Charles MacKay's groundbreaking examination of a staggering variety of popular delusions, crazes and mass follies is presented here in full with no abridgements. The text concentrates on a wide variety of phenomena which had occurred over the centuries prior to this book's publication in 1841. Mackay begins by examining economic bubbles, such as the infamous Tulipomania, wherein Dutch tulips rocketed in value amid claims they could be substituted for actual currency. As we progress further, the scope of the book broadens into several more exotic fields of mass self-deception. Mackay turns his attention to the witch hunts of the 17th and 18th centuries, the practice of alchemy, the phenomena of haunted houses, the vast and varied practices of fortune telling and the search for the philosopher's stone, to name but a handful of subjects. Today, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and The Madness of Crowds is distinguished as an expansive, well-researched and somewhat eccentric work of social history.

England's capture of Canada in 1760 was the culmination of the French and Indian War and of a century and a half of conflict between Britain and France for control of the North American continent. During that long period, there were several English military efforts to evict the French, but all failed. Therefore, at the war's start, few among the English entertained serious thoughts of totally evicting France from all of Canada. Nor did the French consider such a result a serious possibility. Drawing heavily on primary sources, Brecher tells the dramatic story of why the war's outcome differed so sharply from original expectations. He does so from the vantage point of France, while demonstrating in greater depth than has been available to date the linkages between France's American policy and involvement in the Seven Years' War.

Brecher provides an unprecedently full-scale analysis of the political, military, social, and economic conditions of mid-18th-century France and its North American colony, New France. That analysis also examines the direct connection between those internal conditions and the results for France of the war that ended in 1763. In doing so, Brecher assesses France's military strategy and major battles in Europe and America, as well as the diplomatic goals Versailles set for itself in the conduct of the war. Further, he describes why France concurred in leaving not only Canada, but also the vast Louisiana territory, to be divided between England and France's belated wartime ally, Bourbon Spain. Finally, Brecher explains the longer-term implications of the war for North American development and for the future of France. This is an important study for students and scholars of French and colonial American history and for the broad reading public, as well as those interested in the more recent Quebec problem.

The current political trend toward a drastically reduced government role in the economy and civil society begs a thorough discussion of the recent history of the free market movement in the United States. By providing a history of the political revitalization of classical liberalism since the 1960s, Bringing the Market Back In makes a significant step in understanding this discussion. When the market liberals came to power with the election of Ronald Reagan, they failed to translate their economic theories into dramatic political change. Although market liberals had developed remarkable intellectual strengths by 1980, the political movement to roll back the state was still in its infancy. The Gingrich Revolution of 1994 suggests that a better test of market liberalism's political feasibility may come in the last half of the 1990's.

Moving beyond the political polemics so common in the arena of contemporary economic policy, Kelley grounds his study in the little-known archival materials from the Libertarian Party and personal collections from the Hoover Institution Archives.

Is the 'natural resource curse' destiny? Are different ways to link natural resources and economic development? Using two particular regions as case studies, this edited collection examines the divergent development paths of natural resource rich countries over the past two centuries. Bolivia, Chile and Peru are neighbour states with a common history and are globally known by their mining endowments. Norway and Sweden have also a strong common history, and different natural resource endowments (forestry, mining and fishing) are essential to understand their current economic success. By comparing natural resource management in the long run in these two divergent regions, this book can help rethink how developing countries can better take advantage of their natural resource endowments. Specifically, the book examines the interaction between natural resources and different key determinants of long-term development: trade, fiscal policy, sustainability, human capital accumulation and business strategies.

This book uses Figueroa's unified theory of capitalism to explain how economic growth has led to a new epoch, the Anthropocene, and it presents a new set of economic principles that are needed in this new age. The policies presented in the book are derived from an empirically corroborated scientific theory. Therefore, this book is unique in its discussion of public policy as the result of scientific knowledge, rather than based on ideology or private interests. In the new epoch we have entered, man is now the main factor in the fate of the Earth, and in social terms, the Anthropocene age also implies a period of high and persistent income inequality in the capitalist system, with the consequence of social disorder. Figueroa considers these conditions and addresses fundamental problems of our time, such as the ideal organization of production and distribution, and the functionality of a zero-growth society. Standard economics would approach these problems under the assumption that we still live in the Holocene age, but in this book, Figueroa both explains and develops new economic principles for this new context.

