Historical analysis of the German Democratic Republic has tended to adopt a top-down model of the transmission of authority. However, developments were more complicated than the standard state/society dichotomy that has dominated the debate among GDR historians. Drawing on a broad range of archival material from state and SED party sources as well as Stasi files and individual farm records along with some oral history interviews, this book provides a thorough investigation of the transformation of the rural sector from a range of perspectives. Focusing on the region of Bezirk Erfurt, the author examines on the one hand how East Germans responded to the end of private farming by resisting, manipulating but also participating in the new system of rural organization. However, he also shows how the regime sought via its representatives to implement its aims with a combination of compromise and material incentive as well as administrative pressure and other more draconian measures. The reader thus gains valuable insight into the processes by which the SED regime attained stability in the 1970s and yet was increasingly vulnerable to growing popular dissatisfaction and economic stagnation and decline in the 1980s, leading to its eventual collapse.

This book analyzes China's historical experience of industrialization. It adopts a critical stance towards China's development strategy and proposes an alternative approach, outlining its main features. Due to the great importance and special problems of China's rural modernization, special attention is devoted to analysis of the rural sector. Many of China's rural socio-economic problems are similar to those encountered in other developing countries. It is intended that this book will increase understanding of China's socio-economic development as well as contributing to wider debates in the theory of economic development.

From long, first-hand experience as president of his own financial advertising agency, Alec Benn offers a unique, inside look at America's investment community, at a time of changes so profound that their impact and implications are still with us. Based not on public relations handouts (although he himself has written them) but on frank, revealing talks with people who actually participated in the events of those tumultuous seven years, on official oral histories (hitherto concealed), and on his own keen observations, Benn shows how those events and changes really occurred. He reveals that The New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) was in far greater peril of collapse in 1970 than anyone, except a few insiders, has ever known. He exposes how many of the most significant changes ever to affect investors really came about. And he provides new insights into the people who caused, influenced, or sometimes opposed the reforms we now take for granted, as well as into the impact of historical figures such as Richard Nixon and Ross Perot. Informative, entertaining, and impeccably researched and documented, Benn's book gives us new information to help evaluate the investment world of today, and to appreciate how dangerous it was at another time, a time that some say appears uncomfortably familiar.

Among the many topics Benn examines in depth is the creation of the Securities Investors Protection Corporation, the agency that insures against loss of the cash and securities left by investors in their brokers' hands. He shows how stock brokers' commissions came to be competitive and low, instead of fixed and high (a special benefit for today's day traders), and how members of The New York Stock Exchange became able to sell shares in their firms to the general public, opening a bountiful source of permanent capital. He goes on to cover the creation of the Central Certificate System, which led to a dramatic increase in trading volume later, and how the NYSE was reorganized, benefiting not only members but investors as well. Benn also explores how NYSE member firms became authorized to sell annuities and other insurance products, in itself a billion-dollar business. Finally, in an especially telling chapter, he discusses how and why discrimination on Wall Street based on class, religion, race, and gender declined (and by inference, why in some places it still lingers.)

This work uses the critical theory developed by Herbert Marcuse and Jurgen Habermas to analyze the English working class from 1750 to 1867, in particular its social protest activities.

In this book, originally published in 1992, the official history of the Bank of England was continued into the late wartime and early postwar periods. The author's position as a central banker by trade and a former Executive Director of the Bank put him in an ideal position to carry out this analysis. His account examines mainly how the Bank moved on after the hurried nationalisation of 1946 and led a vigourous though often frustrated life in the postwar years, when sterling was subject to recurrent external weakness and when domestic monetary policy was beset by difficulties of content and conduct. The Bank's relationship with the Treasury is central to the story, but Mr Fforde also examines its evolving relationship with the financial community and with central banks overseas. The Bank's contribution to public policy, in a frequently controversial field, is explained and assessed.

The amount collected in taxation, the items which have been taxed, and the classes of people on whom the tax burden has fallen, have all changed greatly in the period from the Restoration to the present. This book considers how and why these changes took place, and some of the consequences which have flowed from them.

