Marché Noir
The Economy of Survival in Second World War France
AUTHOR: Kenneth Mouré, University of Alberta
DATE PUBLISHED: March 2023
ISBN: 9781009207669
Kenneth Mouré shows how the black market in Vichy France developed not only to serve German exploitation, but also as an essential strategy for survival for commerce and consumers. His analysis explains how and why the black market became so prevalent and powerful in France and remained necessary after Liberation. Marché Noir draws on diverse French archives as well as diaries, memoirs and contemporary fiction, to highlight the importance of the black market in everyday life. Vichy's economic controls set the context for adaptations – by commerce facing economic and political constraints, and by consumers needing essential goods. Vichy collaboration in this realm seriously damaged the regime's legitimacy. Marché Noir offers new insights into the dynamics of black markets in wartime, and how illicit trade in France served not only to exploit consumer needs and increase German power, but also to aid communities in their strategies for survival.
An Exchange Rate History of the United Kingdom
1945–1992
Part of Studies in Macroeconomic History
AUTHOR: Alain Naef, University of California, Berkeley
DATE PUBLISHED: March 2023
ISBN: 9781108813938
How did the Bank of England manage sterling crises? This book steps into the shoes of the Bank's foreign exchange dealers to show how foreign exchange intervention worked in practice. The author reviews the history of sterling over half a century, using new archives, data and unseen photographs. This book traces the sterling crises from the end of the War to Black Wednesday in 1992. The resulting analysis shows that a secondary reserve currency such as sterling plays an important role in the stability of the international system. The author goes on to explore the lessons the Bretton Woods system on managed exchange rates has for contemporary policy makers in the context of Brexit. This is a crucial reference for scholars in economics and history examining past and current prospects for the international financial system. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core. 'The open access publication of this book has been published with the support of the Swiss National Science Foundation'.
OPEN ACCESS (https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/an-exchange-rate-history-of-the-united-kingdom/68B7E57D9884394B815C76D48ACD3FB6)
The Ideological Foundations of Qing Taxation
Belief Systems, Politics, and Institutions
Part of Cambridge Studies in Economics, Choice, and Society
AUTHOR: Taisu Zhang, Yale Law School
DATE PUBLISHED: February 2023
ISBN: 9781316518687
How states develop the capacity to tax is a question of fundamental importance to political science, legal theory, economics, sociology, and history. Increasingly, scholars believe that China's relative economic decline in the 18th and 19th centuries was related to its weak fiscal institutions and limited revenue. This book argues that this fiscal weakness was fundamentally ideological in nature. Belief systems created through a confluence of traditional political ethics and the trauma of dynastic change imposed unusually deep and powerful constraints on fiscal policymaking and institutions throughout the final 250 years of China's imperial history. Through the Qing example, this book combs through several interaction dynamics between state institutions and ideologies. The latter shapes the former, but the former can also significantly reinforce the political durability of the latter. In addition to its historical analysis of ideological politics, this book makes a major contribution to the longstanding debate on Sino-European divergence.
Economic Prehistory
Six Transitions That Shaped The World
AUTHORS: Gregory K. Dow, Simon Fraser University, British Columbia
Clyde G. Reed, Simon Fraser University, British Columbia
DATE PUBLISHED: January 2023
ISBN: 9781108839907
Around 15,000 years ago, almost all humans lived in small mobile foraging bands. By about 5,000 years ago, the first city-states had appeared. This radical transformation in human society laid the foundations for the modern world. We use economic logic and archaeological evidence to explain six key elements in this revolution: sedentism, agriculture, inequality, warfare, cities, and states. In our approach the ultimate cause of these events was climate change. We show how shifts in climate interacted with geography to drive technological innovation and population growth. The accumulation of population at especially rich locations led to creation of group property rights over land, stratification into elite and commoner classes, and warfare over land among rival elites. This set the stage for urbanization based on manufacturing or military defense and for elite-controlled states based on taxation. Our closing chapter shows how these developments eventually resulted in contemporary global civilization.
Keynes in Action
Truth and Expediency in Public Policy
AUTHOR: Peter Clarke, University of Cambridge
DATE PUBLISHED: November 2022
ISBN: 9781009255011
John Maynard Keynes died in 1946 but his ideas and his example remain relevant today. In this distinctive new account, Peter Clarke shows how Keynes's own career was not simply that of an academic economist, nor that of a modern policy advisor. Though rightly credited for reshaping economic theory, Keynes's influence was more broadly based and is assessed here in a rounded historical, political and cultural context. Peter Clarke re-examines the full trajectory of Keynes's public career from his role in Paris over the Versailles Treaty to Bretton Woods. He reveals how Keynes's insights as an economic theorist were rooted in his wider intellectual and cultural milieu including Bloomsbury and his friendship with Virginia Woolf as well as his involvement in government business. Keynes in Action uncovers a much more pragmatic Keynes whose concept of 'truth' needs to be interpreted in tension with an acknowledgement of 'expediency' in implementing public policy.