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 monograph aims to analyze the economic and business history of colonial India from a corporate perspective by clarifying the historical role of institutional developments based on archival evidence of a representative enterprise. The perspective is distinctively unique in that it highlights the salience of corporate-level institutional responses to explain the causes of colonial India's industrial growth, in addition to two renowned perspectives focusing on government economic policy or factor endowment. One of the driving forces of India's high growth rate since the 1980s is the expansion of modern business corporations whose origins date back to the colonial era in the mid-nineteenth century. This monograph explores the historical foundation of the growth of such corporations in colonial India, guided by a substantial collection of documents of Tata Iron and Steel Company, whose rich records have not received the due attention they have long deserved. As clarified by numerous economic and business historians of leading industrialized countries since the works of Douglass North and Alfred Chandler, this study as well proposes that the development of modern business corporations in colonial India was broadly supported by the reciprocal evolution of economic institutions and corporate organizations. Adding a new perspective to the business and economic history of colonial India, the analysis also provides an important case study of the development of corporate business in the non-Western world to the study of global business history.

Awarded the Jaume Vicens Vives Prize by the Spanish Association of Economic History, this study analyses the development of the Spanish domestic market from 1650 to 1800, which transformed the country from a pseudocolonial territory, politically and economically dependent on its European neighbours, to a significant European power. The Emergence of a National Market in Spain, 1650-1800 places Spain firmly in a European context, arguing that the origins of a sophisticated economy must be understood through the complex diplomacy of the period, namely the competition between Britain and France for dominance in the Iberian peninsula. It was in response to this rivalry that the Spanish state actively promoted the conditions for economic development in the 18th century, aided by autonomous commercial networks of Catalan merchants, Navarrese tradesmen and migrant French businessmen. This original interpretation by one of Spain's leading economic historians, available in English for the first time, is indispensable reading for students and scholars of Spanish history.

This book is the culmination of a lifetime of research into Chinese development, situated in a global historical context. The author explores the irreplaceable role of state capacity, state-owned-enterprises and five-year plan in China's transformation from an agricultural state to an industrial state and then to the world's economic powerhouse, as well as the remarkable achievements of social policy to reduce the rural-urban gap and regional gap. This book will be of interest to China scholars, development economists, political activists, and general readers who would like to know more about China's growth miracle.

The commercial revolution of the seventeenth century deeply changed English culture. In this ambitious book, Blair Hoxby explores what that economic transformation meant to the century's greatest poet, John Milton, and to the broader literary tradition in which he worked. Hoxby places Milton's work-as well as the writings of contemporary reformers like the Levellers, poets like John Dryden, and political economists like Sir William Petty-within the framework of England's economic history between 1601 and 1724. Literary history swerved in this period, Hoxby demonstrates, as a burgeoning economic discourse pressed authors to reimagine ideas about self, community, and empire. Hoxby shows that, contrary to commonly held views, Milton was a sophisticated economic thinker. Close readings of Milton's prose and verse reveal the importance of economic ideas in a wide range of his most famous writings, from Areopagitica to Samson Agonistes to Paradise Lost.