This book is an excellent work of scholarship. It seeks to redefine the early modern English economy by rejecting the concept of capitalism, and instead explores the cultural meaning of credit which resulted from the way in which it was economically structured. It is a major argument of the book that money was used only in a limited number of exchanges, and that credit in terms of household reputation was a "cultural currency" of trust used to transact most business. As the market expanded in the late-sixteenth century such trust became harder to maintain, leading to an explosion of debt litigation, which in turn resulted in social relations being partially redefined in terms of contractual equality.

This book brings together articles by international political economists on Keynesian economics and its legacy. The book begins with Don Patinkin's assessment of Keynes' early life and focuses attention on Keynes' contribution to monetary economics. Among the many controversies surrounding "The general theory", Axel Leijonhufvud takes the view that the Keynesian revolution began and stayed on the wrong track.;Leland Yeager refutes the idea that Keynesian economics was responsible for the general prosperity in the indusrialized world immediately after the Second World War. Although Karl Brunner is not fundamentally against Keynes' methodological approach, he is critical of his reliance on fiscal rather than monetary policy. Whereas Terence Hutchison defends Keynes, both against his critics but also against Keynesians, and argues that Keynes would not have shared their interpretation of his work on fundamental grounds. Patrick Minford traces the roots of neoclassical economics, based on the concept of rational expectations, back to "the general theory". In the final chapter, Stephen Littlechild offers an alternative to Keynesian economics by focusing attention on the Austrian school.

Unemployment was perhaps the major problem confronting European society at the time in which this book was first published in 1987, and is arguably still the case today. This collection of essays by British and German historians contributes to the debate by taking a close look at unemployment in the Weimar Republic. What groups were most severely affected, and why? How did they react? How effective were welfare and job creation schemes? Did unemployment fuel social instability and political extremism? How far was unemployment a cause of the collapse of the Weimar Republic and the triumph of the Third Reich? Did the Nazis solve the unemployment problem by peaceful Keynsianism or through massive rearmament? This book is ideal for students of history, sociology, and economics.

Annie Abram was born in London in 1869 and died in Sussex in 1930. She contributed significantly to the twentieth-century historiography of late medieval England, researching the social, cultural and religious mores of the English laity and clergy. First published in 1909, this title explores the impact of economic changes on society during the fifteenth century. This is a period of important developments both socially and economically, which witnessed the rise of the middle class through industrialisation, agrarian change, and the growing economic and commercial character of towns. The chapters discuss these areas, as well as the industrial position of women and children, the economic position of the Church and the development of a national character. This is a fascinating classic work, which will be of great value to students researching the socio-economic history of late medieval England.

This edited collection, first published in 1991, focuses on the commercial relations, marketing structures and development of consumption that accompanied early industrial expansion. The papers examine aspects of industrial structure and work organisation, including women's work, and highlight the conflict and compromise between work traditions and the emergence of a market culture. With an overarching introduction providing a background to European manufacturing, this title will be of particular interest to students of social and economic history researching early industrial Europe and the concurrent emergence of a material, consumer culture.

On 9 August 1974, Richard Nixon resigned to avoid impeachment; on 29 April 1975, the United States scuttled from their Embassy in Saigon - optics that were interpreted as defeats for the 'International Right'. Yet in 1975, Margaret Thatcher became leader of the Conservative Party; and in 1976 Ronald Reagan almost unseated a sitting Republican Party President. Pivotal to the 'turn to the Right' was Friedrich 'von' Hayek's 1974 Nobel Prize for Economic Science - awarded for having used Austrian Business Cycle Theory to predict the Great Depression: 'For him it is not a matter of a simple defence of a liberal system of society as may sometimes appear from the popularized versions of his thinking.' The evidence suggests that Hayek's fraudulent assertion was uncovered at the University of Chicago in the early 1930s - but not reported. The most likely explanation is self-censorship - for reasons of ideological correctness, fund raising and residual deference to the Second Estate. Four indirect tests suggest that 'free' market economists have - in other instances and presumably for fund-raising motives - suppressed embarrassing 'knowledge': which suggests that they were perfectly capable of suppressing 'knowledge' about Hayek's non-prediction of the Great Depression. With respect to the Nobel Prize and thus his ability to reach a wider audience, Hayek was fortune in having two loyal 'intermediaries': Lionel Robbins and Fritz Machlup who were - and probably felt themselves to be - 'socially' inferior to 'von' Hayek.

