The Routledge Handbook of Modern Economic History aims to introduce readers to important approaches and findings of economic historians who study the modern world. Its short chapters reflect the most up-to-date research and are written by well-known economic historians who are authorities on their subjects.

Modern economic history blends two approaches Cliometrics (which focuses on measuring economic variables and explicitly testing theories about the historical performance and development of the economy) and the New Institutional Economics (which focuses on how social, cultural, legal and organizational norms and rules shape economic outcomes and their evolution). Part 1 of the Handbook introduces these approaches and other important methodological issues for economic history.

The most fundamental shift in the economic history of the world began about two and a half centuries ago when eons of slow economic change and faltering economic growth gave way to sustained, rapid economic expansion. Part 2 examines this theme and the primary forces economic historians have linked to economic growth, stagnation and fluctuations including technological change, entrepreneurship, competition, the biological environment, war, financial panics and business cycles.

Part 3 examines the evolution of broad sectors that typify a modern economy including agriculture, banking, transportation, health care, housing, and entertainment. It begins by examining an equally important "sector" of the economy which scholars have increasingly analyzed using economic tools religion. Part 4 focuses on the work force and human outcomes including inequality, labor markets, unions, education, immigration, slavery, urbanization, and the evolving economic roles of women and African-Americans.

The text will be of great value to those taking economic history courses as well as a reference book useful to professional practitioners, policy makers and the public.

A Financial Times Best Book of the Year "A must-read, with key lessons for the future."-Thomas Piketty A groundbreaking examination of austerity's dark intellectual origins. For more than a century, governments facing financial crisis have resorted to the economic policies of austerity-cuts to wages, fiscal spending, and public benefits-as a path to solvency. While these policies have been successful in appeasing creditors, they've had devastating effects on social and economic welfare in countries all over the world. Today, as austerity remains a favored policy among troubled states, an important question remains: What if solvency was never really the goal? In The Capital Order, political economist Clara E. Mattei explores the intellectual origins of austerity to uncover its originating motives: the protection of capital-and indeed capitalism-in times of social upheaval from below. Mattei traces modern austerity to its origins in interwar Britain and Italy, revealing how the threat of working-class power in the years after World War I animated a set of top-down economic policies that elevated owners, smothered workers, and imposed a rigid economic hierarchy across their societies. Where these policies "succeeded," relatively speaking, was in their enrichment of certain parties, including employers and foreign-trade interests, who accumulated power and capital at the expense of labor. Here, Mattei argues, is where the true value of austerity can be observed: its insulation of entrenched privilege and its elimination of all alternatives to capitalism. Drawing on newly uncovered archival material from Britain and Italy, much of it translated for the first time, The Capital Order offers a damning and essential new account of the rise of austerity-and of modern economics-at the levers of contemporary political power.

This book presents an economic analysis of the causes and consequences of institutional change in ancient Athens. Focusing on the period 800-300 BCE, it looks in particular at the development of political institutions and taxation, including a new look at the activities of individuals like Solon, Kleisthenes and Perikles and on the changes in political rules and taxation after the Peloponnesian War.

Discussing a rarely researched aspect of the Cold War, this volume uses new material to examine how the United States trade embargo on the Soviet Union and communist China severed relationships with Europe, particularly focusing on Great Britain. In the late 1940s, the US government stopped nearly all exports to the entire Sino-Soviet bloc in the belief that it would hinder the expansion of Soviet and Chinese military potential. To continue receiving the US Marshall Aid, European countries had to impose similar bans, but were reluctant because their trade links with the USSR and its satellite countries had existed for centuries. The US thereafter negotiated with Europe about what to include or exclude from the list of authorised goods, severely straining diplomatic relations. Economic Statecraft during the Cold War details these negotiations, casting new light on the ambivalent US-UK relationship and providing insights into the changing emphasis between the Republican and Democrat administrations on the key question of trade embargo, by explaining how the firm consistency in the application of the US policy over the succeeding decades of the Cold War was maintained. This book will be of much interest to all students and scholars of Cold War history, intelligence studies and international history in general.