With the opening of sea routes in the fifteenth century, groups of men and women left Portugal to establish themselves across the ports and cities of the Atlantic or Ocean sea. They were refugees and migrants, traders and mariners, Jews, Catholics, and the Marranos of mixed Judaic-Catholic
culture. They formed a diasporic community known by contemporaries as the Portuguese Nation. By the early seventeenth century, this nation without a state had created a remarkable trading network that spanned the Atlantic, reached into the Indian Ocean and Asia, and generated millions of pesos that
were used to bankroll the Spanish empire. A Nation Upon the Ocean Sea traces the story of the Portuguese Nation from its emergence in the late fifteenth century to its fragmentation in the middle of the seventeenth and situates it in relation to the parallel expansion and crisis of Spanish imperial
dominion in the Atlantic. Against the backdrop of this relationship, the book reconstitutes the rich inner life of a community based on movement, maritime trade, and cultural hybridity. We are introduced to mariners and traders in such disparate places as Lima, Seville and Amsterdam, their
day-to-day interactions and understandings, their houses and domestic relations, their private reflections and public arguments. This finaly-textured account reveals how the Portuguese Nation created a cohesive and meaningful community despite the mobility and dispersion of its members; how its
forms of sociability fed into the development of robust transatlantic commercial networks; and how the day-to-day experience of trade was translated into the sphere of Spanish imperial politics of commercial reform basedon religious-ethnic toleration and the liberalization of trade. A microhistory,
A Nation Upon the Ocean Sea contributes to our understanding of the broader histories of capitalism, empire, and diaspora in the early Atlantic.

This is the story of one of the most dynamic entrepreneurs in modern French history. Drawing upon a wealth of archival and private documentation. Lewis uncovers the history of Pierre-Francois Tubeuf and assesses his contribution to the development of industry in France. Lewis explores the relationship between seigneurial, proto-industrial, and modern forms of capitalism in the Cevennes region of southeastern France in the eighteenth century, and demonstrates the international scope of proto-industrialization. This subtle and scholarly study seeks to unravel the complex problems associated with the impact of the French Revolution on the processes of modern French capitalism. Lewis traces the responses of a wide variety of individuals, including Tubeuf and his greatest rival, the marechal de Castries. He examines the epic struggle of these two powerful men for control of the rich coal-mines of the region, and their legacy to succeeding generations.

John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946) is perhaps the foremost economic thinker of the twentieth century. On economic theory, he ranks with Adam Smith and Karl Marx; and his impact on how economics was practiced, from the Great Depression to the 1970s, was unmatched. The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money was first published in 1936. But its ideas had been forming for decades ? as a student at Cambridge, Keynes had written to a friend of his love for 'Free Trade and free thought'. Keynes's limpid style, concise prose, and vivid descriptions have helped to keep his ideas alive - as have the novelty and clarity, at times even the ambiguity, of his macroeconomic vision. He was troubled, above all, by high unemployment rates and large disparities in wealth and income. Only by curbing both, he thought, could individualism, 'the most powerful instrument to better the future', be safeguarded. The twenty-first century may yet prove him right. In The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919), Keynes elegantly and acutely exposes the folly of imposing austerity on a defeated and struggling nation.

This book provides an analysis of the process and outcomes of the tax reform, with a focus on progressivity, redistribution, and inequality. Between 1977 and 1986, Spain underwent a comprehensive tax reform which shaped its fiscal system until today. It was made in connection with the transition to democracy and indeed was understood as a fundamental part of the political change. The book situates the reform both within Spanish history and international trends in tax systems and connects it to the expansion of the welfare state and regional decentralization in Spain. The analysis reveals that the tax system failed to attain progressivity, and significant levels of fraud had a noticeable impact on inequality. Because of this, fiscal redistribution remained limited. In the new political economy of the second globalization, late democratic and fiscal transitioners were unable to emulate the path of the welfare state forerunners.

This book explores the neglected contribution of the American and English "psychological" school to economic theory, especially to the development and refinement of the Austrian school of economics. It argues that Frank Knight, Frank Fetter, Herbert Davenport, Philip Wicksteed and J.B. Clark among others improved on the original Austrian theory by Menger and Bohm-Bawerk by providing a coherent subjectivist foundation for the theories of production and distribution. They succeeded where economic theory before them failed - to develop the theories of interest, profit, wages and rents based solely on the principles of subjective value and marginal utility, eschewing the last remnants of the old cost of production models. This book represents a look at what mainstream economic theory might have looked like had the erasure of Mengerian Austrian price theory by Marshallian and Walrasian thoeries not taken place, and had the improvements and refinements of the Mengerian tradition, itself done by the Anglo-Saxon followers of Menger, been fully appropriated.

