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Books > History > History of specific subjects > Economic history
We might think sustainable management is a new idea, created in the
1960s by enlightened modern scientists. We might think that it puts
us on a new path, beyond what management was originally about. But
this is not true. Sustainable management is as old as civilization
and was a foundation stone of management science as it was formed
in the first decade of the 20th century. Recovering this forgotten
past provides deeper roots and greater traction to advance
sustainable management in our own times. This book charts a history
of sustainable management from premodern times, through the birth
of management science as an offshoot of the conservation movement,
to the present day. The authors argue that modern tools like Triple
Bottom Line reporting and multiple Sustainable Development Goals
may be less useful than a return to a more fundamental and holistic
view of management.
Taiwan's economic development experience represents a unique case
study especially in the wake of the Asian financial crisis. Taiwan
has performed outstandingly in terms of macroeconomic and
industrial development, particularly during recent democratic and
social change. This book aims to provide a broad picture of these
institutional reforms and policy evolutions. The expert
contributors detail and examine the interactive relationship
between Taiwan's economic liberalization, political democratization
and social pluralization. Taking 1980 as a watershed, the book
highlights the impact these economic and cultural changes have
exerted on SMEs, foreign trade and investment, technological
progress, industrial development and policy, and the reform of
financial and fiscal systems. They investigate the contentious
issue of whether political democratization is beneficial for
economic development and go on to discuss the creation of an
efficient Taiwanese economy and the resolution of conflicts created
by social pluralization. The book analyses the comparative
advantage of Taiwan over comparable countries, paying particular
attention to the Asian financial crisis. The authors offer a fresh
approach by observing Taiwanese development post 1980 and
integrating economic, political and social analysis. As such,
development economists and scholars of Asian economics will find
this unique book both useful and enlightening.
This book focuses on the ancient Near East, early imperial China,
South-East Asia, and medieval Europe, shedding light on
mathematical knowledge and practices documented by sources relating
to the administrative and economic activities of officials,
merchants and other actors. It compares these to mathematical texts
produced in related school contexts or reflecting the pursuit of
mathematics for its own sake to reveal the diversity of
mathematical practices in each of these geographical areas of the
ancient world. Based on case studies from various periods and
political, economic and social contexts, it explores how, in each
part of the world discussed, it is possible to identify and
describe the different cultures of quantification and computation
as well as their points of contact. The thirteen chapters draw on a
wide variety of texts from ancient Near East, China, South-East
Asia and medieval Europe, which are analyzed by researchers from
various fields, including mathematics, history, philology,
archaeology and economics. The book will appeal to historians of
science, economists and institutional historians of the ancient and
medieval world, and also to Assyriologists, Indologists,
Sinologists and experts on medieval Europe.
This book discusses the case for socialism and the models of
socialist planning. Through examining different countries, each
chapter examines the successes and failures of contrasting
socialist policies. The theories and techniques of socialist
planning are discussed in relation to the Soviet Union and India,
with additional attention given to Great Britain, Scandinavia, and
the former Yugoslavia. Imperialism and Capitalism, Volume 2:
Normative Perspectives aims to explore the alternatives to
capitalism within different sectors and situations. The book is
relevant to those interested in economics, development studies,
international relations, and global politics.
The control of competition is designed, at best, to reconcile
socioeconomic stability with innovation, and at worst, to keep
competitors out of the market. In this respect, the nineteenth
century was no more liberal than the eighteenth century. Even
during the presumed liberal nineteenth century, legal regulation
played a major role in the economy, and the industrial revolution
was based on market institutions and organisations formed during
the second half of the seventeenth century. If indeed there is a
break in the history of capitalism, it should be situated at the
turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with the irruption
of mass production, consumption and the welfare state, which
introduced new forms of regulation. This book provides a new
intellectual, economic and legal history of capitalism from the
eighteenth century to the early twentieth century. It analyzes the
interaction between economic practices and legal constructions in
France and compares the French case with other Western countries
during this period, such as the United Kingdom, the United States,
Germany and Italy.
This book gathers several important texts to offer an overview of
the institutionalist approach to money developed in France since
the 1980s. This material highlights the specificities of the French
monetary approaches and their main contributions to the
understanding of monetary phenomena - not just in developed market
economies but in other societies as well. By bringing these works
to an English-speaking audience for the first time, this book will
provide a much needed and valuable direct insight into this subject
area and contribute to related post-Keynesian, neo-chartalist and
sociological approaches to money. This book highlights the need for
a global vision of money and for a clearer grasp of the link
between money and the political sphere. It will appeal to students
and researchers across various disciplines including but not
limited to economics, anthropology, sociology, history and
philosophy.
