The Making of a Market
The Making of a Market

Author: Juliette Levy

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2012-01-01

Total Pages: 176

ISBN-13: 0271052147

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During the nineteenth century, Yucat&án moved effectively from its colonial past into modernity, transforming from a cattle-ranching and subsistence-farming economy to a booming export-oriented agricultural economy. Yucat&án and its economy grew in response to increasing demand from the United States for henequen, the local cordage fiber. This henequen boom has often been seen as another regional and historical example of overdependence on foreign markets and extortionary local elites. In The Making of a Market, Juliette Levy argues instead that local social and economic dynamics are the root of the region&’s development. She shows how credit markets contributed to the boom before banks (and bank crises) existed and how people borrowed before the creation of institutions designed specifically to lend. As the intermediaries in this lending process, notaries became unwitting catalysts of Yucat&án&’s capitalist transformation. By focusing attention on the notaries&’ role in structuring the mortgage market rather than on formal institutions such as banks, this study challenges the easy compartmentalization of local and global relationships and of economic and social relationships.

The Investment Frontier
The Investment Frontier

Author: John D. Haeger

Publisher: SUNY Press

Published: 1981-01-01

Total Pages: 334

ISBN-13: 9780873955300

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The American West did not grow in isolation from the East. On the contrary, New York financiers and other eastern entrepreneurs were crucial to America's western economic development, providing the necessary capital and expertise to transform the West into a productive part of the nation's economy. This thesis is powerfully demonstrated by John Denis Haeger in this study concerning the "Old Northwest" (the present-day states of Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois and Wisconsin) during the years 1815-1840. The result of years of research in manuscript collections and government documents, the book provides a comprehensive picture of early land speculators, examining their investments in farm lands, town lots, banks and transportation improvements, as well as their influence on western businessmen and institutions. It also explores their political and economic affairs on the East Coast, since these matters dramatically affected the scope of their western investments. Historians' generalizations about nonresident investors or eastern speculators have previously assumed a common type and business method when, in fact, easterners possessed varying economic goals and utilized different business strategies. To demonstrate this, Haeger compares and contrasts the promoter Charles Butler and the conservative speculators Isaac and Arthur Bronson, key figures among New York's financial elite, whose careers and strategies are for the first time described in detail. The activities of these investment pioneers, whose "every move was calculated to return profits," challenge the traditional images of westward expansion as a largely unplanned and spontaneous movement of people and capital.

The Second Bank of the United States
The Second Bank of the United States

Author: Jane Ellen Knodell

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-09-13

Total Pages: 197

ISBN-13: 1317662768

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The year 2016 marks the 200th anniversary of the founding of the Second Bank of the United States (1816-1836). This book is an economic history of an early central bank, the Second Bank of the United States (1816-36). After US President Andrew Jackson vetoed the re-chartering of the Bank in 1832, the US would go without a central bank for the rest of the nineteenth century, unlike Europe and England. This book takes a fresh look at the role and legacy of the Second Bank. The Second Bank of the United States shows how the Bank developed a business model that allowed it to make a competitive profit while providing integrating fiscal services to the national government for free. The model revolved around the strategic use of its unique ability to establish a nationwide system of branches. This book shows how the Bank used its branch network to establish dominance in select money markets: frontier money markets and markets for bills of exchange and specie. These lines of business created synergies with the Bank’s fiscal duties, and profits that helped cover their costs. The Bank’s branch in New Orleans, Louisiana, became its geographic centre of gravity, in contrast with the state-chartered banking system, which was already, by the 1820s, centred around New York. This book is of great interest to those who study banking and American history, as well as economic students who have a great interest in economic history.

Bank Notes and Shinplasters
Bank Notes and Shinplasters

Author: Joshua R. Greenberg

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2020-07-10

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 0812252241

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The colorful history of paper money before the Civil War Before Civil War greenbacks and a national bank network established a uniform federal currency in the United States, the proliferation of loosely regulated banks saturated the early American republic with upwards of 10,000 unique and legal bank notes. This number does not even include the plethora of counterfeit bills and the countless shinplasters of questionable legality issued by unregulated merchants, firms, and municipalities. Adding to the chaos was the idiosyncratic method for negotiating their value, an often manipulative face-to-face discussion consciously separated from any haggling over the price of the work, goods, or services for sale. In Bank Notes and Shinplasters, Joshua R. Greenberg shows how ordinary Americans accumulated and wielded the financial knowledge required to navigate interpersonal bank note transactions. Locating evidence of Americans grappling with their money in fiction, correspondence, newspapers, printed ephemera, government documents, legal cases, and even on the money itself, Greenberg argues Americans, by necessity, developed the ability to analyze the value of paper financial instruments, assess the strength of banking institutions, and even track legislative changes that might alter the rules of currency circulation. In his examination of the doodles, calculations, political screeds, and commercial stamps that ended up on bank bills, he connects the material culture of cash to financial, political, and intellectual history. The book demonstrates that the shift from state-regulated banks and private shinplaster producers to federally authorized paper money in the Civil War era led to the erasure of the skill, knowledge, and lived experience with banking that informed debates over economic policy. The end result, Greenberg writes, has been a diminished public understanding of how currency and the financial sector operate in our contemporary era, from the 2008 recession to the rise of Bitcoin.

Banks and Politics in America from the Revolution to the Civil War
Banks and Politics in America from the Revolution to the Civil War

Author: Bray Hammond

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 1991

Total Pages: 792

ISBN-13: 9780691005539

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This is a book about politics and banks and history. Yet politicians who read it will see that the author is not a politician, bankers who read it will see that he is not a banker, and historians that he is not an historian. Economists will see that he is not an economist and lawyers that he is not a lawyer. With this rather cryptic and exhaustive disclaimer, Bray Hammond began his classic investigation into the role of banking in the formation of American society. Hammond, who was assistant secretary of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System from 1944 to 1950, presented in this 771-page book the definitive account of how banking evolved in the United States in the context of the nation's political and social development. Hammond combined political with financial analysis, highlighting not only the in.uence politicians exercised over banking but also how banking drove political interests and created political coalitions. He captured the entrepreneurial, expansive, risk-taking spirit of the United States from earliest days and then showed how that spirit sometimes undermined sound banking institutions. In Hammond's view, we need central banks to keep the economy on an even keel. Historian Richard Sylla judged the work to be "a wry and urbane study of early U.S. financial history, but also a timeless essay on how Americans became what they are." Banks and Politics in America won the Pulitzer Prize for history in 1958.

Banking, Trade and Industry
Banking, Trade and Industry

Author: Alice Teichova

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1997-05-15

Total Pages: 460

ISBN-13: 9780521573610

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An account of the rise of banking since the Middle Ages and its place in the modern international economy, first published in 1997.