Various explanations have been put forward as to why the Keynesian Revolution in economics in the 1930s and 1940s took place. Some of these point to the temporal relevance of John Maynard Keynes's The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936), appearing, as it did, just a handful of years after the onset of the Great Depression, whilst others highlight the importance of more anecdotal evidence, such as Keynes's close relations with the Cambridge 'Circus', a group of able, young Cambridge economists who dissected and assisted Keynes in developing crucial ideas in the years leading up to the General Theory. However, no systematic effort has been made to bring together these and other factors to examine them from a sociology of science perspective. This book fills this gap by taking its cue from a well-established tradition of work from history of science studies devoted to identifying the intellectual, technical, institutional, psychological and financial factors which help to explain why certain research schools are successful and why others fail. This approach, it turns out, provides a coherent account of why the revolution in macroeconomics was 'Keynesian' and why, on a related note, Keynes was able to see off contemporary competitor theorists, notably Friedrich von Hayek and Michal Kalecki.

In little more than a generation, Asia has emerged from centuries of stagnation to become the rising force of the global economy. This transformation has been so spectacular that some have called it a miracle. How did it happen? Taking the reader from the docksides of Korea to the halls of India's finance ministry, The Miracle details the courageous decisions and heroic self-sacrifice that made Asia's ascent possible. Spanning nine countries and probing major historical currents, this account illuminates not only Asia's extraordinary economic rise but also how its causes might emancipate the developing world from poverty and guide the developed world to further prosperity.

Using more than a decade of reporting and analysis, Time magazine and former Wall Street Journal reporter Michael Schuman uncovers how outsourcing to Asia began; how Asia's most famous companies, such as Sony and Honda, became global corporations; and how technological changes and global economic shifts made Asia's boom possible. He reveals the compelling human side to this economic story, introducing readers to the political strongmen, entrepreneurs, and policymakers who made the Miracle a reality. This engaging historical narrative brings to life the ideas and actions of a diverse group of Asians--dictators and democrats, generals and technocrats, economists and engineers.

Some of the characters in the book have captured the global imagination for years, such as China's reformer Deng Xiaoping and Sony founder Akio Morita. Others are less well known, including Park Chung Hee, Korea's tightfisted nation builder; Liu Chuanzhi, the risk-taking founder of PC maker Lenovo; and Azim Premji, the mastermind behind Wipro, one of India's technology giants. All of them shared a dream--to elevate Asia to its proper place of influence in the world and eradicate the poverty around them.

The Miracle not only offers profound insight into Asia and its increasing wealth and power; it also reveals how these seismic shifts continue to reverberate through the global economy. The implications of Asia's economic ascent for the rest of the world are surprising, promising, and inspiring. Readers of The Miracle will gain a deep understanding of Asia's place in the global economy--and of their own.

Maurice Dobb was the foremost Marxian economist of his generation in Britain. He was noted for his contributions to value theory, the theory of economic planning and the analysis of Soviet economic development. This set will re-issue 7 of his most important works.

The recent dramatic decline in the economic fortunes of the Republic of Ireland have been all the more painful, because it followed the most rapid period of economic development ever witnessed in Irish economic history, when growth rates since the early-1990s surpassed those in the rest of Western Europe. With an unusual openness to international trade and capital flows and a relatively benign corporate tax regime and closer links to the American economy (in terms of investment and trade) than other parts of Western Europe, this growth was something of an aberration in a wider European context and requires explanation. This book provides a synthesis of recent research on Irish economic development, tracing the evolution of the economy since independence with particular reference to how the state sought to shape, regulate and deregulate economic activity to deal with the challenges posed by the wider international environment. In many ways, this book is a follow up to Bielenberg's Ireland and the Industrial Revolution, published by Routledge in 2009. Bielenberg and Ryan chart Ireland's economic progress, examining the unsuccessful attempts to promote economic growth from 1932 through import-substitution and protectionism, the policy frameworks developed in the 1950s and 1960s which sought to create a more open economy, Ireland's entry into the EEC in 1973 and the improvement of the country's economic performance, as well as Ireland's economic relationships with Europe, the USA and the UK.

This book is an investigation into the economic policy formulation and practice of neoliberalism in Britain from the 1950s through to the financial crisis and economic downturn that began in 2007-8. It demonstrates that influential economists, such as F.A. Hayek and Milton Friedman, authors at key British think tanks such as the Institute of Economic Affairs and the Centre for Policy Studies, and important political figures of the Thatcher and New Labour governments shared a similar conception of the consumer.

