This book explores the relationship between democracy and the economy in contemporary political thought and policy-making. Using the concepts of economic, industrial and enterprise democracy, the author focuses on the history of Finland and Sweden during the latter part of the twentieth century. The three concepts are discussed in relation to various political groups, such as social democrats, conservatives and liberals, and the reforms that they were associated with, painting a picture of changing economic thought in the Nordic countries, and the West more generally. Arguing that the concept of democracy has evolved from representative parliamentary democracy towards 'participation' in civil society, this book demonstrates how the ideal of individual freedom and choice has surpassed collective decision-making. These shared characteristics between Finland, Sweden and other Western countries challenge the view that the Nordic countries have been exceptional in resisting neoliberalism. In fact, as this book shows, neoliberalism has been influential to the Nordics since the 1970s. Offering an innovative and conceptual perspective on European political history, this book will appeal to scholars interested in Nordic political history and modern European history more generally.

This book analyzes the role of Dai Viet (Vietnam) in the maritime Asian trading network of the thirteenth through the eighteenth centuries as it systematically integrates the results of archaeological investigations. The first half of the book consolidates reports from excavations conducted at Van Don and Pho Hien, trading ports of Dai Viet, incorporating sophisticated archaeological techniques distinctive of Japan in the presentations of the data. These are accompanied by precise scale drawings, detailed classifications, and quantitative analyses of unearthed artifacts. The latter half of the book discusses the materials discovered in archaeological investigations, specifically ceramics and coins, in terms of the relations among sites and networks of production, distribution, and consumption, from a broader Asian geohistorical perspective. To this end, the diplomatic policies and trading activities of each era in Vietnam are discussed, integrating the results of archaeological investigations with studies of historical documents. Expanding beyond Vietnam, results of the archaeological investigations in other maritime Asian countries, such as Japan, Indonesia, Laos, and the Philippines, are introduced, to inform a comparative study that combines all such data from both archaeology and history in a single volume as materials for broader discussion. This book is expected to contribute to international academic discourse on the history of maritime Asia and help open a new phase of scholarly endeavor in this field.

This book defines the relationship between the thought of Adam Smith and that of the ancients---Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, and the Stoics. Vivenza offers a complete survey of all Smith's writings with the aim of illustrating how classical arguments shaped opinions and scholarship in the eighteenth century.

This collection of books encompasses Scottish identity and cultural heritage, historical geography, health and social issues, industrial, economic, religious and political history. Originally published between 1935 and 1990, many of these titles were written at the height of discussions concerning the viability of an independent Scotland, an issue that has renewed relevance today. They include some of the notable volumes from the Routledge The Voice of Scotland series, as well as other books by leading authors. The empirical content of many of the books reissued here ensures they retain their relevance in informing studies of trends since the time they were first completed and will be of interest to anyone concerned with the ongoing debate about Scotland's role within the UK and Europe and the shape of her political future.

While ethics has been an integral part of economics since the days of Adam Smith (if not Aristotle), many modern economists dismiss ethical concerns in favor of increasing formal mathematical and computational methods. But recent financial crises in the real world have reignited discussions of the importance of ethics to economics, including growing calls for a new approach to incorporating moral philosophy in economic theory, practice, and policy. Ironically, it is the ethics of virtue advocated by Aristotle and Adam Smith that may lead to the most promising way to developing an economics that emphasizes the virtues, character, and judgment of the agents it models. In Economics and the Virtues, editors Jennifer A. Baker and Mark D. White have brought together fifteen leading scholars in economics and philosophy to offer fresh perspectives on integrating virtue into economics. The first section covers five major thinkers and schools in the virtue tradition, tracing historical connections and suggesting new areas of cooperation. The second section applies the ethics of virtue to modern economic theory, delving into its current practices and methodology to suggest areas for integration with moral philosophy. Finally, the third section addresses specific topics such as markets, profits, and justice in the context of virtue and vice, offering valuable applications of virtue to economics. With insights that are novel as well as rooted in time-tested ethical thought, Economics and the Virtues will be of interest to economists, philosophers, and other scholars in the social sciences and humanities, as well as professionals and policymakers in the fields of economics and finance, and makes an invaluable contribution to the ongoing discussion over the role of ethics in economics.

