Economic History

In one lifetime, GDP, or Gross Domestic Product, has ballooned from a narrow economic tool into a global article of faith. As The Little Big Number demonstrates, this spells trouble. While economies and cultures measure their performance by it, GDP only...

Traditional narratives of capitalist change often rely on the myth of the willful entrepreneur from the global North who transforms the economy and delivers modernity-for good or ill-to the rest of the world. With Cigarettes, Inc., Nan Enstad upends this...

The evolution of economic thought can be traced back from its beginnings in classical antiquity up to the present day. In this book, Professor Alessandro Roncaglia offers a clear, concise and updated version of his award-winning The Wealth of Ideas,...

The surprising story of how declining marriage rates are driving many of the country's biggest economic problems. In The Two-Parent Privilege, Melissa S. Kearney makes a provocative, data-driven case for marriage by showing how the institution's decline...

For much of the twentieth century, American corporations led the world in terms of technological progress. Why did certain industries have such great success? Experimental Capitalism examines six key industries--automobiles, pneumatic tires, television...

There is arguably no award more recognized in the academic and professional worlds than the Nobel Prize. The public pays attention to the prizes in the fields of economics, literature, and peace because their recipients are identified with particular...

The Austrian School forms a concise but comprehensive exposition of the main tenets of the modern Austrian School of Economics while also providing a detailed explanation of the differences between the Austrian and the neoclassical (including the Chicago...

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The economic crisis of 2008 led to an unprecedented focus on the world of high finance and revealed it to be far more arcane and influential than most people could ever have imagined. Any hope of avoiding future crises, it's clear, rest on understanding...

The late seventeenth century was a crucial period in English financial history. A host of joint-stock companies emerged offering the opportunity for investment in projects ranging from the manufacture of paper to the search for sunken treasure. Driven by...

Drawing together multidisciplinary research exploring everyday life in Europe during times of economic crisis, this book explores the ways in which austerity policies are lived and experienced - often alongside other significant social, political and...

Aglietta's path-breaking book is the first attempt at a rigorous historical theory of the whole development of US capitalism, from the Civil War to the Carter presidency. A major document of the "Regulation School" of Marxist economics, it was received...

The United States has long epitomized capitalism. From its enterprising shopkeepers, wildcat banks, violent slave plantations, huge industrial working class, and raucous commodities trade to its world-spanning multinationals, its massive factories, and...

Anxiety and alienation threaten modern democracies. Political anger runs rampant in the United States, Britain voted to leave the European Union, authoritarian governments control several European countries, and millions of desperate migrants are...

Indecent Disclosure captures the anguish the commercial public experiences when the misleading financial disclosures of some public corporations lead to an unexpected collapse. Here, the authors pursue four main themes as underpinning the crisis in...

Unequal Gains offers a radically new understanding of the economic evolution of the United States, providing a complete picture of the uneven progress of America from colonial times to today. While other economic historians base their accounts on...

Neoclassical economics as-sumes that people are highly rational and can reason their way through even the most complex economic problems. In Individual Strategy and Social Structure, Peyton Young argues for a more realistic view in which people have a...

The big economic story of our times is not the Great Recession. It is how China and India began to embrace neoliberal ideas of economics and attributed a sense of dignity and liberty to the bourgeoisie they had denied for so long. The result was an...

A monumental work of research and analysis, this is a history of the Vietnam War in a single province of the Mekong Delta over the period 1930-1975. More precisely, it is a study of the Vietnamese dimension of the "Vietnam War, " focusing on the...

Silver mining was a capitalist business long before the supposed origin of modern capitalism Hundreds of years before a sixteenth-century crisis in European agriculture led to the origins of capital, investment, and finance, the silver mining industry...

A comprehensive account of the rise and fall of the mortgage-securitization industry, which explains the complex roots of the 2008 financial crisis.More than a decade after the 2008 financial crisis plunged the world economy into recession, we still lack...

Providing a thorough examination of distributive justice, Distributive Justice and Taxation presents and discusses different theories of what constitutes a just society, and how goods should be distributed in such a society.The distribution of goods in...

This book asks why tax policy is both attracted to and repelled by the idea of justice.Accepting the invitation of economist Henry Simons to acknowledge that tax justice is a theological concept, the work explores theological doctrines of taxation to...

International financial centres have come to represent a major economic stake. Yet no historical study has been devoted to them. Professor Cassis, a leading financial historian, attempts to fill this gap by providing a comparative history of the most...

Conventional wisdom holds that all nations must repay debt. Regardless of the legitimacy of the regime that signs the contract, a country that fails to honor its loan obligations damages its reputation, inviting still greater problems down the road. Yet...

Widely recognized as one of the greatest economists in history, there has been a surge of interest in the work of John Maynard Keynes since the financial crisis of 2008 with people looking for solutions to rebalance the economy. Presciently, Keynes...

Economists, historians and social scientists have offered a variety of conflicting answers to the issue of the beginnings of capitalism and these deviating answers imply different conceptualizations of what capitalism actually is. This book provides a...

Anthony Giddens is one of the most respected and influential social theorists at work today. This wide-ranging and stimulating volume, first published in 1991, provides an authoratative and penetrating critical assessment of social theory. It will be of...

By all accounts, the case of Poland and its segue to market economy and democracy is a success story: 30 years of uninterrupted growth and development, infrastructure expansion, and modernization of the economy and society. Epochal changes have unfolded...

The idea of corporate social responsibility may seem like a recent trend, but the previously unpublished historical documents on Cambridge's sophisticated urban property market reveal that businesses have been practicing what is sometimes referred to as...

For better or for worse, in recent times the rapid growth of international economic exchange has changed our lives. But when did this process of globalization begin, and what effects did it have on economies and societies? Pim de Zwart and Jan Luiten van...

The United States has endured crippling financial crises, together with many other sorts of monetary disorder, throughout its history. Why? The popular answer has long been that U.S. banks have been under-regulated, that increased regulation and...

Harold James examines the vulnerability and fragility of processes of globalization, both historically and in the present. This book applies lessons from past breakdowns of globalization-above all in the Great Depression-to show how financial crises...

The English East India Company was one of the most powerful and enduring organizations in history. Between Monopoly and Free Trade locates the source of that success in the innovative policy by which the Company's Court of Directors granted employees the...

Other books exist that warn of the dangers of empire and war. However, few, if any, of these books do so from a scholarly, informed economic standpoint. In Depression, War, and Cold War , Robert Higgs, a highly regarded economic historian, makes pointed,...

Originally published in 1970, this book examines the origins of social organizations, the development of Robinson Crusoe economies and the conception of property or rightful ownership, as well as the origins of agriculture, race and class. Discussing...

Carefully and lovingly researched, this is a tale of roundabouts and concrete cows, of earlier settlers often marginalised and forgotten, of a promising football team, of lakes and water sports, a thriving business and social community with unique...

Syriza's victory in the recent Greek general election shook the foundations of the Western political establishment and gave hope to the millions suffering the austerity measures imposed by the European Troika. Millions asked, how did this happen and what...

In 1776 the United States government started out on a shoestring and quickly went bankrupt fighting its War of Independence against Britain. At the war's end, the national government owed tremendous sums to foreign creditors and its own citizens. But...

This compact volume covers the main developments in the social sciences since the Second World War. Chapters on economics, human geography, political science, psychology, social anthropology, and sociology will interest anyone wanting short, accessible...