For neoliberals, the idea that consumers were weak in the face of businesses and large corporations was almost offensive. Instead, consumers were imagined to be sovereign agents in the economy, whose consumption decisions played a central role in the construction of their human capital and in the enabling of their aspirations. Consumption, just like production, came to be viewed as an enterprising and entrepreneurial activity. Consequently, from the early 1980s until the present day, it was felt necessary that banks should have the freedom to meet the borrowing needs of consumers. Credit rationing would be a thing of the past. Just like businesses, consumers and households could use debt to expand their stock of personal assets.

By utilizing the method of French philosopher Michel Foucault this book provides an original analysis of the policy ideas and political speeches of key figures in the New Right, in government and at the Bank of England. And it addresses the key question as to why policy-makers both in Britain and the United States did little or nothing to stem rising consumer and household indebtedness, instead always choosing to see increasing house prices and homeownership as a positive to be encouraged.

First published in 1979, The Transformation of England discusses the creation in late eighteenth century England of the industrial system and thereby the present world. Professor Mathias poses questions about the nature of industrialization, social change and historical explanation, issues that are his principal scholarly concern. This series of essays is divided into two groups. The first group of essays focuses upon general themes such as the 'uniqueness' in Europe of the industrial revolution, capital formation, taxation, the growth of skills, science and technical change, leisure and wages, and diagnoses of poverty. In the second section, Professor Mathias focuses on the social structure in the eighteenth century, considering the industrialization of brewing, coinage, agriculture and the drink industries, advances in public health and the armed forces, British and American public finance in the War of Independence, Dr Johnson and the business world.

First published in 1964, Was Stalin Really Necessary? is a thought-provoking work which deals with many aspects of the Soviet political economy, planning problems and statistics. Professor Nove starts with an attempt to evaluate the rationality of Stalinism and discusses the possible political consequences of the search for greater economic efficiency, which is followed by a controversial discussion of Kremlinology. The author goes on to analyse the situation of the peasants as reflected in literary journals, then looks at industrial and agricultural problems. There are elaborate statistical surveys of occupational patterns and the purchasing power of wages, followed by an examination of the irrational statistical reflection of irrational economic decisions. Professor Nove 's essay on social welfare was, unlike some of his other work, used in the Soviet press as evidence against over-enthusiastic cold-warriors, among whom the author was not always popular. Finally, the author seeks to generalise about the evolution of world communism.

First published in 1991, Stuart Bruchey's study is a historical tribute to the financial innovation of the American Stock Exchange. He chronicles the heyday of Wall Street - from events leading to the Great Depression, through the New Deal and World War II, to the electronic era, the crash of'87, and the new realities and global opportunities of the 1990s. We observe with fascination the transformation of the relocated outdoor Curb market on Broad Street to its cavernous indoor trading facility on Trinity Place, where it's been ever since - the first trading "posts" topped with light fixtures reminiscent of the outdoor lampposts they replaced. Bruchey relives for us the introduction of the first CRT terminals on the trading floor and the gradual, yet inevitable, influence of technology on the trading process. His study of modernization brings us right into the world of equity options, derivatives and other creative products introduced in latter part of the twentieth century - investment vehicles designed to serve an increasingly sophisticated and demanding marketplace of investors.

This and the following volume chart the history of financial institutions in England in the mid-late nineteenth century as well as examining the periods of boom and bust, their causes and effects. Using hitherto unpublished sources from the International Financial Society this book provides an unrivalled record of the development of the modern banking industry.

This book investigates the tensions between subjectivism and objectivism in the history of economics. The book looks at the works of Adam Smith, Carl Menger, Leon Walras, William Stanley Jevons, Oskar Morgenstern, Ludwig Mises, Piero Sraffa, and so on. The book highlights the diverse subjective and objective elements of their economic theories and suggests a reframing of methodology to better address the core problems of the theories.

Contributors of the volume are leading members of the Japan Society of History of Economic Thought who have provided a comprehensive overview on the economics methodology and the related problems. Hence, this book will be of an invaluable asset to not only those who are interested in the history of economic thought, but also to scholars who are concerned with the methodological problems of economic science.