Creating Global Shipping
Aristotle Onassis, the Vagliano Brothers, and the Business of Shipping, c.1820–1970
Part of Cambridge Studies in the Emergence of Global Enterprise
AUTHOR: Gelina Harlaftis, Ionian University, Corfu
DATE PUBLISHED: November 2022
ISBN: 9781108466783
Shipping has been the international business par excellence in many national economies, one that preceded trends in other, more highly visible sectors of international economic activity. Nevertheless, in both business or economic history, shipping has remained relatively overlooked. That gap is filled by this exploration of the evolution of European shipping through the study of two Greek shipping firms. They provide a prime example of the regional European maritime businesses that evolved to serve Europe's international trade and, eventually, the global economy. By the end of the twentieth century, Greeks owned more ships than any other nationality. The story of the Vagliano brothers traces the transformation of Greek shipping from local shipping and trading to international shipping and ship management, while the case of Aristotle Onassis reveals how international shipping was transformed into a global business.
Navigating Nationalism in Global Enterprise
A Century of Indo-German Business Relations
Part of Cambridge Studies in the Emergence of Global Enterprise
AUTHOR: Christina Lubinski, Copenhagen Business School
DATE PUBLISHED: November 2022
ISBN: 9781316511282
Navigating Nationalism in Global Enterprise analyzes the role of nationalism in global business strategy, showing how multinationals act not just as drivers of globalization but also as sophisticated operators in a world of nations. Using the case study of German companies in colonial and post-colonial India, Christina Lubinski traces how nationalism's influence on business competitive strategies changed over the twentieth century and across major political turning points, such as two world wars and India's transition to independence. She highlights how national imaginings are both relational because they derive from comparisons with other nations, and historical because they mobilize the past to legitimize future aspirations. Lubinski stresses that learning from the past is how multinationals engage strategically with the content of nationalism – i.e., a nation's history, aspirations, and relationships with other nations. In India, German companies' competitiveness was continuously dependent on navigating nationalism and on understanding that nationalism and globalization are inextricably linked.
Sovereignty without Power
Liberia in the Age of Empires, 1822–1980
Part of Cambridge Studies in Economic History - Second Series
AUTHOR: Leigh A. Gardner, London School of Economics and Political Science
DATE PUBLISHED: November 2022
ISBN: 9781009181105
What did independence mean during the age of empires? How did independent governments balance different interests when they made policies about trade, money and access to foreign capital? Sovereignty without Power tells the story of Liberia, one of the few African countries to maintain independence through the colonial period. Established in 1822 as a colony for freed slaves from the United States, Liberia's history illustrates how the government's efforts to exercise its economic sovereignty and engage with the global economy shaped Liberia's economic and political development over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Drawing together a wide range of archival sources, Leigh A. Gardner presents the first quantitative estimates of Liberian's economic performance and uses these to compare it to its colonized neighbors and other independent countries. Liberia's history anticipated challenges still faced by developing countries today, and offers a new perspective on the role of power and power relationships in shaping Africa's economic history.
The Making of a New Rural Order in South China
Volume 2. Merchants, Markets, and Lineages, 1500–1700
AUTHOR: Joseph P. McDermott, University of Cambridge
DATE PUBLISHED: October 2022
ISBN: 9781107658615
This volume is written for anyone who has wondered about the growth of Chinese businesses and their relation to Chinese family and government institutions. Making full use of its partner volume's findings on village institutions in the southern prefecture of Huizhou, this volume explains how late imperial China's key regional group of merchants emerged from this prefecture's village lineages. It identifies the strategies they deployed to overcome the serious obstacles to their domination of major financial transactions and commodity markets throughout much of China from 1500 to 1700. At the same time it describes how the commercial success enjoyed by these 'house firms' undermined their lineages' social stability, making them vulnerable to competition from popular religious cults back home. In recounting how rural and urban institutions interacted through state and economic development, McDermott provides a powerful new framework for understanding late imperial China's distinctive trajectory to social and economic transformation.
