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Spain's development from a premodern society into a modern unified nation-state with an integrated economy was painfully slow and varied widely by region. Economic historians have long argued that high internal transportation costs limited domestic market integration, while at the same time the Castilian capital city of Madrid drew resources from surrounding Spanish regions as it pursued its quest for centralization. According to this view, powerful Madrid thwarted trade over large geographic distances by destroying an integrated network of manufacturing towns in the Spanish interior. Challenging this long-held view, Regina Grafe argues that decentralization, not a strong and powerful Madrid...
This study aims to provide new insights into the connections between maritime history and global history. It demonstrates the significance of maritime activity as a conduit of global exchange by examining local, national, and international interdependencies and trade networks, and a broad range of time periods, geographical areas, and various sub-divisions of maritime historical research. It is composed of ten essays, with an introductory chapter and concluding chapter. The first five essays discuss the effects globalisation on shipping in the early modern period; the following three discuss maritime transportation and the economics of industrialisation from the nineteenth century to the pre...
Why are some countries rich and others poor? In 1500, the income differences were small, but they have grown dramatically since Columbus reached America. Since then, the interplay between geography, globalization, technological change, and economic policy has determined the wealth and poverty of nations. The industrial revolution was Britain's path breaking response to the challenge of globalization. Western Europe and North America joined Britain to form a club of rich nations by pursuing four polices-creating a national market by abolishing internal tariffs and investing in transportation, erecting an external tariff to protect their fledgling industries from British competition, banks to ...
This book analyzes public debt from a political, historical, and global perspective. It demonstrates that public debt has been a defining feature in the construction of modern states, a main driver in the history of capitalism, and a potent geopolitical force. From revolutionary crisis to empire and the rise and fall of a post-war world order, the problem of debt has never been the sole purview of closed economic circles. This book offers a key to understanding the centrality of public debt today by revealing that political problems of public debt have and will continue to need a political response. Today’s tendency to consider public debt as a source of fragility or economic inefficiency ...
Shipping was the most dynamic sector of the economy of Europe from the fourteenth into the nineteenth century. Europeans who moved goods by sea dramatically improved their efficiency, laying the foundations for greater economic growth to come and for domination of the world’s oceans.
This book brings together world-renowned experts and rising scholars to provide a collection of chapters examining the long-term impact of historical events on modern-day economic and political developments in Latin America. It uses a novel approach, stressing empirical contributions and state-of-the-art empirical methods for causal identification. Contributing authors apply these cutting-edge tools to their topics of expertise, giving readers a compendium of frontier research in the region. Important questions of colonialism, migration, elites, land tenure, corruption, and conflict are examined and discussed in an approachable style. The book features a conclusion from Alberto Diaz-Cayeros, Director of the Center for Latin American Studies at Stanford University. This book is critical reader for scholars and students of economic history, political science, political economy, development studies, and Latin American, and Caribbean studies.
‘Commerce and manufactures gradually introduced order and good government,’ wrote Adam Smith in his Wealth of Nations, ‘and with them, the liberty and security of individuals.’ However, Philipp Robinson Rössner shows how, when looked at in the face of history, it has usually been the other way around. This book follows the development of capitalism from the Middle Ages through the industrial revolution to the modern day, casting new light on the areas where premodern political economies of growth and development made a difference. It shows how order and governance provided the foundation for prosperity, growth and the wealth of nations. Written for scholars and students of economic history, this is a pioneering new study that debunks the neoliberal origin myth of how capitalism came into the world.
This book covers the evolution of royal policy in Spanish America as eighteenth-century Spain modernized its empire and transformed itself into a power of the first order. Tracing the interplay between war and reform, the analysis confronts the diverse realities of the Spanish Atlantic world, which stretched from the northern Mexican borderlands to Argentina and Chile. Unlike earlier studies on eighteenth-century Spain, this work incorporates the early Bourbon experience into the narrative and integrates the impressive reemergence of the Royal Armada into a fuller picture of administrative, commercial, fiscal, ecclesiastical, and military change.
This edited collection demonstrates how economic history can be analysed using both quantitative and qualitative methods, connecting statistical research with the social, cultural and psychological aspects of history. With their focus on the time between the end of the commercial revolution and the Black Death (c. 1300), and the Thirty Years’ War (c. 1600), Kypta et al. redress a significant lack of published work regarding economic history methodology in the premodern period. Case studies stem from the Holy Roman Empire, one of the most important economic regions in premodern times, and reconnect the German premodern economic history approach with the grand narratives that have been developed mainly for Western European regions. Methodological approaches stemming from economics as well as from sociology and cultural studies show how multifaceted research in economic history can be, and how it might accordingly offer us new insights into premodern economies. Chapters 9 and 10 are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.
This groundbreaking book examines the history of Spain, England, the United States, and Mexico to explain why development takes centuries.