on a rigorous investigation of multiple sources. It demonstrates Argentina's role as a laboratory for and disseminator of ideas that would eventually become the common property of all the developing world. Influential thinkers such as Raul Prebisch and Aldo Ferrer, leading figures in twentieth century Latin American economic thought, developed important ideas such as unequal international trade relations, the promise and limits of Import Substitution Industrialization, the role of the state in the development of a national capitalism. These were the forerunners of similar concerns in other countries in Latin America and elsewhere in the world. The book will be of interest to historians, economists, sociologists of economic development, and related disciplines concerned with questions of global economic inequality.
The frequency and repetition of economic crises over the last hundred years demands an analysis that allows us to discover the root causes of these situations and the problems they have generated in the world economy. This book investigates these cycles throughout the 20th and the early 21st century. Economic crises can be the result of political or military conflict, but they have also been the consequence of bad practices, unbridled speculation, excessive greed or poor management by the rulers and leaders of nations. The contributors to this volume analyse the causes and consequences of economic crises from the Great Depression to the present day, incorporating post-World War II reconstruction, the oil crisis of the 1970s and the "lost" Latin American decade of the 1980s, among others. This longer-term view allows the book to provide insights into understanding economic cycles in the long run, not just at a specific moment in time, and the ways in which they have spread internationally. This historical analysis also helps to shed new light on the current covid-impacted situation, as it provides another reading of the main crises of recent centuries and their causes and consequences, as well as the measures and policies adopted to overcome the difficulties. This book will be of significant interest to readers in economic history, business history, politics, and economics and history more broadly.
The period from 1957-1988 was transformative for the international oil industry. As the home to two major oil companies, BP and Shell, as well as the possessor of large quantities of oil and gas in its territorial waters, the United Kingdom was at the heart of this transition. While famous for its liberal policy towards oil and gas production, both before and after the discovery of North Sea oil and gas, this period actually saw the United Kingdom respond to shifts in power from the major oil companies to the oil-producing states, many of them in OPEC, by building up its competency regarding oil matters. This took the form of efforts to influence the activities of BP and Shell abroad as well as in creation of a state-run oil company, the British National Oil Corporation, in an attempt to exercise greater state control over oil and gas production and distribution. The failure of these efforts was driven in part by internal divisions within Whitehall, the efforts of the oil companies themselves, and ultimately the political will of the Conservative Party under Margaret Thatcher to get the state out of the business of oil and gas.
The 1964 Kennedy-Johnson tax cut is often cited as the single most successful application of Keynesian stabilization policy. The author challenges this orthodox historical view by exposing the haphazard planning, simplistic economic theorizing, irreconcilable numerical projections, and partisan political influences on the Council of Economic Advisers. The focus of the book is on the decisions, advice and actions of the three Chairmen of the Council during the 1960s: Walter Heller, Gardner Ackley and Arthur Okun. They were the authors of the ambitious and optimistic new economics that attempted to manipulate aggregate demand in the US economy to reach potential output. By 1965 this goal was achieved, but when Vietnam War spending and Great Society programs were added to the tax cut, the subsequent policy paralysis in the face of a surging economy clearly indicated a lack of symmetry in fiscal policy implementation. Much of the evidence for this revisionist view comes from the participants own statements in the form of White House memoranda and confidential reports as well as from counter-factual exercises that allow alternative policies or swifter responses. This book will be of great interest to macroeconomists as well as to scholars and students interested in economic history and in the formulation and implementation of economic policy.
