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This impressive and pioneering work describes and analyses the management of the national debt of the United Kingdom from the Boer War (1899-1902) to the period of the Great Depression in the early 1930s. It therefore spans the expansion of the debt during the Great War of 1914-18 and the struggle to bring its structure and cost under control in the decade and a half following Armistice. The Management of the National Debt in the United Kingdom is the first definitive work on the subject. Using an impressive array of research, from archives and unpublished material, Jeremy Wormell has brought together material that is unavailable in any other form. It will be an invaluable resource for political and economic historians, as well as economists in general, civil servants, bankers and financial journalists.
In this authoritative and gripping book--the first full account of the 1976 International Monetary Fund crisis--Kathleen Burk and Alec Cairncross peel back the surface of the most searing economic crisis of postwar Britain to reveal its historical roots and contemporary context. During the spring of 1976, the plummeting value of the British pound against the U.S. dollar triggered a traumatic economic and political crisis. International confidence in the pound collapsed; an article in the Wall Street Journal, headlined "Good-bye, Great Britain," urged investors to get out of sterling. Refused aid by the London and New York markets, the Labour Government under Prime Minister James Callaghan wa...
This book examines whether different kinds of 'freedoms' (absolutist, parliamentary and republican) caused different economic outcomes, and shows the effect of different political regimes on long term development.
The world of finance is again undergoing crisis and transformation. This book provides a new perspective on finance through the prism of popular and formal culture and examines fascination and repulsion toward money, the role of governments and individuals in financial crises and how the Crisis of 2008, like others since 1720, repeat the same patterns of enthusiasm, greed, culpability, revulsion, reform and recovery. The book explores the political and socio-economic factors which determine fallibility and resilience in financial cultures, periods of crisis, transition and recovery based on cyclical rather than linear progression. Examining the roots of financial capitalism, in Europe and the United States and its corollary development in Asia, Russia and emerging markets proves that cultural and psychosocial reactions to financial success, endeavor and calamity transcend specific periods or events. The book allows the reader to discover parallel and intersecting reactions, controversies and resolutions in the cultural history of financial markets and institutions.
This book provides the most comprehensive history of German migration to North America for the period 1709 to 1920 than has been done before. Employing state-of-the-art methodological and statistical techniques, the book has two objectives. First he explores how the recruitment and shipping markets for immigrants were set up, determining what the voyage was like in terms of the health outcomes for the passengers, and identifying the characteristics of the immigrants in terms of family, age, and occupational compositions and educational attainments. Secondly he details how immigrant servitude worked, by identifying how important it was to passenger financing, how shippers profited from carrying immigrant servants, how the labor auction treated immigrant servants, and when and why this method of financing passage to America came to an end.
During the period from 1945 to 2005, Britain underwent two deep-seated institutional transformations when political elites successfully challenged the prevailing wisdom on how to govern the economy. Attlee and Thatcher were able to effectively implement most of their political platforms. During this period there were also two opportunities to challenge existing institutional arrangements. Heath's 'U-turn' in 1972 signalled his failure to implement the radical agenda promised upon election in 1970, whilst Tony Blair’s New Labour similarly failed to instigate a major break with the 'Thatcherite' settlement. Rather than simply retell the story of British economic policymaking since World War II, this book offers a theoretically informed version of events, which draws upon the literatures on institutional path dependence, economic constructivism and political economy to explain this puzzle. It will be of great interest to both researchers and postgraduates with an interest in British economic history and the fields of political economy and economic crisis more widely.
How best to foster agricultural development in the Third World has long been a subject of debate and from a European perspective the persistent failure to design peasant-friendly technology is puzzling. From the late 19th century, for example, various western European countries also underwent ‘green revolutions’ in which systematic attempts were made to promote the adoption of technological innovation by peasant-farmers. This book focuses on the development of public-sector plant-breeding in Germany from the late nineteenth century through its fate under National Socialism. Harwood uses this historical case study in order to argue that peasant-friendly research has an important role to play in future Green Revolutions.
The complex relationships between ethno-nationality, rights to land, and territorial sovereignty have long fed disputes over territorial control and landed rights between different nations, ethnicities, and religions. These disputes raise a number of interesting issues related to the nature of land regimes and to their economic and political implications. The studies drawn together in this key volume explore these and related issues for a broad variety of countries and times. They illuminate the diverse causes of ethno-national land disputes, and the different forms of adjustment and accommodation to the power differences between the contesting groups. This is done within a framework outlined by the editors in their analytical overview, which offers contours for comparative examinations of such disputes, past and present. Providing conceptual and factual analyses of comparative nature and wealth of empirical material (both historical and contemporary), this book will appeal to economic historians, economists, political scientists, sociologists, anthropologists and all scholars interested in issues concerning ethno-nationality and land rights in historical perspective.
As author of the hugely influential The Economic History of India 1857-1947, Tirthankar Roy has established himself as the leading contemporary economic historian of India. Here, Roy turns his attention to labour and livelihood and the nature of economic change in the Subcontinent. This book covers: economic history of modern India rural labour labour-intensive industrialization women and industrialization. Challenging the prevailing wisdom on Indian economic growth - that it is bound up with Marxian, postcolonial class analysis - Roy formulates a new view. Commercialization, surplus labour and uncertainty are seen as equally important and the end result reconciles the increasingly opposed view of economists and historians.
This book presents the lifelong and ongoing research of Lawrence H. Officer in a systematic way. The result is an authoritative treatment of such issues as market structure and economic efficiency where more than one characteristic of a commodity is priced, both in general and in application to shipping conferences; financing of the United Nations and International Monetary Fund; monetary history of the UK and US; and central-bank preferences between gold and dollars, The book first examines multidimensional pricing, defined as pricing when a commodity or service has several characteristics that are priced. The second part is concerned with country-group conflicts in the United Nations and International Monetary Fund. The book then takes a fresh look at historical experiences of monetary-standard upheavals and the final part considers a crucial time (1958-67), during which central-bank gold-dollar decisions were power-politically determined.