The fascinating story of a man struggling to reach his dream, his small toy company's fabulous toys, and an explanation of the folklore connecting the company's wooden mouse "MICKY" with Walt Disney. The book highlights never before assembled documentation.

An examination of East-Central European history, this book looks to the past for the roots of the cleavage between the eastern and western regions of Europe and the reasons for the east-central countries' backward, reactionary nature; their slide into fascism and war; and the ultimate destruction of the region within the Stalinist orbit. East-Central Europe emerged as a distinct region as early as the 15th century, when, in sharp contrast to an expanding urban economy and a loosening of serfdom in the West, it pursued a brutal Second Serfdom. This development would determine much of its future course, as 19th century attempts to modernize society included revolutions from above and the abolishment of serfdom, while stubbornly retaining decisive feudal structures. After World War I, industrial developments created a semi-feudal, distorted capitalism, and the region soon saw the emergence of ultra-nationalist, fascist-style regimes whose actions would eventually lead to catastrophe.

In the post-war era, the region found itself in the Soviet sphere. The short People's Democracy period attempted to purge its structure of feudal, reactionary and fascist remnants, but soon got destroyed as a distinct region by brutal Stalinization. The collapse of Communism did not restore its separate existence reintegration into the West requires a painful transition period with a yet uncertain outcome. Hodos produces a comprehensive, comparative overview of the centuries-old division, along with the resulting social, political, and economic consequences. Chapters on anti-Semitism and the Holocaust illustrate the stark differences between the regions.

This book brings together a set of incisive essays that interrogate Malaysian history and social relations which began during pre-colonial times, and extended to colonial and post-colonial Malaysia. It addresses economic misinterpretations of the role of markets in the way colonial industrialisation evolved, the nature of exploitation of workers, and the participation of local actors in shaping a wide range of socioeconomic and political processes. In doing so, it takes the lead from the innovative historian, Shaharil Talib Robert who argued that the recrafting of history should go beyond the use of conventional methodologies and analytic techniques. It is in that tradition that the chapters offer a semblance of causality, contingency, contradictions, and connections. With that, the analysis in each chapter utilises approaches appropriate for the topics chosen, which include history, anthropology, sociology, economics, politics, and international relations. The collection of chapters also offer novel interpretations to contest and fill gaps that have not been addressed in past works. The book is essential reading for history students, and those interested in Malaysian history in particular.

This book - the first of two volumes- looks at episodes in American economic history from a public choice perspective. Each chapter discusses citizens, special interests, and government officials responding to economic incentives in both markets and politics. In doing so, the book provides fresh insights into important periods of American history, from the Acadian expulsion in 1755 to the allocation of government grants during the New Deal. This volume features the work of prominent economic historians such as Dora Costa, John Wallis, and Jeremy Atack; well-known public choice scholars such as Jac Heckelman; and younger scholars such as Vincent Geloso and Philip Magness. This book will be useful for researchers and students interested in economics, history, political science, economic history, public choice, and political economy.

This book explores the evolution of credit and financing in Europe from the Middle Ages through to Modern Times. It engages with the distinct political, economic and institutional frameworks of the examined areas (England, Italy, France, Germany, Spain, the Netherlands and Turkey) and discusses how these affected the credit market. It covers a wide range of different types of lending and borrowing instruments, the destination of capital, the way it was raised, and the impact it had on local or national economies in a very long run. Presented in two parts, part one of the book focuses on credit markets in the preindustrial age, in particular the period before the advent of modern joint stock banks. Part two examines the evolution of credit at the time of the emergence of modern banks. This volume will be of interest to academics and researchers in the field of finance who are interested in the historic evolution of credit and the credit market.

This volume of intellectual biography takes the Italian economist, sociologist, political scientist Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923) from his disillusionment with liberal and pacifist activism, to the original development of pure economics and the composition of his Treatise on General Sociology and the test of this latter on the war and post-war events.

This edited volume is based on original essays first presented at the World Economic History Conference, Kyoto, Japan, in August 2015. It also includes three essays subsequently written especially for this volume. All of the essays focus on financial markets in the periods leading up to, during, and after financial crises, and all are based on new data and archival research. The essays in this volume enlarge the range of historical evidence on the causes and potential cures for financial crises. While not neglecting the United States or Britain, the usual focus of financial historians, it includes studies of financial markets in times of crisis in Japan, Sweden, France, and other countries to achieve a truly global and historical perspective. As a result of the research reported here the reader will be made aware of several neglected factors that have shaped financial crises including the most recent crisis. These factors are (1) the role played by monetary policy in causing and ameliorating crises, (2) the role played by international contagion in private financial markets in propagating financial crises, (3) the role played by variations in the institutional structures of financial markets in determining the impact of financial crises, and (4) the role played by the social background of the central bankers who must contend with financial crises in determining the final outcome.