This book covers the life of John Blackwell, who pursued interests in Ireland, banking schemes in London and Massachusetts, before being Governor of Pennsylvania / This book will apeal to all those interested in 17th century English history and society / Working with his son, Lambert Blackwell, who established himself as a merchant and financier this book will also appeal to those interested in financial and trading history, as well as the history of the English colonies in America

This unique troika of Handbooks provides indispensable coverage of the history of economic analysis. Edited by two of the foremost academics in the field, the volumes gather together insightful and original contributions from scholars across the world. The encyclopaedic breadth and scope of the original entries will make these Handbooks an invaluable source of knowledge for all serious students and scholars of the history of economic thought. Each Handbook can be read individually and acts as a self-contained volume in its own right. It can be purchased separately or as part of a three-volume set. Volume I contains original biographical profiles of many of the most important and influential economists. These inform the reader about their lives, works and impact on the further development of the discipline. The emphasis is on their lasting contributions to our understanding of the complex system known as the economy. The entries also shed light on the means and ways in which the functioning of this system can be improved and its dysfunction reduced. Contributors include: T. Asada, T. Aspromourgos, M. Assous, V. Avtonomov, R. Baranzini, A. Baujard, A. Beraud, E. Bertrand, O. Bjerkholt, P. Boettke, D. Boegenhold, A. Brewer, G. Campagnolo, V. Caspari, V. Chick J. Creedy, F. Dal Degan, M. Dal Pont-Legrande, M. Dardi, J. de Boyer des Roches, D. Diatkine, V. Di Giovinazzo, R.W. Dimand, R. Dujmovits, I. Eliseeva, R.B. Emmett, N. Eyguesier, G. Faccarello, O. Favereau, A. Fossati, W. Gaertner, C. Gehrke, A. Giuliani, J. Glaeser, M. Goedl, R. Gomez Betancourt, H. Gram, M.E.L. Guidi, D. Haas, H. Hagemann, G.C. Harcourt, M.J. Holler, H. Janssen, J. Jespersen, J. Joachim Zweynert, P. Kalmbach, Y.-F. Kao, J.E. King, A. Kirman, H. Klausinger, M. Knell, S. Kolev, H.D. Kurz, B.J. Loasby, N. Makasheva, C. Martin, M. McLure, A. Molavi Vassei, A.E. Murphy, L. Nellinger, S. Oliver, A. Opocher, A. Orain, T. Raffaelli, A. Rainer, G. Rubin, M. Rutherford, M. Salles, N. Salvadori,B. Schefold, M. Schneider, C.P. Schroeder, M.H. Schutz, U. Schwalbe, R. Signorino, N. Skaggs, P. Spahn, P. Steiner, R. Sturn, H.-M. Trautwein, K. Tribe, R. Van den Berg, V. Vanberg, K. Velupillai, R. Venkatachalam, C.C. von Weizsacker, L.R. Wray, K. Yahia

From the early 1960s until his death in 1994, Alec Nove was one of the world's leading authorities on Russian and Soviet economic history. This Routledge Revivals collection brings together six of his most essential books on the Soviet Economy, taken from across the full breadth of his eminent career.

Written between 1961 and 1989, this definitive collection covers Soviet economic history from the height of the Cold War through to the cultural renaissance of Glasnost in the late 1980s. From Joseph Stalin through to Mikhail Gorbachev, via an exploration of Soviet political economy, efficiency, Socialism and development, this is a truly wide-ranging reissued collection, which will be a delight to Soviet economists and historians.

This is Volume II of Professor Parker's authoritative Official History of Privatisation, covering the period from the re-election of Margaret Thatcher in 1987 to the election of Tony Blair in 1997. Volume II considers in detail several of the major privatisations, including those of airports, steel, water, electricity, coal and the railways, as well as a number of smaller ones. Each privatisation involved major challenges in terms of industrial restructuring, organising successful sales and, in a number of cases, establishing effective regulatory regimes. The policy evolved and new methods of selling and regulating were put in place that enabled further disposals to occur. Monolithic nationalised industries with their emphasis on the benefits of economies of scale, vertical integration and rationalisation, were replaced by industrial structures rooted in the importance of commercial management, risk taking and competition. In government departments and parts of the National Health Service, direct employees were replaced by private contractors, and private investment became a characteristic of public infrastructure in the form of PFI/PPP schemes. This study draws heavily on the official records of the British government, to which the author was given full access and on interviews with the leading figures involved in each of the privatisations, including ex-ministers, civil servants, business and City figures, as well as academics that have studied the subject. This book will of great interest to students of privatisation, British political history and of business and economics in general.