Thomas Robert Malthus's""An Essay on the Principle of Population" was an immediate succes de scandale" when it appeared in 1798. Arguing that nature is niggardly and that societies, both human and animal, tend to overstep the limits of natural resources in "perpetual oscillation between happiness and misery," he found himself attacked on all sides--by Romantic poets, utopian thinkers, and the religious establishment. Though Malthus has never disappeared, he has been perpetually misunderstood. This book is at once a major reassessment of Malthus's ideas and an intellectual history of the origins of modern debates about demography, resources, and the environment.

Against the ferment of Enlightenment ideals about the perfectibility of mankind and the grim realities of life in the eighteenth century, Robert Mayhew explains the genesis of the Essay" and Malthus's preoccupation with birth and death rates. He traces Malthus's collision course with the Lake poets, his important revisions to the Essay, " and composition of his other great work, Principles of Political Economy. "Mayhew suggests we see the author in his later writings as an environmental economist for his persistent concern with natural resources, land, and the conditions of their use. Mayhew then pursues Malthus's many afterlives in the Victorian world and beyond.

Today, the Malthusian dilemma makes itself feltonce again, as demography and climate change come together on the same environmental agenda. By opening a new door onto Malthus's arguments and their transmission to the present day, Robert Mayhew gives historical depth to our current planetary concerns."

This book provides a comprehensive overview of the economic development of Singapore, easily the leading commercial and financial centre in Southeast Asia throughout the twentieth century. This development has been based on a strategic location at the crossroads of Asia, a free trade economy, and a dynamic entrepreneurial tradition. Initial twentieth-century economic success was linked to a group of legendary Chinese entrepreneurs, but by mid-century independent Singapore looked to multinational enterprise to deliver economic growth. Nonetheless exports of manufactures accounted for only part of Singaporean expansion, and by the 1980s Singapore was a major international financial centre and leading world exporter of commercial services. Throughout this study Dr Huff assesses the interaction of government policy and market forces, and places the transformation of the Singaporean economy in the context of both development theory and experience elsewhere in East Asia.

Subsidiarity in the European Union, as the guiding principle of decision-making "close to the people," is often motivated and discussed from a predominantly political perspective. In this book, experts draw the demarcation between national and European policies from an economic viewpoint. Insights from economic theory and empirical research are used both to analyse the assignment of policies between the EU and its member states and to identify appropriate levels of decision-making.

This is an academic inquiry into how labor power has been dehumanized and commodified around the world through the ages for capital accumulation and industrialization, and colonial and post-colonial economic transformation. The study explores all major episodes of slaveries beginning from the ancient civilizations to the end of Transatlantic Slave Trade in the eighteenth century; the worlds of serfdoms in the context of Western Europe, Eastern Europe, and Russia; the worlds of feudalisms in the context of Latin America, Japan, China, and India; the worlds of indentured servitudes in the context of the Europeans, the Indians, and the Chinese; the worlds of guestworkers in the contexts of the United States and Western Europe; the worlds of migrant labor programs in the context of the Gulf States; and the contemporary world of neoslavery focusing on human trafficking in both developing and developed countries, and forced labor in global value chains. The book is designed not only for students and academia in labor economics, labor history, and global socio-economic and political transformations, but also for the intelligent and inquiring policy makers, reformers, and general readers across the disciplinary pursuits of Economics, Political Science, History, Sociology, Anthropology, and Law.