This contributed volume applies cliometric methods to the study of family and households in order to derive global patterns and determine their impact on economic development. Family and households are a fundamental feature of societies and economies. They are found throughout history and are the place where key decisions on fertility, labour force participation, education, consumption are made. This is especially relevant for the position of women. The book gathers key insights from a variety of fields - economics, history, demography, anthropology, biology - to shed light on the relation between family organisation and the long-term process of economic development.

The History of Corporate Law by the Foremost Legal Historian, James Willard HurstThis study, which is based on a series of lectures delivered at the University of Virginia Law School, explores the development of corporate law from the 1780s, a time when the special charter was the only form of incorporation, to the 1960s, a time when corporations were established exclusively through general incorporation statutes. More than a chronicle, Hurst emphasizes how legal institutions actively shaped the central traits of American capitalism. CONTENTSAnalytical Table of ContentsIntroduction: Time, Place and SubjectI.From Special Privilege to General Utility, 1780-1890II.Legitimacy: Utility and Responsibility, 1890-1970III.Institutional Contributions to PolicyConclusion: The Social Impact of Corporation LawBibliographyIndexJames Willard Hurst 1910-1997] revitalized the field of American legal history with The Growth of American Law (1950) and helped establish the study of law and American society in Law and Social Process in United States History (1960). He had a particular interest in the ways society and law influenced one another. He was a professor of law at the University of Wisconsin Law School.

This transdisciplinary volume puts forward proposals for wiser, socially just and sustainable socio-economic systems in transition. There is growing support for the view that the end of capitalism is around the corner, but on which conceptual and ethical basis can we interpret these times? With investigations into feminist economics, post-growth environmentalism, socio-technical digital design, collaborative and commons economics, the editors create a dialogue between radical knowledge/practices and contemplative social sciences to transgress disciplinary boundaries and implement new visions of reality. This important book challenges our ways of thinking and outlines a pathway for new research. Chapter 13 of this book is available open access under a CC BY 4.0 license at link.springer.com

This fascinating volume offers a comprehensive synthesis of the events, causes and outcomes of the major financial crises from 1929 to the present day. Beginning with an overview of the global financial system, Sara Hsu presents both theoretical and empirical evidence to explain the roots of financial crises and financial instability in general. She then provides a thorough breakdown of a number of major crises of the past century, both in the United States and around the world. Hsu's thorough and ambitious survey begins with the Great Depression of 1929, the first crisis created within the institutions of our current financial system, and moves through the aftermath of the Depression in the 1930s and 1940s, the inter-crisis period of the 1950s through the 1970s, and the emerging market debt default crisis of the 1980s. From there, she tackles major crises in specific countries from the 1990s on, including those in Mexico, Asia (Thailand, Indonesia, South Korea and Malaysia), Russia, Brazil and Argentina, as well as the Great Recession of 2008. The book concludes with a chapter detailing insightful policy recommendations for preventing future crises. Students and professors of economic history, financial and regulatory economics and banking will find this an invaluable resource, both for its comprehensive historical approach and its thoughtful look toward the future of the global economy.

This unique survey of the environmental history of the southern United States explores the ecological, social, and economic interaction between humans and the environment in the South over the last 20,000 years. The melting of the Ice Age glaciers heralded the arrival of the Archaic peoples in the South and the lives of the South's peoples have long been shaped and challenged by the environment. Conversely, the human impact on the South's landscape has been dramatic, from the mound building of Native Americans to the construction of cities and the birth of modern industry. Part of ABC-CLIO's Nature and Human Societies series, Southern United States: An Environmental History explores the historical and ecological dimensions of human interaction with the environment throughout Southern history. Examining diverse issues from the impact of the end of the Ice Age to the consequences of the U.S. space program for Florida's environment, this invaluable guide synthesizes literature from a wide range of authoritative sources to provide a fascinating guide to the South's environment. Illustrations, including maps, and first-hand accounts of the southern landscape from early travel writers A chronology listing key individuals, events, and movements in the environmental history of the South

This is the second volume of conference proceedings for the handbook of the economic history of the Alpine region in the preindustrial era, which finally provides an extensive cross-regional synopsis of the history of the Alpine economy. Like Braudel's classic on the Mediterranean region, renowned scholars examine the region and its people, the everyday lives of Alpine inhabitants, and commerce, migration, and communication in three volumes.

This book theoretically and empirically investigates the emergence of strong money demand in wartime Japan (1937-1945), its disappearance after the end of the war (1945-1949), and the reemergence of strong money demand in contemporary Japan (from 1995 to the present) in terms of the effects on fiscal activities and the price level. An augmented fiscal/monetary theory of the price level is constructed from a close examination of the strong money demand present in these periods. Then, profoundly puzzling phenomena such as mild deflation despite monetary expansion, low long-term interest rates despite fiscal unsustainability, and weak aggregate demand despite near-zero rates of interest, all of which are actually being observed in contemporary Japan, can now be interpreted in line with the above augmented theory. In the present, strong money demand at near-zero rates endows the Japanese government with maximum fiscal flexibility. However, if it disappeared for some reason, prices would surge to the quantity theory of money level, and fiscal sustainability would have to be restored. In the future, alternative currency units issued by private banks might carry out a purge of such strong demand for the yen.