Known as the "economist's economist" for his work on creating a synthetic economic theory, Swedish economist Knut Wicksell was a controversial, but highly influential figure in modern economic thought. His contributions to marginal productivity theory, income distribution and, most notably, his theory of interest would come to have a profound impact upon twentieth century economic theory, not least in the work of John Maynard Keynes. First published in English in 1934 and 1935, this Routledge Revival set is a reissue of his two volume work on political economy, first published in Sweden in 1901 and 1906. This work is aimed at both the professional economist and the advanced student alike, as well as all those interested in the theoretical development of political economy. Volume I concerns itself predominiantly with issues of theory: specifically the theory of value, the theory of production and distribution and the theory of capital accumulation. Volume II deals with theories relating to money, currency and credit. For institutional purchases for e-book sets please contact [email protected] (customers in the UK, Europe and Rest of World)

The book is based on a rich and detailed quantitative material from research over the past decades with consecutive time series over production volumes, employment, productivity, investments etc. for sectors and branches covering the whole economy, even including estimates of non-marketed domestic work. It is also based on a broad literature from Swedish historiography with details on the individual level of firms, innovators and entrepreneurs. Focus is upon the interplay between technological, economic and social change where a number of broad themes are treated with a general interest to historians or economists, e.g. the role of social change and domestic markets versus international specialisation and exports as dynamic factors in Swedish economic growth.

Within the theoretical framework of the trade-growth and structural transformation-growth nexuses, the book examines the evolution of African (goods and service) trade in terms of value and share of global commerce relative to other regions during the period 1948-2017. It also identifies and discusses discernible changes in the composition and structure of African exports and imports between 1995 and 2015 and their implications for economic development in Africa. The study attributes Africa's laggard trade performance during the period primarily to sub-optimal macroeconomic policies and lack of bold export development policies and initiatives, among other factors. It also offers an incisive discussion of several inhibitions to the structural transformation of African exports and imports, including lack of finance, globalization, tariff, and non-tariff measures in global markets. The discussion of the evolution of African trade during the period 1948-2017 based on statistics and publications of international organizations, including the UNCTAD, the World Bank, and the African Development Bank, among others, is the first of its kind in terms of scope and depth of review of African trade. The analyses of cross-border trade during 1948-2017 and their implications for Africa's economic development prospects constitute a useful reference material for academics and students of African and development studies and African and international policymakers.

This book follows on from the author's volume Russian Economic Development and although it encompasses some of the same material it charts the history and progress of the Soviet economy down to the efforts at reconstruction after The Second World War. A new chapter was added which covers the post-war decade from the end of the war to the announcement of the Sixth Year Plan.

Central economic planning is often associated with failed state socialism, and modern capitalism celebrated as its antithesis. This book shows that central planning is not always, or even primarily, a state enterprise, and that the giant industrial corporations that dominated the American economy through the twentieth century were, first and foremost, unprecedented examples of successful, consensual central planning at a very large scale.

The principal themes pursued in this book emerge from the great transformation that the Latin American and the Caribbean economies experienced in the aftermath of both the foreign debt crisis of 1982 and the macroeconomic stabilisation policies that vividly and painfully produced the so-called "lost decade" of the 1980s. Latin America implemented an economic liberalisation process during the late 1980s and the 1990s. The main policy reforms involved in that course can be summarized as privatization of state owned firms, trade openness, deregulation of the foreign direct investment (FDI) regime and fiscal discipline. Latin American countries have also embarked in regional trade agreements, the most important ones being Mercosur and the North American Free trade Agreement (NAFTA). This book compares results from the experience of North-South and South-South moulds of integration. Thus, the impacts of these policies on growth, development, technological progress, poverty and inequality are analysed. Orthodox and heterodox economic policies and theories are discussed along with relevant empirical evidence with a view to assess, on the one hand, the relative merits of the various policy reforms applied by different countries in the region, and on the other, the experience of integration into the global economy. There are thirteen chapters in this collection linked in varying ways to the series of economic reforms introduced in the region in the last decades. The book will be of interest to academics, researchers, students and policymakers interested in the study of economic development in emerging economies and in particular in Latin America.

This volume collects published papers and essays from widely scattered and inaccessible sources, some of which appeared for the first time when this book was originally published. In the first part of the book the subjects range from the theory of wages and recent trends in economic theory to economists' criticism of capitalism and socialism, investment-policy in under-developed countries, and economic growth under the Soviet Five Year Plans. The second part includes papers on Lenin and Marx, a study of the economic ideas of Bernard Shaw, and an essay on historical materialism.