The Currency of Empire
The Currency of Empire

Author: Jonathan Barth

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2021-06-15

Total Pages: 248

ISBN-13: 150175579X

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In The Currency of Empire, Jonathan Barth explores the intersection of money and power in the early years of North American history, and he shows how the control of money informed English imperial action overseas. The export-oriented mercantile economy promoted by the English Crown, Barth argues, directed the plan for colonization, the regulation of colonial commerce, and the politics of empire. The imperial project required an orderly flow of gold and silver, and thus England's colonial regime required stringent monetary regulation. As Barth shows, money was also a flash point for resistance; many colonists acutely resented their subordinate economic station, desiring for their local economies a robust, secure, and uniform money supply. This placed them immediately at odds with the mercantilist laws of the empire and precipitated an imperial crisis in the 1670s, a full century before the Declaration of Independence. The Currency of Empire examines what were a series of explosive political conflicts in the seventeenth century and demonstrates how the struggle over monetary policy prefigured the patriot reaction to the Stamp Act and so-called Intolerable Acts on the eve of American independence. Thanks to generous funding from the Arizona State University and George Mason University, the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access (OA) volumes from Cornell Open (cornellpress.cornell.edu/cornell-open) and other Open Access repositories.

The Social Life of Coffee
The Social Life of Coffee

Author: Brian Cowan

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2008-10-01

Total Pages: 376

ISBN-13: 0300133502

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What induced the British to adopt foreign coffee-drinking customs in the seventeenth century? Why did an entirely new social institution, the coffeehouse, emerge as the primary place for consumption of this new drink? In this lively book, Brian Cowan locates the answers to these questions in the particularly British combination of curiosity, commerce, and civil society. Cowan provides the definitive account of the origins of coffee drinking and coffeehouse society, and in so doing he reshapes our understanding of the commercial and consumer revolutions in Britain during the long Stuart century. Britain’s virtuosi, gentlemanly patrons of the arts and sciences, were profoundly interested in things strange and exotic. Cowan explores how such virtuosi spurred initial consumer interest in coffee and invented the social template for the first coffeehouses. As the coffeehouse evolved, rising to take a central role in British commercial and civil society, the virtuosi were also transformed by their own invention.

Friedrich List (1789-1846)
Friedrich List (1789-1846)

Author: Eugen Wendler

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2014-09-16

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 3642545548

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Friedrich List (1789-1846) was a prophet of social market economy, national economy and the infant-industry theory. In this comprehensive biography the international influence and reception of List’s theories is presented together with his extraordinary vita. List was a notable early advocate of economic integration of the many separate states of 19th century Germany. His basic theory is that of productive resources and the need to protect infant industries until they have matured enough to stand alone. He is recognized as a visionary economist with social responsibility and as an influential railway pioneer. He was a liberal and a democrat who promoted an extended representative democracy, including respect for human rights and civil liberties, to accompany industrial development. His highly influential main work “The National System of Political Economy” has been translated into many languages. Eugen Wendler, the renowned author and List expert, not only builds upon his many years of research, but also discusses several new sources. This richly illustrated book is as informative as it is well written.