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Who and what a government taxes, and how the government spends the money collected, are questions of primary concern to governments large and small, national and local. When public revenues pay for high-quality infrastructure and social services, citizens thrive and crises are averted. When public revenues are inadequate to provide those goods, inequality thrives and communities can verge into unrest—as evidenced by the riots during Greece’s financial meltdown and by the needless loss of life in Haiti’s collapse in the wake of the earthquake. In The Public Good and the Brazilian State, Anne G. Hanley assembles an economic history of public revenues as they developed in nineteenth-centu...
This book analyzes the contribution of financial market institutions—banks and the stock and bond exchange—to São Paulo's economic modernization at the turn of the twentieth century.
Closely linked essays examine distinctive national patterns of industrialization. This collection of essays offers new perspectives on the Industrial Revolution as a global phenomenon. The fifteen contributors go beyond the longstanding view of industrialization as a linear process marked by discrete stages. Instead, they examine a lengthy and creative period in the history of industrialization, 1750 to 1914, reassessing the nature of and explanations for England's industrial primacy, and comparing significant industrial developments in countries ranging from China to Brazil. Each chapter explores a distinctive national production ecology, a complex blend of natural resources, demographic pr...
James P. Woodard's history of consumer capitalism in Brazil, today the world's fifth most populous country, is at once magisterial, intimate, and penetrating enough to serve as a history of modern Brazil itself. It tells how a new economic outlook took hold over the course of the twentieth century, a time when the United States became Brazil's most important trading partner and the tastemaker of its better-heeled citizens. In a cultural entangling with the United States, Brazilians saw Chevrolets and Fords replace horse-drawn carriages, railroads lose to a mania for cheap automobile roads, and the fabric of everyday existence rewoven as commerce reached into the deepest spheres of family lif...
In the 1950s–80s, Brazil built one of the most advanced industrial networks among the "developing" countries, initially concentrated in the state of São Paulo. But from the 1980s, decentralization of industry spread to other states reducing São Paulo's relative importance in the country's industrial product. This volume draws on social, economic, and demographic data to document the accelerated industrialization of the state and its subsequent shift to a service economy amidst worsening social and economic inequality. Through its cultural institutions, universities, banking, and corporate sectors, the municipality of São Paulo would become a world metropolis. At the same time, given its rapid growth from 2 million to 12 million residents in this period, São Paulo dealt with problems of distribution, housing, and governance. This significant volume elucidates these and other trends during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, and will be an invaluable reference for scholars of history, policy, and the economy in Latin America.
Focusing on the political culture forged by Rocky Mountain workers from the 1870s through the 1920s, this book shows how the unique working-class politics of the region led to remarkable successes in securing progressive labor legislation. These successes--especially in improving workers' hours, wages, and safety--in turn played a central role in transforming the nation's attitudes toward workers' rights. Examining political culture in the everyday lives of workers (from shop floors to union halls to recreation), the author uncovers a labor movement based as much on pragmatism as on ideology, and he traces how its members productively focused their efforts on political action at the local and state levels. In the process, they developed a genuinely social-democratic political culture.
Why are we speaking English? Replenishing the Earth gives a new answer to that question, uncovering a 'settler revolution' that took place from the early nineteenth century that led to the explosive settlement of the American West and its forgotten twin, the British West, comprising the settler dominions of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. Between 1780 and 1930 the number of English-speakers rocketed from 12 million in 1780 to 200 million, and their wealth and power grew to match. Their secret was not racial, or cultural, or institutional superiority but a resonant intersection of historical changes, including the sudden rise of mass transfer across oceans and mountains, a r...
The National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) was enacted by Congress in June of 1933 to assist the nation’s recovery during the Great Depression. Its passage ushered in a unique experiment in US economic history: under the NIRA, the federal government explicitly supported, and in some cases enforced, alliances within industries. Antitrust laws were suspended, and companies were required to agree upon industry-level “codes of fair competition” that regulated wages and hours and could implement anti-competitive provisions such as those fixing prices, establishing production quotas, and imposing restrictions on new productive capacity. The NIRA is generally viewed as a monolithic program, ...
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In 2005, more than two million Americans—six out of every 1,000 people—filed for bankruptcy. Though personal bankruptcy rates have since stabilized, bankruptcy remains an important tool for the relief of financially distressed households. In Bankrupt in America, Mary and Brad Hansen offer a vital perspective on the history of bankruptcy in America, beginning with the first lasting federal bankruptcy law enacted in 1898. Interweaving careful legal history and rigorous economic analysis, Bankrupt in America is the first work to trace how bankruptcy was transformed from an intermittently used constitutional provision, to an indispensable tool for business, to a central element of the social safety net for ordinary Americans. To do this, the authors track federal bankruptcy law, as well as related state and federal laws, examining the interaction between changes in the laws and changes in how people in each state used the bankruptcy law. In this thorough investigation, Hansen and Hansen reach novel conclusions about the causes and consequences of bankruptcy, adding nuance to the discussion of the relationship between bankruptcy rates and economic performance.