The authors explore cases in the 18th, 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries in which international exchanges of ideas about taxation have significantly influenced the development of national fiscal systems. Today many intense transfers of ideas about taxation take place through international organisations such as the IMF and the Worldbank. These transfers build on a long historical continuity of exchanges of fiscal ideas. International exchanges of ideas were already part of the development of modern fiscal systems in Europe in the 18th. Exchanges were also crucial in the colonial empires of the nineteenth and twentieth century and in the period of reconstruction after World War II.

The main focus of this edited volume is an examination of dynamic relationships among Japan, Taiwan, Korea, and the northeastern region of China, and the economic development of each area in East Asia from the 1910s to the end of World War II. The development of foreign trade in East Asia, the relations between industrialization and consumption in Korea, the transactions in fertilizers and the development of small-scale industries in Taiwan are precisely examined. At present, East Asia is a major economic center of the world. It is necessary to look closely not only at both sides of the "exploitation or development under colonization" paradigm but also at the prewar factors that spurred East Asian economic growth in the postwar decades. A noteworthy characteristic of the Japanese colonial empire was the close economic and geographic relations among Japan, Taiwan, Korea, and the northeastern region of China. Economic integration within the empire strengthened considerably in the interwar years and remained high even during the war as compared to that in European countries and their colonies. What was the irreversible change in each colonial economy by means of forced incorporation into the Japanese empire? What was the impact on economic subjects such as merchants, manufacturers, managers, and workers through the colonial regime? This book provides readers with broad perspectives that are indispensable given that the factors discussed herein are the historical origins of current issues.

This book explores the causes and nature of the industrial revolution through a comparative study of the main wool textile manufacturing regions of England. Based on extensive archival research and including several new or little-known sources, it addresses many of the current debates in economic history and eighteenth-century studies by examining how the interplay between merchants, markets, and producers shaped the pace and character of economic growth during the eighteenth century. Particular attention is paid to the rapid growth of product innovation and the export trade as both of these factors affected evolving structures of marketing and production.

"Contrary to the doomsayers, Wegren finds a great deal of social change in the Russian countryside. This in-depth and very carefully crafted research project, covering more than fifteen years, shows that if we look at the actual behavior of farm managers and ordinary rural residents they are reacting to reform much like we would expect rational actors to do. This work provides us with some genuine hope for the future of rural Russia."--David J. O'Brien, Professor of Rural Sociology, University of Missouri-Columbia
"This is an ambitious and critically important reconceptualization of traditional theories of rural change and overturns our understanding of agrarian reform in Russia today. Rejecting conventional views of peasants and rural dwellers as isolated, conservative, collectivist, and anti-market, Wegren finds them to be individualistic, "rational," adaptive, even opportunistic, and, when historical circumstances or government reformers have offered economically realistic alternatives and incentives, very willing to take advantage of market-oriented possibilities. He demonstrates not only that contemporary reform has produced significant, market-oriented changes in the contemporary Russian countryside but also that actual outcomes have diverged markedly from the expectations of both government and observers, so much so, indeed, that he considers Russia's future agricultural development to lie with the reconstructed collective and state farms. All subsequent students of these subjects will, perforce, have to take notice of this compelling work."--David A.J. Macey, Middlebury College

This book focuses on the late colonial history of Zambia and Malawi, which between 1953 and 1963 were part of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland. Although there were many links in their history and between their populations, the two territories (British protectorates under Colonial Office control) contrasted greatly in power structures, in their economies, and in their development. Europeans living in Northern Rhodesia, with a power base in the mining economy, were able to establish a dominant position in the territory after the Second World War. By the 1950s it looked as though they would have, with Southern Rhodesian Europeans, a long hegemony, gaining independence from Britain as a new Dominion, which would mean control over both Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland through the Federation. Thus, white ethnicity and ideology are essential factors in this book relating to the struggle for power from just before the Second World War up to the 1960s. However, crises in 1959 and 1960 led to the collapse of the Federation. A second focus is on issues of social and economic development. For Africans in Nyasaland, and in rural parts of Northern Rhodesia, there was a relatively weak economy in this period, a pattern of limited cash crop production, while many people became caught up in labour migration, subordinate to powerful European-dominated economic forces within southern Africa. This meant that colonial policies aimed at rural development were fundamentally flawed. The book also looks at the actual nature of rural economic change (as opposed to colonial policies) and discusses alternative visions of the future which were put forward. The argument is put that historians have often concentrated on the activities of the main nationalist movements in Nyasaland and Northern Rhodesia, seeing them as bringing progress away from colonialism and towards independence. Here there is an attempt to draw out the complexities of life, and a variety of responses in the colonial situation, progress coming in a number of forms, but not always being achieved.