In this book some of the world's leading economists and experts on Serra explore the enduring appeal of his 1613 Breve trattato.

Placing 'literature' at the centre of Renaissance economic knowledge, this book offers a distinct intervention in the history of early modern epistemology. It is premised on the belief that early modern practices of change and exchange produced a range of epistemic shifts and crises, which, nonetheless, lacked a systematic vocabulary. These essays collectively tap into the imaginative kernel at the core of economic experience, to grasp and give expression to some of its more elusive experiential dimensions. The essays gathered here probe the early modern interface between imaginative and mercantile knowledge, between technologies of change in the field of commerce and transactions in the sphere of cultural production, and between forms of transaction and representation. In the process, they go beyond the specific interrelation of economic life and literary work to bring back into view the thresholds between economics on the one hand, and religious, legal and natural philosophical epistemologies on the other.

This book provides a unique historical perspective on expectations in economic theory, and applications of expectations models in economic history. Based on papers presented at the 2017 Thomas Guggenheim Conference, it brings together the work of economists, historians of economics, and economic historians on issues and events concerning expectations in economics and economic history. The contributions address: (i) the history of expectations models; (ii) growth, expectations and political economy; (iii) controversies regarding expectations methods and models; (iv) expectations in theory and reality; and (v) expectations in economic history. The book opens with a lecture by Thomas Guggenheim Prize winner Duncan Foley on the evolution of expectations in modern economic thought. The remaining content is divided into two parts, the first of which focuses on the utilization of expectations in the "ancient" and "meso" periods of high theory, i.e., from Smithian to Keynesian approaches. The papers cover topics such as "modern" applications of expectations in both "Tobinesque-Phillips" and "Harrodian-Solowian" contexts, and the debate between Friedmanite and Keynesian approaches to expectation formation. In turn, the last part presents essays on the role of economic expectations in connection with historical events and contexts, ranging from the early 20th century to World War II, and on the application of expectations theory to hyperinflation and stabilization, taking Israel as a case study.

After years of relative neglect, the reconstruction of post-war Germany has recently become a major research focus for historians. The contributors to this volume were among the first to evaluate the archives relevant to their topic and are hence able to present many fresh insights into Allied occupation policy in the late 1940s, revealing the painful adjustment which German industry, institutions and citizens had to make in the post-1945 world.

Fully modern corporations appeared in fourteenth-century Toulouse, much earlier than previously believed Germain Sicard proves that Europe's first corporations were fourteenth-century mill companies operating in Toulouse, rather than seventeenth-century English and Dutch trading companies as commonly believed. He shows that the corporate form derives from a unique ownership contract from Medieval Europe called pariage, and a culture of strong property rights and municipal self-governance. Based on archival research, Sicard's 1952 thesis has been translated into English with an introduction that places the work in the context of new institutional economics and legal theory. It is an important contribution to research on the history and legal origins of the corporation.

The unprecedented importance of finance in our societies, as well as its central role in provoking economic crises, has generated an enormous interest in understanding the historical origins and evolution of modern financial systems. Today the U.S. economy is seen as an archetype of a capitalist system in which securities markets play a central role. Moreover, these markets have had a high profile in some of the most dramatic moments in U.S. history, often in the context of crises. Dividends of Development: Securities Markets in the History of U.S. Capitalism, 1865-1922, explains how U.S. securities markets became central to the institutional fabric of U.S. capitalism. After the Civil War, these markets had a narrowly circumscribed relationship to the country's real economy, being largely dominated by railroad securities. Moreover, their role in the U.S. financial system was of limited significance given the relatively modest resources that financial institutions committed to investment in, and lending on, corporate securities. That situation was to undergo fundamental change from the Civil War through the end of World War 1 but the development of U.S. securities markets did not occur as a result of a smooth, or even, linear process. Instead, the book shows that the transformation of U.S. securities markets occurred through a process that was volatile and time-consuming, unscripted by powerful actors, and driven, above all else, by the dramatic but unstable character of the nation's economic development. These claims about the trajectory, the operation, and the underlying dynamics of the development of U.S. securities markets are brought together in a novel synthesis that portrays the historical evolution of securities markets in the United States as the "dividends" of the country's distinctive trajectory of economic development.

