The first volume of The Cambridge History of Capitalism provides a comprehensive account of the evolution of capitalism from its earliest beginnings. Starting with its distant origins in ancient Babylon, successive chapters trace progression up to the 'Promised Land' of capitalism in America. Adopting a wide geographical coverage and comparative perspective, the international team of authors discuss the contributions of Greek, Roman, and Asian civilizations to the development of capitalism, as well as the Chinese, Indian and Arab empires. They determine what features of modern capitalism were present at each time and place, and why the various precursors of capitalism did not survive. Looking at the eventual success of medieval Europe and the examples of city-states in northern Italy and the Low Countries, the authors address how British mercantilism led to European imitations and American successes, and ultimately, how capitalism became global.
The first volume of The Cambridge History of Capitalism provides a comprehensive account of the evolution of capitalism from its earliest beginnings. Starting with its distant origins in ancient Babylon, successive chapters trace progression up to the 'Promised Land' of capitalism in America. Adopting a wide geographical coverage and comparative perspective, the international team of authors discuss the contributions of Greek, Roman, and Asian civilizations to the development of capitalism, as well as the Chinese, Indian and Arab empires. They determine what features of modern capitalism were present at each time and place, and why the various precursors of capitalism did not survive. Looking at the eventual success of medieval Europe and the examples of city-states in northern Italy and the Low Countries, the authors address how British mercantilism led to European imitations and American successes, and ultimately, how capitalism became global.
By the end of the nineteenth century, the world was ready to adopt the gold standard out of concerns of national power, prestige, and anti-English competition. Yet although the gold standard allowed countries to enact a virtual single world currency, the years before World War I were not a time of unfettered liberal economics and one-world, one-market harmony. Outside of Europe, the gold standard became a tool for nationalists and protectionists primarily interested in growing domestic industry and imperial expansion. This overlooked trend, provocatively reassessed in Steven Bryan's well-documented history, contradicts our conception of the gold standard as a British-based system infused with English ideas, interests, and institutions. In countries like Japan and Argentina, where nationalist concerns focused on infant-industry protection and the growth of military power, the gold standard enabled the expansion of trade and the goals of the age: industry and empire. Bryan argues that these countries looked less to Britain and more to North America and the rest of Europe for ideological models. Not only does this history challenge our idealistic notions of the prewar period, but it also reorients our understanding of the history that followed. Policymakers of the 1920s latched onto the idea that global prosperity before World War I was the result of a system dominated by English liberalism. Their attempt to reproduce this triumph helped bring about the global downturn, the Great Depression, and the collapse of the interwar world.
DIVIn this groundbreaking book Andrew Sluyter demonstrates for the first time that Africans played significant creative roles in establishing open-range cattle ranching in the Americas. In so doing, he provides a new way of looking at and studying the history of land, labor, property, and commerce in the Atlantic world./div DIVSluyter shows that Africans’ ideas and creativity helped to establish a production system so fundamental to the environmental and social relations of the American colonies that the consequences persist to the present. He examines various methods of cattle production, compares these methods to those used in Europe and the Americas, and traces the networks of actors that linked that Atlantic world. The use of archival documents, material culture items, and ecological relationships between landscape elements make this book a methodologically and substantively original contribution to Atlantic, African-American, and agricultural history./div
Drawing on largely unexplored nineteenth- and twentieth-century sources, this book offers an in-depth study of Britain’s presence in Argentina. Its subjects include the nineteenth-century rise of British trade, merchants and explorers, of investment and railways, and of British imperialism. Spanning the period from the Napoleonic Wars until the end of the twentieth century, it provides a comprehensive history of the unique British community in Argentina. Later sections examine the decline of British influence in Argentina from World War I into the early 1950s. Finally, the book traces links between British multinationals and the political breakdown in Argentina of the 1970s and early 1980s, leading into dictatorship and the Falklands War. Combining economic, social and political history, this extensive volume offers new insights into both the historical development of Argentina and of British interests overseas.
Covering the entire sweep of Argentina's history from pre-Columbian times to today Lewis outlines the connections between the colonial era and the 19th century, and focuses closely on the last three decades of the twentieth century, during which Argentina dealt with the legacies of Peronism and of military dictatorship, as well as establishing a stable democracy.
This book argues that humanity's relationship to the land has undergone a fundamental and calamitous change. Marzec reveals how the historical phenomenon known as the 'enclosure movement' has effected not only the ecosystems and the geopolitics of the Twenty-First century, but on how we relate to the earth and conceive of ourselves as human.