The quality of life for ordinary Roman citizens at the height of the Roman Empire probably was better than that of any other large group of people living before the Industrial Revolution. The Roman Market Economy uses the tools of modern economics to show how trade, markets, and the Pax Romana were critical to ancient Rome's prosperity. Peter Temin, one of the world's foremost economic historians, argues that markets dominated the Roman economy. He traces how the Pax Romana encouraged trade around the Mediterranean, and how Roman law promoted commerce and banking. Temin shows that a reasonably vibrant market for wheat extended throughout the empire, and suggests that the Antonine Plague may have been responsible for turning the stable prices of the early empire into the persistent inflation of the late. He vividly describes how various markets operated in Roman times, from commodities and slaves to the buying and selling of land. Applying modern methods for evaluating economic growth to data culled from historical sources, Temin argues that Roman Italy in the second century was as prosperous as the Dutch Republic in its golden age of the seventeenth century. The Roman Market Economy reveals how economics can help us understand how the Roman Empire could have ruled seventy million people and endured for centuries.

"The Leaderless Economy" reveals why international financial cooperation is the only solution to today's global economic crisis. In this timely and important book, Peter Temin and David Vines argue that our current predicament is a catastrophe rivaled only by the Great Depression. Taking an in-depth look at the history of both, they explain what went wrong and why, and demonstrate why international leadership is needed to restore prosperity and prevent future crises.

Temin and Vines argue that the financial collapse of the 1930s was an "end-of-regime crisis" in which the economic leader of the nineteenth century, Great Britain, found itself unable to stem international panic as countries abandoned the gold standard. They trace how John Maynard Keynes struggled for years to identify the causes of the Great Depression, and draw valuable lessons from his intellectual journey. Today we are in the midst of a similar crisis, one in which the regime that led the world economy in the twentieth century--that of the United States--is ending. Temin and Vines show how America emerged from World War II as an economic and military powerhouse, but how deregulation and a lax attitude toward international monetary flows left the nation incapable of reining in an overleveraged financial sector and powerless to contain the 2008 financial panic. Fixed exchange rates in Europe and Asia have exacerbated the problem.

"The Leaderless Economy" provides a blueprint for how renewed international leadership can bring today's industrial nations back into financial balance--domestically and between each other.

In November 2020, The New York Times asked fifteen of its columnists to 'explain what the past four years have cost America.' Not one of the columnists focused on President Trump's racism. This book seeks to redress this imbalance and bring Black Americans' role in our economy to the forefront. While all humans were created equal, economic history in the United States tells a different story. Reconstruction lasted for only a decade, and Jim Crow laws replaced it. The Civil Rights Movement lasted through the 1960s, yet decayed under President Nixon. The United States has been declining in the Social Product Index, where it now is the lowest of the G7 and 26th in the world. For health and happiness, Temin argues that we need lasting integration efforts that allow Black Americans equal opportunity. This book convincingly integrates Black and white activities into an inclusive economic history of America.

Hardbound. This book examines the relationship between elites, minorities, and economic growth. The novelty of the book lies in its focus on the interaction between social and economic changes during economic growth. This is an undeveloped subject because it crosses disciplinary lines. The first part of the book contains essays on the role of economic and political elites in America, Europe and the Middle East. The second part of the book contains essays on the role of minorities in past and present industrialization in Europe and Asia. And the final part contains more theoretical approaches that build on the historical essays earlier in the volume.Elites, Minorities and Economic Growth is particularly useful for macroeconomists interested in economic growth, economic historians, sociologists interested in elites, minorities and social mobility and historians of industrialization and economic growth.

"Learning by Doing in Markets, Firms, and Countries" draws out the underlying economics in business history by focusing on learning processes and the development of competitively valuable asymmetries. The essays show that organizations, like people, learn that this process can be organized more or less effectively, which can have major implications for how competition works.
The first three essays in this volume explore techniques firms have used to both manage information to create valuable asymmetries and to otherwise suppress unwelcome competition. The next three focus on the ways in which firms have built special capabilities over time, capabilities that have been both sources of competitive advantage and resistance to new opportunities. The last two extend the notion of learning from the level of firms to that of nations. The collection as a whole builds on the previous two volumes to make the connection between information structure and product market outcomes in business history.