The late seventeenth century was a crucial period in English
financial history. A host of joint-stock companies emerged offering
the opportunity for investment in projects ranging from the
manufacture of paper to the search for sunken treasure. Driven by
the demands of the Nine Years' War, the state also employed
innovative tactics to attract money, its most famous scheme being
the incorporation of the Bank of England. This 2009 book provides a
comprehensive study of the choices and actions of the investors who
enthusiastically embraced London's new financial market. It
highlights the interactions between public and private finance,
looks at how information circulated around the market and was used
by speculators and investors, and documents the establishment of
the institutions - the Bank of England, the national debt and an
active secondary market in that debt - on which England's financial
system was built.
This book brings together for the first time more than half a dozen
proposals for an imperial paper currency in the mid-eighteenth
century British Atlantic, to show how manage colonial currency and
banking in the expanding empire. Existing studies have looked at
the successes and failures of schemes in individual colonies. But
some had grander ambitions, such as Benjamin Franklin, and offered
proposals for 'imperial' or 'continental' paper currencies and
monetary unions which would help knit together colonial territories
throughout North America and even the Caribbean into a cohesive
whole during a moment of imperial reform. This book brings together
these proposals for the first time, including several never studied
before, to show how thinkers and writers on empire, currency and
finance drew on financial practices, precedents and principles from
across the British Atlantic to present their own visions of
monetary union and the future of empire. In doing so it makes an
important and original contribution to the wider histories of
monetary and financial thought and theory and the roots of American
monetary policy, and the links between finance, empire, politics,
reform and revolution. It will be of interest to academics working
on the history of finance, banking and currency in the British
Isles, North America and the Caribbean in the eighteenth century,
as well as those working on the political economy of the British
Empire, including mercantilism, trade, warfare and the politics of
empire in the decades leading up to the American Revolution.
Globalization and the Politics of Institutional Reform in Japan
illuminates Japan's contemporary and historical struggle to adjust
policy and the institutional architecture of government to an
evolving global order. This focused and scholarly study identifies
that key to this difficulty is a structural tendency towards
central political command, which reduces the country's capacity to
follow a more subtle allocation of authority that ensures political
leadership remains robust and non-dictatorial. Thus, Motoshi Suzuki
argues that it is essential for a globalizing state to incorporate
opposition parties and transgovernmental networks into
policy-making processes. Providing an in-depth analysis of the
theories of institutional change, this book introduces readers to a
wealth of perspectives and counterarguments concerning analysis of
political decision-making and policy adjustment on both the
national and international scale. Placing Japanese policy reform in
the global context and relating policy reform to leadership's
political strategies, the author gives a detailed chronological and
analytical overview of Japan's challenging institutional, political
and bureaucratic transformations since the Meiji Restoration of the
late nineteenth century. Analysis of globalization and policy
reform in a non-liberal state, and the relationship between
politicians and bureaucrats from an international perspective is
included. For those interested in historical and contemporary
Japanese politics from a theoretical perspective, particularly the
implications of globalization and the politician-bureaucrat
relationship, this is an indispensable resource.
An insightful collection of essays focused on American men, women,
and children from a range of economic classes and ethnic
backgrounds during the Great Depression. Who were the people
waiting in the bread lines and living in Hoovervilles? Who were the
migrants heading North and West? Did anyone survive the Depression
relatively unscathed? Giving a voice to stories often untold, Great
Depression: People and Perspectives covers the full spectrum of
American life, portraying the experiences of ordinary citizens
during the worst economic crisis in the nation's history. Great
Depression shows how specific groups coped with the traumatic
upheaval of the times, including rural Americans, women, children,
African Americans, and immigrants. In addition, it offers revealing
chapters on the conflict between social scientists and policymakers
responding to the crisis, the impact of the Depression on the
health of U.S. citizens, and the roles that American technology and
Hollywood movies played in helping the nation survive. 11 expert
contributors, including well-established scholars who bring new
perspectives to the study of the Great Depression A wide range of
primary sources such as news articles, photographs, diaries, and
letters that provide a deeper understanding of daily life during
the Depression
This book is an edited collection by leading insurance historians,
examining the historical role of reinsurance (the insurance of
insurers) in the insurance markets of eight countries: USA,
Netherlands, Sweden, France, Spain, Italy, Mexico and Japan. All
the contributors are experts in their field and have widely
published in insurance history, providing the reader with new
insights into the insurance and economic history of these
countries. In particular, this is the first book to explore the
reinsurance markets in the USA, Netherlands, France, Italy and
Mexico. This book will be of interest to economic and business
historians, as well as insurance practitioners with an interest in
the history of their industry.
This book articulates a unified theory of capitalism as an attempt
to provide a comprehensive scientific theory of this social system.
