Bøger i Markets and Governments in Economic History serien

"An essential new history of America's monetary origins. The Second Continental Congress faced multiple daunting challenges when it was convened in summer 1775. First the assembly had to create a de facto government for the loosely joined colonies that would become the United States. It then had to strategize a war effort for what would become the American Revolution. And it also had to figure out how to pay for all of it-without the benefit of any real legal authority to do so. The Continental Dollar is a sweeping, revelatory new history of how the fledgling United States paid for its first war. Economist Farley Grubb upends the folk telling of this story, in which the US printed cross-colony money, called Continentals, to serve as an early fiat currency-a currency that is not tied to a commodity like gold, but rather to the viability and legal authority of the issuer. As Grubb outlines in rigorous terms, the Continental was not a fiat currency, but a "zero-coupon bond"-a wholly different species of currency that is both value-anchored (one Continental was a promise to pay the holder one milled Spanish silver dollar after a defined future time) and subject to discounting by the issuer if that issuer needs fast capital. Through this lens, and as confirmed by Grubb's exhaustive mining of 18th-century colonial monetary records, the appearance of Continental-dollar depreciation was, in fact, capricious discounting: the US was playing easy money in the face of an expensive war. Drawing on decades of research and careful mining of historical evidence, The Continental Dollar is an essential and authoritative origin story of the early American monetary system. It is certain to serve as the benchmark for critical work in this space for decades to come"--

"A sweeping new history of the American origins of modern money. Economists debate endlessly the nature of fiat monetary systems-coins and bills whose value is guaranteed by a government or other authority. But the actual origins of these fiat currencies have received little attention. With Easy Money, economic historian Dror Goldberg tells the origin story for fiat currency in North America (and maybe beyond): the little-known example of the Massachusetts colony at the end of the 17th century. As the young colony grew into passive self-governance, and as its economy became increasingly complex, the need to formalize a smooth exchange emerged. Printing local money followed. Goldberg's story illustrates how colonial Americans invented modern money by shifting money's foundation from intrinsically valuable goods to the authority of the state. Whereas other governments had tied currencies unit to gold (and would continue to do so until the Great Depression and beyond), Massachusetts tied its local money to the assurance of a government: This money came from the state treasury, and it's the only currency you can use to pay for x things, so use this money. Goldberg's narrative traces how this happy accident has grown into a worldwide monetary system in which, monetarily, we are all Massachusetts. As Goldberg illustrates, the road to fiat currency has not been linear. Weaving monetary economics and American history, Easy Money is a new, highly novel starting square for the modern history of monetary systems"--

"Tirthankar Roy and Anand V. Swamy trace India's economic growth since 1947 and the legal reforms that have allowed it to settle in, however unevenly and tenuously, in the shadow of the stagnating effects of colonial rule. Law and the Economy in a Young Democracy portrays a long shadow of Indian "path dependence"-the persistence of colonial-era legal practices and institutions-interrupted by a series of reactive, dramatic departures from colonial inertia aimed at achieving quick or corrective growth and regulation. Roy and Swamy address five principal questions: How have new laws emerged in India? Does the explanation lie with colonialism or with post-independence politics and economic change? How were laws shaped by egalitarian goals in the Indian democracy with its universal adult suffrage? When did laws constrain economic growth? And to what extent did case law and legislation affect the evolution of law, which was also shaped by politics and the quality of legal infrastructure? Each of these questions brings together different threads of India's economic transformation and social/political history, and the format allows the authors to go deep on the country's most important market sectors and their surrounding economic and political histories. These sections include: colonialist influences on laws governing land and natural resources; politics and labor; and the alternating stifling effects of the country's economic policies and legal systems. In Roy and Swamy's telling, inadequate legal infrastructure has often been the country's primary impediment to economic growth during the last century, and it remains a primary reason that India's future may not be as bright as advertised"--

"In Bankrupt in America, Mary and Brad Hansen show that examination of how Americans have used bankruptcy law and the history of the law itself offers important perspective on the history of bankruptcy in America. Using new statistical and documentary evidence, they illustrate the cycles of interaction between bankruptcy law's use and its own evolution. The authors first offer a broad overview of the laws at various levels governing the collection of debt and position their research in the literature on bankruptcy. They establish the need for a framework that integrates various lines of thought, and introduce of the methods of their approach, which incorporates new institutional economics and cliometrics, that is, the incorporation of econometric data analysis. They then illustrate the general path to bankruptcy by discussing the series of decisions that creditors and debtors make at every stage and how various formal and informal institutions influence these decisions. The core of the book will comprise a generally chronological narrative from 1898, when the first major federal bankruptcy law was enacted to an end point of 2005. Hansen and Hansen reach novel conclusions about causes and consequences of bankruptcy and raise nuances in the relationship between bankruptcy rates and economic growth. For instance, while higher bankruptcy rates are usually considered a negative, the authors show that higher bankruptcy may actually signal economic growth if it is due to an expansion of credit markets. Further, the authors contribute to our understanding of what drives differences in bankruptcy rates among states by illustrating the influence of the broader legal framework. Ultimately, this work find that long-run growth in personal bankruptcy is the result of growth in credit and that the study of legal governance provides useful viewpoints from which to draw out patterns in bankruptcy"--

Relative to the other habited places on our planet, Hawai'i has a very short history. The Hawaiian archipelago was the last major land area on the planet to be settled, with Polynesians making the long voyage just under a millennium ago. Our understanding of the social, political, and economic changes that have unfolded since has been limited until recently by how little we knew about the first five centuries of settlement. Building on new archaeological and historical research, Sumner La Croix assembles here the economic history of Hawai'i from the first Polynesian settlements in 1200 through US colonization, the formation of statehood, and to the present day. He shows how the political and economic institutions that emerged and evolved in Hawai'i during its three centuries of global isolation allowed an economically and culturally rich society to emerge, flourish, and ultimately survive annexation and colonization by the United States. The story of a small, open economy struggling to adapt its institutions to changes in the global economy, Hawai'i offers broadly instructive conclusions about economic evolution and development, political institutions, and native Hawaiian rights.

An economic history of the modern Danish dairy industry.

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, its dramatic and sweeping effects best measurable through a macroeconomic lens. In this pioneering book, however, Jason E. Taylor examines the act instead using microeconomic tools, probing the uneven implementation of the act's codes and the radical heterogeneity of its impact across industries and time. Deconstructing the Monolith employs a mixture of archival and empirical research to enrich our understanding of how the program affected the behavior and well-being of workers and firms during the two years NIRA existed as well as in the period immediately following its demise.

A history of municipal public finance in Brazil in the last half of the nineteenth century and first part of the twentieth.

Looking at the history of the United States with a focus on three diseases - smallpox, typhoid fever, and yellow fever, this book shows how constitutional rules and provisions that promoted individual liberty and economic prosperity also influenced the country's ability to eradicate infectious disease.

Fresh water has become scarce and will become even more so in the coming years, as continued population growth places ever greater demands on the supply of fresh water. This book draws on historical sources to trace the emergence of the current framework for resolving water-rights issues to California in the 1850s, during the Gold Rush.

Few events in the history of humanity rival the Industrial Revolution. This title offers an account of how dramatic changes in institutions - the formal and informal rules that govern a society - resulted from the unprecedented economic development that took place during the Industrial Revolution.