Sassetti’s Indian Letters are among the most interesting penned during these years, offering a trove of cultural speculation and economic analysis. Sassetti was neither a principled critic of imperialism nor a principled advocate of liberalism, but a pragmatic theorist of free trade Sassetti was very much the archetypal Renaissance man
This unique book, written in a question and answer style, brings to life the work of the world's foremost Marxian economist Thomas T. Sekine on the scientificity of Marx's project in Capital, its applicability to navigating world-historic change across capitalist stages of development and what Marxian economics teaches us about building viable future historical societies. Sekine, a student and follower of Marxist Kozo Uno, argues that capitalism neither constitutes the end of history nor does its overthrow await socialist revolution. Rather, based upon its own historical delimitations capitalism, following World War I and the Great Depression of the 1930s, has entered a period of disintegration. Grounded on a scathing critique of bourgeois economics in all its forms, Sekine exposes the futility of bourgeois policy interventions attempting to revive capitalism. This book will be of interest to economists in both the mainstream and heterodox schools, and those broadly interested in the history of economic thought.
What were the lives of Africans in provincial England like during the early modern period? How, where, and when did they arrive in rural counties? How were they perceived by their contemporaries? This book examines the population of Africans in Norfolk and Suffolk from 1467, the date of the first documented reference to an African in the region, to 1833, when Parliament voted to abolish slavery in the British Empire. It uncovers the complexity of these Africans' historical experience, considering the interaction of local custom, class structure, tradition, memory, and the gradual impact of the Atlantic slaving economy. Richard C. Maguire proposes that the initial regional response to arriving Africans during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was not defined exclusively by ideas relating to skin colour, but rather by local understandings of religious status, class position, ideas about freedom and bondage, and immediate local circumstances. Arriving Africans were able to join the region's working population through baptism, marriage, parenthood, and work. This manner of response to Africans was challenged as local merchants and gentry begin doing business with the slaving economy from the mid-seventeenth century onwards. Although the racialised ideas underpinning Atlantic slavery changed the social circumstances of Africans in the region, the book suggests that they did not completely displace older, more inclusive, ideas in working communities.
This ground-breaking collection reveals the networks of interrelation between Early Modern England and the Dutch Republic. As people, ideas and goods moved back and forth across the North Sea - or spread further afield in the vanguard of globalisation and empire - Anglo-Dutch relations shaped all aspects of life, with profound implications still relevant today. A diverse range of expert scholars share new research in their discipline, ranging across technology, trade, politics, religion and the arts. Different aspects of this history of competition, alliance, migration and conflict are taken up by each chapter, providing the reader with detailed case studies as well as the broader background and its historical roots. Anglo-Dutch Connections in the Early Modern World aims to be both accessible and innovative. It will be essential to students and researchers interested in European politics, intellectual history, and shared Anglo-Dutch society, while showcasing current research in multiple facets of the Early Modern World.
The US in 1913 was one of the last major economies to establish an institution of a central bank. The book examines, however, the history and evolution of central banking in the US from the perspective of central banking functions-i.e. aggregator of private lending to the federal government, fiscal agent for the government, regulator of money supply, monopoly over currency issuance, banking system supervision, and lender of last resort. The evolution of central banking functions is traced from earliest pre-1987 proposals, through the Constitutional Convention and Congressional debates on Hamilton's 1st Report on Credit, the rise and fall of the 1st and 2nd Banks of the United States, through the long period of the National Banking System, 1862-1913. The book describes how US federal governments-often in cooperation with the largest US private banks in New York, Philadelphia, and elsewhere in the northeast-attempted to expand and develop those functions, sometimes successfully sometimes not, from 1781 through the creation of the Federal Reserve Act of 1913. Other themes include how rapid US economic growth, and an expanding, geographically dispersed private banking system, created formidable resistance by banks at the state and local level to the evolution and consolidation of central banking functions at the national level. Whenever central banking functions were dismantled (1810s, 1830s) or were weakened (after 1860s), the consequences were financial instability and severe economic depressions. The book concludes with a detailed narrative on how, from 1903 to 1913, big eastern banks-leveraging the Panic of 1907, weak economic recovery of 1909-13, and need to expand internationally-allied with Congressional supporters to prevail over state and local banking interests and created the Fed; how the structure of the 1913 Fed clearly favored New York banks while granting concessions to state and local banks to win Congressional approval; and how that compromise central bank structure doomed US monetary policy to fail after 1929.