A unified theory of capitalism is not the combination of the
predominant economic theories-neoclassical, classical, and
Keynesian-so as to make them compatible. It is not a composite
economic theory. It is a new economic theory. Predictions of the
theory's models were consistent with eight basic empirical
regularities of capitalism dealing with economic growth, income
inequality, employment level, and environment degradation.
Therefore, the unified theory can be accepted as a good
approximation of the real capitalist world. But the models were
constructed at a high level of abstraction. Also problematic was
the need to work out more fully the public policy implications of
the theory. It is, therefore, no wonder that essays on the unified
theory to answer these questions are a natural outcome of a new
scientific endeavor attempting to reach a unity of knowledge in
economics.
What were the consequences of the German occupation for the economy
of occupied Europe? After Germany conquered major parts of the
European continent, it was faced with a choice between plundering
the suppressed countries and using their economies to produce what
it needed. The decision made not only differed from country to
country but also changed over the course of the war. Individual
leaders; the economic needs of the Reich; the military situation;
struggles between governors of occupied countries and Berlin
officials, and finally racism all had an impact on the outcome. In
the end, in Western Europe and the Czech Protectorate, emphasis was
placed on production for German warfare, which kept these economies
functioning. New research, presented for the first time in this
book, shows that as a consequence the economic setback in these
areas was limited, and therefore post-war recovery was relatively
easy. However, plundering was characteristic in Eastern Europe and
the Balkans, resulting in partisan activity, a collapse of normal
society and a dramatic destruction not only of the economy but in
some countries of a substantial proportion of the labour force. In
these countries, post-war recovery was almost impossible.
This groundbreaking book provides the first comprehensive account
of the "juridiction consulaire," ""or Merchant Court, of
eighteenth-century Paris. Drawing on extensive archival research,
Amalia D. Kessler reconstructs the workings of the court and the
commercial law that it applied and uses these to shed new light on
questions about the relationship between commerce and modernity
that are of deep and abiding interest to lawyers, historians, and
social scientists alike. Kessler shows how the merchants who were
associated with the court--and not just elite thinkers and royal
reformers--played a key role in reconceptualizing commerce as the
credit-fueled private exchange necessary to sustain the social
order. Deploying this modern conception of commerce in a variety of
contexts, ranging from litigation over negotiable instruments to
corporatist battles for status and jurisdiction, these merchants
contributed (largely inadvertently and to their ultimate regret) to
the demise of corporatism as both conceptual framework and
institutional practice. In so doing, they helped bring about the
social and political revolution of 1789. Highly readable and
engaging, "A Revolution in Commerce" provides important new
insights into the rise of commercial modernity by demonstrating the
remarkable role played by the law in ideological and institutional
transformation.
This book provides the first comprehensive study of the 'special
relationship' between Southern Rhodesia and South Africa. While
most studies approach this from the history of British and South
African relations or the history of South African territorial
expansion, this book offers new insights by examining Southern
Rhodesia's relations with South Africa from the former's
perspective. Exploring relations through the lens of settler
colonialism, the book argues that settler colonialism in the region
was marked by a competitive and antagonistic relationship between
settler communities, particularly Afrikaner and English
communities. The book explores the connections between these
countries by examining (high) politics, economic links, and social
and cultural ties, highlighting both instances of competition and
cooperation. Above all, it argues that economic ties were the
cornerstone of the relationship and that these shaped the rest of
the ties between the two countries. Drawing on archival records
from Britain, South Africa and Zimbabwe, as well as a number of
secondary sources, it offers a much more nuanced perspective of
this relationship than has been previously offered.
This book clarifies the challenges and outcomes of the Sunshine
Project, a national project in Japan for developing new energy that
was launched about 40 years ago at the time of the first oil crisis
in the early 1970s and ended, as planned, in the early 2000s. The
Sunshine Project was the government's national project for
developing new energy technologies such as solar energy and other
natural energy sources-what we call renewable energy today. The
book considers why policies were successful in some areas but did
not have the intended effect in other areas. It explains how
technology innovation was employed to achieve energy policy goals
and to tackle environmental issues. If we can present suggestions
for how to structure national projects, it may also be possible to
identify ways for industry, government, and academia to come
together to find solutions not only to environmental energy
problems, but also to other social problems. Herein lies the goal
of this book. Although the development of new energy is the main
subject of the book, the author also scrutinizes the governmental
decision-making process involved in planning policy, the creative
process, and the design of systems of collaboration between
industry, government, and academia as well as cases where
corporations have developed commercial versions of new energy
products. The main part of the book consists of three case studies
interspersed with two reflective chapters. The first case study
describes the Sunshine Project from the perspective of project
management based on the perspective of government. The second case
study is a detailed examination of the routines in all
organizations, whether industry, government, or academia, and of
the autonomy of the project organization. The third case study
increases the degree of detail to focus on the smallest unit of
analysis, the intentions and motivations of key individuals
participating in the project.
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