In traditional theory of economic crisis, and in all its manifestations, there is no fundamental difference between economic disorder and economic crisis: the two types of economic turmoil are both considered temporary states. This book is a methodical study of deep-seated causes of economic crises. The aim of the book is to explain the key difference between economic disorder and economic crisis. Its key argument is that economic disorder is a permanent condition, whereas economic crises are a series of transitory periods. Economic crises, unlike economic disorders, are acute and frenzied volatilities that are unpredictable and short-lived. Humans cannot survive in a condition of perpetual economic crises but can only accommodate life under unremitting economic disorders. The book also explores the root cause of economic crisis. Unlike the received wisdom in economics, this book looks at the root cause of such hysterical economic turbulences as a result of an innate propensity of human fallibility. The final section of this book looks at the ramifications of this alternative perspective on macroeconomic policy formation and implementation. This book is a major contribution to the literature on economic disorder and crises and will be of great interest to readers of economic theory, philosophy of economics, and the history of economic thought.

This book presents an innovative history of the first Portuguese public bank, by exploring the relationship between banking activities and the political context. It provides an overview of the origins of the banking system in Portugal, and also in Brazil, and explores new archive materials related to the first years of activity of the Bank of Lisbon and to the public debates on monetary and public finance topics. It discusses the main features of the Bank of Lisbon: a private bank with a mandate to issue banknotes for the purposes of regulating monetary circulation, and with the function of financing the State for current payments, as well as for the amortisation of public debt and the creation of new debt. The aim of contributing to the re-establishment of public trust and credit conferred upon the Bank of Lisbon the status of a quasi-central bank with the obligations of lending and issuing money. This historical case study offers new insights for a better understanding of the role of banks on the regulation of monetary circulation and on the management of sovereign debt. By stressing the relevance of the political context, it also illustrates the key issues of trust, independence and rules associated to decision-making processes in the study of European banking history. The main focus is the link between banking practices and the political environment. However, the reader will also engage in discussions on theoretical and economic policy issues on the main economic topics under survey: money, paper money, public debt and credit system.

Financialisation has become a widely discussed and debated term leading to a plurality of perspectives, but no fixed definition or single reading. This book presents a critical exploration and review of the current literature on financialisation, focusing on the financialisation of NFCs and its possible implications for the macroeconomic and financial stability of advanced countries. Starting from this critical analysis, it proposes some new readings of the process of financialisation, linking it directly, on the one hand, to the evolution of interest-bearing capital and the credit system, and, on the other hand, to the historical tendencies of monopoly capital towards financial arrangements to manage corporate control. Finally, a conceptual scheme for interpretation and a mathematical model of corporate portfolio choice is developed to explain how the tendency in developed countries to place growing shares of social surplus in speculative financial channels can contribute to their long-term real stagnation. The book also underlines the excessive attention usually being paid to some micro-epiphenomena that show a fallacy of composition at the macroeconomic level and can lead to some misunderstandings of the general trends in capitalist evolution. Moreover, some doubts are raised about the extent to which financialisation actually represents a change to the present regime of accumulation. The book targets all the scholars who are interested in better understanding whether financialisation constitutes a profound change in the functioning of capitalist economic systems and what effects it can produce in social welfare in the advanced countries.