Originally published between 2002 and 2011, the first 6 meticulously researched and extensive volumes of this set cover a vast period of US financial and economic history, from the 'discovery' of America, through Civil War, Independence, two World Wars, the Great Depression, and on through the turbulent 20th and early 21st Centuries. An entirely new volume brings the series up to date to the Pandemic of 2020. Carefully documented and lucidly written by Jerry W. Markham, these volumes give an unparalleled insight into financial scandals; corporate governance issues; the development of US securities, derivative and mortgage markets; housing boom and bust and stock market panics. The final (entirely new) 7th volume is divided into three chronological sections: the first section describes the recovery of financial markets after the Great Recession. It begins with an overview of the state of the economy at the start of the new decade, including some of the political storms affecting the economy and financial markets. The second section sets forth regulatory responses to the Financial Crisis of 2008, including the massive fines imposed on large banks by a swarm of regulators. The third section describes the rules adopted under the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010 that broadly affected financial markets. It also recounts the Trump trade wars and ends with an account of the financial and economic turmoil that occurred during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020.

This is the first history on the subject of foreign investment in the United States since 1920. It shows how the United States changed from a debtor nation to a supplier of capital to the rest of the world, and then details the structural shifts to this creditor position after the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system in 1972. Geisst demonstrates that the United States has always been a magnet for foreign portfolio and direct investment. Traditionally, this has come from northern European or Canadian sources, but in the 1970s the Japanese became a major force. Currently, both types of investment in the United States are at historically high levels, but Geisst asserts that this foreign interest exerts a positive rather than a negative impact on the economic climate.

This study is a counterpart to the author's earlier examination of domestic investment in the United States, "Visionary Capitalism: Financial Markets and the American Dream in the Twentieth Century." It will be of interest to scholars and professionals in finance and investments, business history, and American history.

With the life story of Shibusawa Eiichi (1840-1931), one of the most important financiers and industrialists in modern Japanese history, as its narrative focal point, this book explores the challenges of importing modern business enterprises to Japan, where the pursuit of profit was considered beneath the dignity of the samurai elite. Seeking to overturn the Tokugawa samurai-dominated political economy after the Meiji Restoration, Shibusawa was a pioneer in introducing joint-stock corporations to Japan as institutions of economic development. As the entrepreneurial head of Tokyo's Dai-Ichi Bank, he helped launch modern enterprises in such diverse industries as banking, shipping, textiles, paper, beer, and railroads. Believing businesses should be both successful and serve the national interest, Shibusawa regularly cautioned against the pursuit of profit alone. He insisted instead on the 'unity of morality and economy' following business ethics derived from the Confucian Analects. A top leader in Japan's business community for decades, Shibusawa contributed to founding the Tokyo Stock Exchange, the Tokyo Chamber of Commerce, and numerous educational and philanthropic organizations to promote his vision of Confucian capitalism. This volume marks an important contribution to the international debate on the extent to which capitalist enterprises have a responsibility to serve and benefit the societies in which they do business. Shibusawa's story demonstrates that business, government, trade associations, and educational institutions all have valuable roles to play in establishing a political economy that is both productive and humane.

Protecting economic competition has become a major objective of government in Western Europe, and competition law has become a central part of economic and legal experience. National competition laws have long helped shape the relationship between government and the economy, and their influence has grown dramatically during the last decade. Competition law has also played a key role in the process of European integration, and is likely to do so in the future. Yet, despite its importance, images of European experience with competition law often remain vague and are sometimes dangerously distorted. This book examines that experience, analysing the dynamics of European competition law systems, revealing their impacts and assessing the political and economic issues they raise.