After 1688, Britain underwent a revolution in public finance, and the cost of borrowing declined sharply. Leading scholars have argued that easier credit for the government, made possible by better property-rights protection, lead to a rapid expansion of private credit. The Industrial Revolution, according to this view, is the result of the preceding revolution in public finance. In Prometheus Shackled, prominent economic historians Peter Temin and Hans-Joachim Voth examine this hypothesis using new, detailed archival data from 18th century banks. They conclude the opposite: the financial revolution led to an explosion of public debt, but it stifled private credit. This led to markedly slower growth in the English economy. Temin and Voth collected detailed data from several goldsmith banks-Child's, Gosling's, Freame and Gould, Hoare's, and Duncombe and Kent. The excellent records from Hoare's, founded by Sir Richard Hoare in 1672, offer particular insight. Numerous entrants into the banking business tried their hand at deposit-taking and lending in the early 17th century; few survived and fewer thrived. Hoare's and a small group of competitors did both. Temin and Voth chart the growth of the successful banks in the face of frequent wars and heavy-handed regulations. Their new data allows insights into the interaction between financial and economic development. Government regulations such as (a sharply lower) maximum interest rate caused severe misallocation of credit, and a misguided attempt to lighten the nation's debt burden led directly to the South Sea Bubble in 1720. Frequent wars caused banks to call in loans, resulting in a sharply slower economic growth rate. Based on detailed micro-data, the authors present conclusive evidence that wartime borrowing crowded out investment. Far from fostering economic development, England's financial revolution after 1688 did much to stifle it - the Hanoverian "warfare state" was a key reason for slow growth during Britain's Industrial Revolution. Prometheus Shackled is a revealing new take on one of the most important periods of economic and financial development.

AT&T's divestiture was the largest corporate reorganization in history and has had international repercussions. It was a major development in American economic policy, and a prominent part of the deregulation movement of the late 1970s. This study reveals the internal decision-making process at AT&T and explains how private and public interests combined to shape corporate and public policy in late 20th-century America. Temin weaves the strands of politics, economics, business, and law into an accessible narrative history that will be of interest to the general reader who wants to know about government business interaction and how it affects American citizens. Temin portrays divestiture as a great experiment in public policy, competition, openness, and international policy. He concludes that the experiment has been a mix of deliberate design and uncontrollable forces whose outcome was not foreseen.

How do business enterprises control their subunits? In what ways do existing paths of communication within a firm affect its ability to absorb new technology and techniques? How do American banks affect how companies operate? Do theoretical constructs correspond to actual behavior?
Because business enterprises are complex institutions, these questions can prove difficult to address. All too often, firms are treated as the atoms of economics, the irreducible unit of analysis. This accessible volume, suitable for course use, looks more closely at the American firm--into its "internal" workings and its genesis in the Gilded Age. Focusing on the crucial role of imperfect and asymmetric information in the operation of enterprises, "Inside the Business Enterprise" forges an innovative link between modern economic theory and recent business history.

The European Economy Between the Wars provides a full and up-to-date economic history of Europe in the inter-war period. The authors place the Great Depression of 1929-33 and the associated financial crisis at the centre of the narrative, and present these as both the culmination of the economic consequences of the First World War, the post-war peace treaties, and the policies and practices of the 1920s, and as a powerful influence on the subsequent economic history of the 1930s. In describing and explaining these developments, the authors show that errors in international economic policy, especially the commitment to the gold standard, were a principal cause of both the deep crisis and the partial recovery. The overall theme is illustrated at every point by a discussion of similarities and contrasts in the economic history and policies of individual countries, large and small. The basic approach is chronological, the style is clear and straightforward, and the book is accessible to students in a range of disciplines. The work takes full account of recent research, and there is an annotated guide to further reading with a substantial bibliography.

