A Financial History Of Western Europe

This is the first history of finance - broadly defined to include money, banking, capital markets, public and private finance, international transfers etc. - that covers Western Europe (with an occasional glance at the western hemisphere) and half a millennium. Charles Kindleberger highlights the development of financial institutions to meet emerging needs, and the similarities and contrasts in the handling of financial problems such as transferring resources from one country to another, stimulating investment, or financing war and cleaning up the resulting monetary mess. The first half of the book covers money, banking and finance from 1450 to 1913; the second deals in considerably finer detail with the twentieth century. This major work casts current issues in historical perspective and throws light on the fascinating, and far from orderly, evolution of financial institutions and the management of financial problems. Comprehensive, critical and cosmopolitan, this book is both an outstanding work of reference and essential reading for all those involved in the study and practice of finance, be they economic historians, financial experts, scholarly bankers or students of money and banking. This groundbreaking work was first published in 1984.

Revised and updated throughout, this brilliant survey of European financial history from the earliest times to the present by internationally renowned scholar and author Charles P. Kindleberger offers a comprehensive account of the evolution of money in Western Europe, bimetallism and theemergence of the gold standard, the banking systems of the Continent and the British Isles, and overviews of foreign investment, regional and global financial integration, and private and public finance in Western Europe. The new edition features expanded coverage of the sixteenth and seventeenthcenturies and important new material on recent developments in European monetary integration.

This is the first history of finance - broadly defined to include money, banking, capital markets, public and private finance, international transfers etc. - that covers Western Europe (with an occasional glance at the western hemisphere) and half a millennium. Charles Kindleberger highlights the development of financial institutions to meet emerging needs, and the similarities and contrasts in the handling of financial problems such as transferring resources from one country to another, stimulating investment, or financing war and cleaning up the resulting monetary mess. The first half of the book covers money, banking and finance from 1450 to 1913; the second deals in considerably finer detail with the twentieth century. This major work casts current issues in historical perspective and throws light on the fascinating, and far from orderly, evolution of financial institutions and the management of financial problems. Comprehensive, critical and cosmopolitan, this book is both an outstanding work of reference and essential reading for all those involved in the study and practice of finance, be they economic historians, financial experts, scholarly bankers or students of money and banking. This groundbreaking work was first published in 1984.

The end of the Cold War put the planet on a new track, abruptly replacing the familiar world of bipolarity, red phones, and intercontinental ballistic missiles with the strange new world of the Internet, e-commerce, and Palm Pilots. The "New World Order" was defined by a U.S.-led war against Iraq, bloody ethnic strife in Bosnia and Rwanda, and religious turmoil in Central Asia. This evolving global system, however, overlooked the powerful role of credit, which functions as a critical building block for developing greater national and individual wealth. This volume examines the evolution of credit in the Western world and its relationship to power. Spanning several centuries of human endeavor. it focuses on Western Europe and the United States and also considers how the Western system became the global credit system. Six major themes run throughout: (1) the direct relationship between credit and power; (2) different kinds of political power promote different kinds of economic behavior; (3) various societal and cultural groups were often more successful in mingling credit and political power; (4) the Western credit system evolved in tandem with the development of the nation-state; (5) historically, there has been a pattern of financial crises; (6) credit spread from being the privilege of the wealthy and powerful to being available to vast numbers. MacDonald and Gastmann have broken history into five periods, ranging from early pre-modern, defining the earliest references to banking and credit as exemplified by the Code of Hammurabi, circa 1726 BC, through the Roman Empire with its creation of money and growing use of credit in trade, the barbarian invasions of the 11th century which led to a breakdown in credit networks in the West, through the establishment of the Italian city-states, to the modern period which incorporates the rise of credit in the Low Countries in the 1500s and extends through the rise of London and New York as the major international credit hubs.

Bringing together cultural, economic and social historians from across Europe and beyond, this volume offers a consideration from a number of perspectives of the principal forces that further integrated the Ottoman Empire and Western Europe during the first century of industrialisation. The essays not only review and analyse the commercial, financial and monetary factors, negative as well as positive, that bore upon the region's initial stages of modern transformation, but also provide a ready introduction to major aspects of the economy and society of the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century. Beginning with two chapters providing the context to the development of Ottoman relations with Western Europe up to the second half of the nineteenth century, the collection then moves on to explore more specific questions of trade links, the impact of improved transportation and communications, the development and changing nature of Ottoman finance and banking, as well as European investment in Turkey. The outcome is a broad ranging consideration of how all these issues played a fundamental role in the final decades of the Ottoman Empire and the emergence of Turkey as a modern state with links to both east and west. The essays in this collection derive from the EABFH colloquium held in the Imperial Mint, Istanbul, in October 1999.

The startling economic and political answers behind Europe's historical dominance Between 1492 and 1914, Europeans conquered 84 percent of the globe. But why did Europe establish global dominance, when for centuries the Chinese, Japanese, Ottomans, and South Asians were far more advanced? In Why Did Europe Conquer the World?, Philip Hoffman demonstrates that conventional explanations—such as geography, epidemic disease, and the Industrial Revolution—fail to provide answers. Arguing instead for the pivotal role of economic and political history, Hoffman shows that if certain variables had been different, Europe would have been eclipsed, and another power could have become master of the world. Hoffman sheds light on the two millennia of economic, political, and historical changes that set European states on a distinctive path of development, military rivalry, and war. This resulted in astonishingly rapid growth in Europe's military sector, and produced an insurmountable lead in gunpowder technology. The consequences determined which states established colonial empires or ran the slave trade, and even which economies were the first to industrialize. Debunking traditional arguments, Why Did Europe Conquer the World? reveals the startling reasons behind Europe's historic global supremacy.

The collapse of communism in Central, East and South-East Europe (CESEE) led to great hopes for the region and for Europe. A quarter of a century on, the picture is mixed: in many CESEE countries, the transformation process is incomplete, and the economic catch-up has taken longer than anticipated. The current situation has highlighted the need for a better understanding of the long-term political and economic implications of the Central, East and South-East European historical experience. This thematically organised text offers a clear and comprehensive guide to the economic history of CESEE from 1800 to the present day. Bringing together authors from both East and West, the book also draws on the cutting-edge research of a new generation of scholars from the CESEE region. Presenting a thoroughly modern overview of the history of the region, the text will be invaluable to students of economic history and CESEE area studies.