This classic history of the Mexican hacienda from the colonial period through the nineteenth century has been reissued in a silver anniversary edition complete with a substantive new introduction and foreword. Eric Van Young explores 150 years of Mexico's economic and rural development, a period when one of history's great empires was trying to extract more resources from its most important colony, and when an arguably capitalist economy was both expanding and taking deeper root. The author explains the development of a regional agrarian system, centered on the landed estates of late colonial Mexico, the central economic and social institution of an overwhelmingly rural society. With rich empirical detail, he meticulously describes the features of the rural economy, including patterns of land ownership, credit and investment, labor relations, the structure of production, and the relationship of a major colonial city to its surrounding area. The book's most interesting and innovative element is its emphasis on the way the system of rural economy shaped, and was shaped by, the internal logic of a great spatial system, the region of Guadalajara. Van Young argues that Guadalajara's population growth progressively integrated the large geographical region surrounding the city through the mechanisms of the urban market for grain and meat, which in turn put pressure on local land and labor resources. Eventually this drove white and Indian landowners into increasingly sharp conflict and led to the progressive proletarianization of the region's peasantry during the last decades of the Spanish colonial era. It is no accident, given this history, that the Guadalajara region was one of the major areas of armed insurrection for most of the decade during Mexico's struggle for independence from Spain. By highlighting the way haciendas worked and changed over time, this indispensable study illuminates Mexico's economic and social history, the movement for independence, and the origins of the Mexican Revolution.

This study utilizes the rich archives which survive at Durham Cathedral to examine the way in which accounting methods and systems were adopted and adapted to manage income and expenses, assets and liabilities in changing economic environments.

The economic relationship between the U.S. and China during the 1940s has long been neglected, with few scholarly works focusing on the period. This era was overshadowed by the political and diplomatic changes during and after the failure of the Nationalists in 1949. Without a close and insightful look into the reconstruction of China with American involvement during the late 1940s, one cannot identify the problems which led to the Nationalists' failure, nor can one answer the questions dealing with the impact of American economic policy toward China during that time.

This text develops an original critical analysis of the origins and evolution of the euro and the current debt crisis that envelops the euro-zone. It provides a comprehensive critical historical narrative of the evolution of European Monetary Union (EMU). The history of the euro, culminating in the Maastricht blueprint in 1992, reveals that this deeply flawed monetary edifice was informed by the prevailing neoliberal/monetarist economic doctrines, favoured by Germany. The final blueprint witnessed the birth of an international currency which was devoid of a coherent sovereign power.
The author's critique is informed by post-Keynesian theories of endogenous money. Lucarelli provides an essential contribution to the critique of the existing economic theories that continue to inform the evolution of the euro. In the absence of political union and a corresponding fiscal framework, the survival of the euro remains problematic. The imposition of harsh, neoliberal, austerity measures by the IMF/EU/ECB (Troika) on Europe's peripheral, deficit countries threaten the very existence of the euro-zone in its present form, and have set in motion powerful centrifugal forces, which could ultimately derail the entire post-war European project.

This book presents detailed case studies of the first commercial internet digital currency systems developed between 1996 and 2004. Transactions completed with the new technology circumvented all US financial regulations, an opening that transnational criminals exploited. Mullan explains how an entire industry of companies, agents, and participants turned a blind eye to crimes being committed in this unsupervised environment. He then tracks the subsequent changes made to US regulations that now prevent such unlicensed activity, illustrating the importance of supervising products and industries that arise from new disruptive technology. This book distills hundreds of hours of interviews with the creators and operators of early digital currency businesses to create detailed case studies of their practices.