Why Keynes is relevant to today's global economic crisis, and how Keynesian ideas can point the way to renewed economic growth. As the global economic crisis continues to cause damage, some policy makers have called for a more Keynesian approach to current economic problems. In this book, the economists Peter Temin and David Vines provide an accessible introduction to Keynesian ideas that connects Keynes's insights to today's global economy and offers readers a way to understand current policy debates. They survey economic thinking before Keynes and explain how difficult it was for Keynes to escape from conventional wisdom. They also set out the Keynesian analysis of a closed economy and expand the analysis to the international economy, using a few simple graphs to present Keynes's formal analyses in an accessible way. Finally, they discuss problems of today's world economy, showcasing the usefulness of a simple Keynesian approach to current economic policy choices. Keynesian ideas, they argue, can lay the basis for a return to economic growth.

The European Economy between the Wars, (OUP, 1997) has become the definitive economic history of Europe in the inter-war period. Placing the Great Depression of 1929-33 and the associated financial crisis at the center of the narrative, the authors comprehensively examined the lead-up to and consequences of the depression and recovery. Peter Temin and Gianni Toniolo (their former co-author, Charles H. Feinstein, has died) now expand their scope to include the entire world economy, and have created a new edition: The World Economy between the Wars. New material focuses on the structure of the world economy in the 1920s, including a special focus on the United States, Japan, and Latin America. In addition, chapters that discuss the post-depression recovery now cover The New Deal and recovery in general in the United States and Japan. This new edition is a necessary update, and invaluable resource for those who desire an overview of the inter-war area beyond the usual discussion of the 1929 stock market crash. The book's broad geographic coverage, as well as its clarity and chronological execution, will appeal to students of economic history, as well as those academics in other fields whose research involves the inter-war period.

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Richard Hofstadter, and other have maintained that Andrew Jackson set off a chain reaction when he vetoed the recharter of the Second Bank of the United States in 1832. This interpretation holds that subsequent removal of deposits from the Bank led to unsound credit expansion and inflation, to unprecedented speculation in public land, to the Panic of 1837, and ultimately to the depression.

"Not true," write Professor Temin in this thoroughly researched and documented study which shatters the traditional interpretation of the 1830's. "Jackson's economic policies undoubtedly were not the most enlightened the country has ever seen, but they were by no means disastrous. The inflation and crisis of the 1930's had their origin in events largely beyond Jackson's control and probably would have taken place whether or not he had acted as he did. The economy was not the victim of Jacksonian politics; Jackson's policies were the victims of economic fluctuations."

New England's economy has a history as dramatic as any in the world. From an inauspicious beginning--as immigration ground to a halt in the eighteenth century--New England went on to lead the United States in its transformation from an agrarian to an industrial economy. And when the rest of the country caught up in the mid-twentieth century, New England reinvented itself as a leader in the complex economy of the information society.

"Engines of Enterprise" tells this dramatic story in a sequence of narrative essays written by preeminent historians and economists. These essays chart the changing fortunes of entrepreneurs and venturers, businessmen and inventors, and common folk toiling in fields, in factories, and in air-conditioned offices. The authors describe how, short of staple crops, colonial New Englanders turned to the sea and built an empire; and how the region became the earliest home of the textile industry as commercial fortunes underwrote new industries in the nineteenth century. They show us the region as it grew ahead of the rest of the country and as the rest of the United States caught up. And they trace the transformation of New England's products and exports from cotton textiles and machine tools to such intangible goods as education and software. Concluding short essays also put forward surprising but persuasive arguments--for instance, that slavery, while not prominent in colonial New England, was a critical part of the economy; and that the federal government played a crucial role in the development of the region's industrial skills.

Did Monetary Forces Cause the Great Depression? challenges Friedman's "money hypothesis" and sharply criticizes many features of the Keynesian "spending hypothesis."