This book focuses on urbanization as an attendant consequence of industrialization and sheds light on urban problems such as housing shortages and poverty of jobless people, and the housing and social policies implemented by central and local governments to deal with these problems. Through this book, the volume editor and authors convey the view that urbanization transformed economy and society spatially and in quality, and caused the change of central and local administration in the process of tackling various urban problems. The book features recent academic works on economic history of the city and housing, researched from an advanced perspective of comparative history in Japan. The aim of this book is to make works by Japanese scholars accessible to a wider readership throughout the world. This edited volume includes four articles (chapters) and four book reviews originally published in Japanese and subsequently translated into English. The first chapter analyzes the characteristics of the urbanization that occurred under the land readjustment projects implemented from the Sino-Japanese War to the reforms following World War II, by focusing on the conflict between landowners and peasants in Japan. The second chapter examines the construction of urban housing following Japan's defeat in World War II, focusing on the reconstruction of war-damaged housing from the perspective of the creation and distribution of private residential space under Japan's postwar regulatory regime. The third chapter examines the adoption of communal unemployment insurance systems in Wilhelmine Germany, focusing on the Genter system, in which the municipalities paid subsidies to the trade unions that provided their out-of-work members with unemployment benefits. The last chapter investigates the accumulation of the mechanical engineering industry in Paris region during the period 1939-1958, focusing on the role of the subcontracting system.

The Carolina, Mariana and Marshall Islands have experienced world war, atomic weapons testing and varying brands of colonialism in the 20th century. Following the seizure of the islands from Japan, agencies of the US government sought to better possess and control the area through a series of developmental initiatives. Interdisciplinary in its approach, this text goes beyond the liberal discourse surrounding modernity to examine what economic development actually entailed. It explores in ethnographic terms how different groups of island people responded to development programmes in multiple, complex, layered and sometimes conflicting ways that reflected their own historical experiences and cultural understandings.

This book repositions the groundbreaking Bretton Woods conference of July 1944 as the first large-scale multilateral North-South dialogue on global financial governance. It moves beyond the usual focus on Anglo-American interests by highlighting the influence of delegations from Latin America, India, the Soviet Union, France, and others. It also investigates how state and private interests intermingled, collided, and compromised during the negotiations on the way to a set of regulations and institutions that still partly frame global economic governance in the early twenty-first century. Together, these essays lay the groundwork for a more comprehensive analysis of Bretton Woods as a pivotal site of multilateralism in international history.

Steel Phoenix: The Fall and Rise of the U.S. Steel Industry is a remarkable story. Christopher Hall recounts the great downfall of "Big Steel" in America and the emergence of a new, reinvented steel industry from the ashes of the old. Beginning with the failures of Big Steel to respond to a changing world, Christopher Hall analyzes the powers and drives behind this "most basic" of industries, revealing how the "Rust Belt" of the 1970s and 1980s was created and how the death of the traditional steel industry devastated cities such as Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Youngstown. Hall then examines how pioneering entrepreneurs and engineers rebuilt the industry by recycling large supplies of scrap steel, giving way to a minimill industry that ultimately saved what was left of the old Big Steel mills.

This book examines the application of risk-sharing finance as a national economic policy in history and how it stimulated economic recovery during a short period in Germany between 1933 and 1935. Economic history indicates that risk-sharing instruments have promoted socio-economic development in many parts of the world while risk-shifting methods have imposed huge socio-economic costs on many nations, leading to debt slavery on individual members. This book highlights lessons to be learned from history and argues that risk-sharing is a powerful tool for generating rapid economic recovery and resumption of growth.

Complete ready reference covering Chinese history, economics, politics, culture, and prevalent social problems ... a "must-have" addition to any global studies collection. Throughout its imperial golden ages, China was the world's most developed nation, home to advanced technologies, a robust economy, and thriving cities. Its thousands of years of cultural and artistic achievements combined with its vastness and ethnic complexity have made China both fascinating and forbidding for those encountering it for the first time. This new volume offers readers a concise, single-stop introduction to Chinese history, culture, economics, politics, and social issues. As they trace China's history from the creation stories of ancient Chinese myths to the Communist upheaval of the 20th century, readers will learn how the country has changed-and not changed-from early to modern times, and what life throughout China is like today. Chronology of key historical developments, which details the most important people, places, and events A directory of business, cultural, government, and tourist organizations to help facilitate further research and study