Apprenticeship in Early Modern Europe
EDITORS: Maarten Prak, Universiteit Utrecht, The Netherlands
Patrick Wallis, London School of Economics and Political Science
DATE PUBLISHED: September 2022
ISBN: 9781108739085
This is the first comparative and comprehensive account of occupational training before the Industrial Revolution. Apprenticeship was a critical part of human capital formation, and, because of this, it has a central role to play in understanding economic growth in the past. At the same time, it was a key stage in the lives of many people, whose access to skills and experience of learning were shaped by the guilds that trained them. The local and national studies contained in this volume bring together the latest research into how skills training worked across Europe in an era before the emergence of national school systems. These essays, written to a common agenda and drawing on major new datasets, systematically outline the features of what amounted to a European-wide system of skills education, and provide essential insights into a key institution of economic and social history.
Fiscal Capacity and the Colonial State in Asia and Africa, c.1850–1960
Part of Cambridge Studies in Economic History - Second Series
EDITORS: Ewout Frankema, Wageningen Universiteit, The Netherlands
Anne Booth, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
DATE PUBLISHED: September 2022
ISBN: 9781108714297
This book examines the evolution of fiscal capacity in the context of colonial state formation and the changing world order between 1850 and 1960. Until the early nineteenth century, European colonial control over Asia and Africa was largely confined to coastal and island settlements, which functioned as little more than trading posts. The officials running these settlements had neither the resources nor the need to develop new fiscal instruments. With the expansion of imperialism, the costs of maintaining colonies rose. Home governments, reluctant to place the financial burden of imperial expansion on metropolitan taxpayers, pressed colonial governments to become fiscally self-supporting. A team of leading historians provides a comparative overview of how colonial states set up their administrative systems and how these regimes involved local people and elites. They shed new light on the political economy of colonial state formation and the institutional legacies they left behind at independence.
Wealth, Land, and Property in Angola
A History of Dispossession, Slavery, and Inequality
Part of African Studies
AUTHOR: Mariana P. Candido, Emory University, Atlanta
DATE PUBLISHED: September 2022
ISBN: 9781009055987
Exploring the multifaceted history of dispossession, consumption, and inequality in West Central Africa, Mariana P. Candido presents a bold revisionist history of Angola from the sixteenth century until the Berlin Conference of 1884–5. Synthesising disparate strands of scholarship, including the histories of slavery, land tenure, and gender in West Central Africa, Candido makes a significant contribution to ongoing historical debates. She demonstrates how ideas about dominion and land rights eventually came to inform the appropriation and enslavement of free people and their labour. By centring the experiences of West Central Africans, and especially African women, this book challenges dominant historical narratives, and shows that securing property was a gendered process. Drawing attention to how archives obscure African forms of knowledge and normalize conquest, Candido interrogates simplistic interpretations of ownership and pushes for the decolonization of African history.
Impunity and Capitalism
The Afterlives of European Financial Crises, 1690–1830
AUTHOR: Trevor Jackson, George Washington University, Washington DC
DATE PUBLISHED: September 2022
ISBN: 9781316516287
Whose fault are financial crises, and who is responsible for stopping them, or repairing the damage? Impunity and Capitalism develops a new approach to the history of capitalism and inequality by using the concept of impunity to show how financial crises stopped being crimes and became natural disasters. Trevor Jackson examines the legal regulation of capital markets in a period of unprecedented expansion in the complexity of finance ranging from the bankruptcy of Europe's richest man in 1709, to the world's first stock market crash in 1720, to the first Latin American debt crisis in 1825. He shows how, after each crisis, popular anger and improvised policy responses resulted in efforts to create a more just financial capitalism but succeeded only in changing who could act with impunity, and how. Henceforth financial crises came to seem normal and legitimate, caused by impersonal international markets, with the costs borne by domestic populations and nobody in particular at fault.
The Making of a Fiscal-Military State in Post-Revolutionary France
Part of New Studies in European History
AUTHOR: Jerome Greenfield
DATE PUBLISHED: September 2022
ISBN: 9781108839679
Drawing on a wide range of archival and published documents, this book explains how the French Revolution of 1789 transformed the French state and its fiscal system, and how further reforms in the nineteenth century created a durable, post-revolutionary state. Instead of presenting the nineteenth-century French state as primarily the creation of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic era, as most scholars have done, Jerome Greenfield emphasises the importance of counter-revolution after 1815 in establishing a stable, durable state, capable of surviving revolutions in 1830 and 1848 intact. The years 1815–1870 thus marked a crucial period in the development of the French state, not least in stimulating the economic interventionism for which it become notorious and facilitating the resurgence of France as a great power after Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo.