This book examines the early American cotton industry through British perspectives. The book covers the period from the 1780s to 1880, and concerns mainly Lancashire and New England, although there are many references to Scotland on the one hand, and to Pennsylvania and New York on the other. By concentrating on the spinning branch of the industry, which was far more affected by technological advances than the weaving branch during this period, Cohen is able to contrast different types of technologies, workers, markets, and goods. For example, the book contrasts how American industrialists acted differently than the British millowners and deals with the response of American factory workers to industrialization as distinct from the British operatives. Three interrelated themes emerge to define the theoretical subject matter of this study: mass production versus craft production, technology and organization, and craft control. Significantly, this study recognizes the often overlooked importance of mule spinning to the industry. The volume examines the craft workers' rise to and struggle for power, the rise of the foreman, the role of unions, and an exploration of strikes--how they happened, why they happened, and what happened because of them. In the final chapter, the book expands its focus to examine the relationship of cotton to the coal, iron, and steel industries.

This book goes back to the origins of the transformation of health and medicine into a business, during the first part of the twentieth century, focusing on the example of Japan. In the past hundred years, medicine has gone from being a charitable activity to a large economic sector, amounting to 12-15% of the GDP in many developed countries, and one of the fastest-growing businesses around the world. Despite the mounting presence of the medical industry, there is a lack of academic work detailing this major transformation. The objective of this book is to fill this gap and address the following question: how did medicine become a business? Using over ten years of research in the field, Pierre-Yves Donze argues that economic factors and business factors were decisive in transforming the way that medicine enters our lives. This book will be of interest to historians of medicine, business historians, health economists, scholars in medical humanities, and more.

Bringing together contributions from an international group of social scientists, this collection examines diverse crises, both historical and contemporary, which implicate market forces, widening inequalities, social exclusion, forms of resistance, and ideological polarisation. The Commonalities of Global Crises offers carefully researched case studies which stretch across large geographical distances- from Egypt to the US and from northern, central, eastern and southern Europe to South America- and covers timely issues including human rights, slavery, care, migration, racism, and the far right. The volume demonstrates that such different settings and diverse concerns are characterized by a common tension in which the crises that unfold around pressures of widening marketization and commodification are met by the (re)building or re-assertion of various communities, and competing politics of solidarity and nostalgia.

This work is dedicated to Wassiliy Leontief's concepts of Input-Output Analysis and to the algebraic properties of Piero Sraffa's seminal models described consequently by matrix algebra and the Perron-Frobenius Theorem. Detailed examples and visualizing graphs are presented for applications of various mathematical methods.

Economics for Alfred Marshall, the last of the classical economists, is concerned with activities in the ordinary business of life. In that milieu, we find conflicts and chaotic behavior among people, firms, and countries, which make them conduct their affairs in different, and sometimes, ironic ways. Economic Ironies Throughout History explores, explains, predicts, and harnesses these ironies for economists and scholars alike. Szenberg and Ramrattan distill their core economic ironies from a vast history of philosophy and literature that applies to economic thought. They include philosophical, psychological, literary and linguistic discussions and the personalities behind those ideas such as Socrates, Kierkegaard, Hume, Freud, Jung, Saussure, and Barthes. This book is ideal for economists as well as scholars across the business, social science, and humanities fields.

This book provides a historical evaluation of banking reforms and structural changes in India over the past 25 years. Chapters cover issues in consolidation and restructuring, competition and concentration, performance evaluation in terms of cost efficiency and productivity, profitability, non-performing assets and technology use. The authors use specific regression models to measure the impact of these reforms on bank performance during this period and assess whether or not the consolidation phase is now complete. This volume will be of interest to researchers and academicians interested in the financial history of Indian Banking reforms.

This volume explores the concept of the honest merchant, taking a broad perspective and covering a wide range of aspects. It looks at the different types of "honest merchant" conceptions originating from different cultures and literary traditions. The book covers Japanese, Islamic, Scandinavian, Russian, German, Spanish, as well as other aspects, and studies different disciplinary backgrounds of the honest merchant, such as philosophical, economic, neuroethical, sociological and literary ones. The concept of the honest merchant has a long tradition in business ethics. In the Hanseatic League and in medieval Italy, the ideal of the honest businessman was taught since the late Middle Ages. It originated during a time when travelling merchants were often regarded with a sceptical eye. The honest merchants of their time however held clear principles in their business and took responsibility for their community. In later times, the religious notions of the concept lost their pivotal place to reason and morality. This book goes beyond the tradition of discussing business ethics in association with concepts from the Hanseatic League and medieval Italy, and puts the central concept of business ethics in a much greater perspective.