The untold story of the mysterious company that shook the world. On the coast of southern China, an eccentric entrepreneur spent three decades steadily building an obscure telecom company into one of the world’s most powerful technological empires with hardly anyone noticing. This all changed in December 2018, when the detention of Meng Wanzhou, Huawei Technologies’ female scion, sparked an international hostage standoff, poured fuel on the US-China trade war, and suddenly thrust the mysterious company into the global spotlight. In House of Huawei, Washington Post technology reporter Eva Dou pieces together a remarkable portrait of Huawei’s reclusive founder, Ren Zhengfei, and how he built a sprawling corporate empire—one whose rise Western policymakers have become increasingly obsessed with halting. Based on wide-ranging interviews and painstaking archival research, House of Huawei dissects the global web of power, money, influence, surveillance, bloodshed, and national glory that Huawei helped to build—and that has also ensnared it.
This volume brings together historians, economists, political scientists, and anthropologists to present a global perspective on the new forms of lending and borrowing that have become a key feature of twentieth-century mass consumer societies, emphasizing comparative and transnational historical perspectives.
Long before Deng Xiaoping's market-based reforms, commercial relationships bound the Chinese Communist Party to international capitalism and left lasting marks on China's trade and diplomacy. China today seems caught in a contradiction: a capitalist state led by a Communist party. But as Market Maoists shows, this seeming paradox is nothing new. Since the 1930s, before the Chinese Communist Party came to power, Communist traders and diplomats have sought deals with capitalists in an effort to fuel political transformation and the restoration of Chinese power. For as long as there have been Communists in China, they have been reconciling revolutionary aspirations at home with market realities abroad. Jason Kelly unearths this hidden history of global commerce, finding that even Mao Zedong saw no fundamental conflict between trading with capitalists and chasing revolution. China's ties to capitalism transformed under Mao but were never broken. And it was not just goods and currencies that changed hands. Sustained contact with foreign capitalists shaped the Chinese nation under Communism and left deep impressions on foreign policy. Deals demanded mutual intelligibility and cooperation. As a result, international transactions facilitated the exchange of ideas, habits, and beliefs, leaving subtle but lasting effects on the values and attitudes of individuals and institutions. Drawing from official and commercial archives around the world, including newly available internal Chinese Communist Party documents, Market Maoists recasts our understanding of China's relationship with global capitalism, revealing how these early accommodations laid the groundwork for China's embrace of capitalism in the 1980s and after.
Throughout history, rich and poor countries alike have been lending, borrowing, crashing--and recovering--their way through an extraordinary range of financial crises. Each time, the experts have chimed, "this time is different"--claiming that the old rules of valuation no longer apply and that the new situation bears little similarity to past disasters. With this breakthrough study, leading economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff definitively prove them wrong. Covering sixty-six countries across five continents, "This Time Is Different" presents a comprehensive look at the varieties of financial crises, and guides us through eight astonishing centuries of government defaults, banking panics, and inflationary spikes--from medieval currency debasements to today's subprime catastrophe. Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, leading economists whose work has been influential in the policy debate concerning the current financial crisis, provocatively argue that financial combustions are universal rites of passage for emerging and established market nations. The authors draw important lessons from history to show us how much--or how little--we have learned. Using clear, sharp analysis and comprehensive data, Reinhart and Rogoff document that financial fallouts occur in clusters and strike with surprisingly consistent frequency, duration, and ferocity. They examine the patterns of currency crashes, high and hyperinflation, and government defaults on international and domestic debts--as well as the cycles in housing and equity prices, capital flows, unemployment, and government revenues around these crises. While countries do weather their financial storms, Reinhart and Rogoff prove that short memories make it all too easy for crises to recur. An important book that will affect policy discussions for a long time to come, "This Time Is Different" exposes centuries of financial missteps. |
![]() ![]() You may like...
The Martha Graham Dance Company - House…
Blakeley White-McGuire
Hardcover
R2,515
Discovery Miles 25 150
|