This book offers a vision of economics in which there is no place for universal laws of nature, and even for laws of a more probabilistic character. The author avoids interpreting the practice of economics as something that leads to the formulation of universal laws or laws of nature. Instead, chapters in the book follow the method of contemporary philosophy of science: rather than formulating suggestions for practicing scientists of how they should do research, the text describes and interprets the very practice of scientific research. This approach demonstrates how economists can explain economic phenomena not by subsuming them under general laws, but rather by building models of these phenomena, by referring to causes, or even by investigating what is in the nature of given factors, events, or circumstances to produce.

The book uses archival data to examine how access to micro-finance credit played a role in facilitating adjustment to blight during the Great Famine of Ireland. The author argues that the worst affected districts with a microfinance fund experienced substantially smaller population declines and larger increases in buffer livestock during the famine than those districts without a fund. The potentially limited capacity of credit access to mitigate the effects of a major environmental shock on the poorest, most vulnerable borrowers is also a key topic of discussion.

This classic history of the Mexican hacienda from the colonial period through the nineteenth century has been reissued in a silver anniversary edition complete with a substantive new introduction and foreword. Eric Van Young explores 150 years of Mexico's economic and rural development, a period when one of history's great empires was trying to extract more resources from its most important colony, and when an arguably capitalist economy was both expanding and taking deeper root. The author explains the development of a regional agrarian system, centered on the landed estates of late colonial Mexico, the central economic and social institution of an overwhelmingly rural society. With rich empirical detail, he meticulously describes the features of the rural economy, including patterns of land ownership, credit and investment, labor relations, the structure of production, and the relationship of a major colonial city to its surrounding area. The book's most interesting and innovative element is its emphasis on the way the system of rural economy shaped, and was shaped by, the internal logic of a great spatial system, the region of Guadalajara. Van Young argues that Guadalajara's population growth progressively integrated the large geographical region surrounding the city through the mechanisms of the urban market for grain and meat, which in turn put pressure on local land and labor resources. Eventually this drove white and Indian landowners into increasingly sharp conflict and led to the progressive proletarianization of the region's peasantry during the last decades of the Spanish colonial era. It is no accident, given this history, that the Guadalajara region was one of the major areas of armed insurrection for most of the decade during Mexico's struggle for independence from Spain. By highlighting the way haciendas worked and changed over time, this indispensable study illuminates Mexico's economic and social history, the movement for independence, and the origins of the Mexican Revolution.

Capitalism has lifted millions out of poverty. Under its guiding hand, living standards throughout the Western world have been transformed. Further afield, the trail blazed by Japan is being followed by other emerging market countries across the globe, creating prosperity on a breathtaking scale.And yet, capitalism is unloved. From its discontents to its outright enemies, voices compete to point out the flaws in the system that allow increasingly powerful elites to grab an ever larger share of our collective wealth.In this incisive, clear-sighted guide, award winning Financial Times journalist John Plender explores the paradoxes and pitfalls inherent in this extraordinarily dynamic mechanism - and in our attitudes to it. Taking us on a journey from the Venetian merchants of the Rennaissance to the gleaming temples of commerce in 21st-century Canary Wharf via the South Sea Bubble, Dutch tulip mania and manic-depressive gambling addicts, Plender shows us our economic creation through the eyes of philosophers, novelists, poets, artists and the divines.Along the way, he delves into the ethics of debt; reveals the truth about the unashamedly materialistic artistic giants who pioneered copyrighting; and traces the path of our instinctive conviction that entrepreneurs are greedy, unethical opportunists, hell-bent on capital accumulation, while manufacturing is innately virtuous. Thoughtful, eloquent and above all compelling, Capitalism is a remarkable contribution to the enduring debate.