Browse

Should businessmen who commit fraud go to prison? This question has been asked repeatedly since 2008; it was also raised in nineteenth-century Britain, when the spread of corporate capitalism created enormous new opportunities for dishonesty. Historians have presented Victorian Britain as a haven for white-collar criminals, beneficiaries of a prejudiced criminal justice system which only dealt harshly with offences by the poor. This book challenges these beliefs. Based on an unparalleled sample of legal cases—many examined here for the first time—it presents a radical new interpretation of the relationship between capitalism and the law. Initially, there were no criminal sanctions against publishing false prospectuses, concealing losses in balance sheets, and even misappropriating company money. But parliament became convinced of the need to criminalize these practices to protect the culture of stock market investment on which mid-Victorian prosperity increasingly rested. Persuading judges to play along was harder, with many invoking the principle of caveat emptor to exonerate defendants. But by the end of the century, successful prosecutions of company executives were commonplace. These trials performed multiple functions. They stabilized confidence in times of crisis. They dramatized the class blindness of the law. And they were increasingly seen as essential as faith in a self-regulating economy ebbed. The criminalization of fraud therefore has far-reaching implications for our understanding of nineteenth-century Britain. It also has relevance today in light of the ongoing economic crisis and the issues it raises regarding business ethics and the role of the state.

At the beginning of World War II, the United States and Mexico launched the bracero program, a series of labor agreements that brought Mexican men to work temporarily in U.S. agricultural fields. This book asks why these temporary migrants provoked so much concern and anxiety in the United States and what the Mexican government expected to gain in participating in the program. It reveals the fashioning of a U.S.–Mexican transnational world, a world created through the interactions, negotiations, and struggles of the program's principal protagonists including Mexican and U.S. state actors, labor activists, growers, and bracero migrants. The book argues that braceros became racialized foreigners, Mexican citizens, workers, and transnational subjects as they moved between U.S. and Mexican national spaces. Drawing on oral histories, ethnographic fieldwork, and documentary evidence, it links the often unconnected themes of exploitation, development, the rise of consumer cultures, and gendered class and race formation to show why those with connections beyond the nation have historically provoked suspicion, anxiety, and retaliatory political policies.

Conventional accounts often conceive the genesis of capitalism in Europe within the conjunctures of agricultural, commercial, and industrial revolutions. Challenging this widely believed cliché, this volume traces the history of capitalism across civilizations, tenth century onwards, and argues that capitalism was neither a monolithic entity nor exclusively an economic phenomenon confined to the West. Looking at regions as diverse as England, South America, Russia, North Africa, and East, South, West, and Southeast Asia, the book explores the plurality of developments across time and space. The chapters analyse aspects such as historical conjunctures, commodity production and distribution, circulation of knowledge and personnel, and the role of mercantile capital, small producers, and force—all the while stressing the necessity to think beyond present-day national boundaries. The book argues that the multiple histories of capitalism can be better understood from a trans-regional, intercontinental, and interconnected perspective.

In recent decades, Tokyo, London, and New York have been the sites of credit bubbles of historically unprecedented magnitude. Central bankers have enjoyed almost unparalleled power and autonomy. They have cooperated to construct and preserve towering structures of debt, reshaping relations of power and ownership around the world. This book explores how this financialized form of globalism took shape a century ago, when Tokyo joined London and New York as a major financial center. This book shows that close cooperation between central banks began along an unexpected axis, between London and Tokyo, around the year 1900, with the Bank of England's secret use of large Bank of Japan funds to intervene in the London markets. Central-bank cooperation became multilateral during World War I—the moment when Japan first emerged as a creditor country. In 1919 and 1920, as Japan, Great Britain, and the United States adopted deflation policies, the results of cooperation were realized in the world's first globally coordinated program of monetary policy. It was also in 1920 that Wall Street bankers moved to establish closer ties with Tokyo. The text tells the story of how the first age of central-bank power and pride ended in the disaster of the Great Depression, when a rush for gold brought the system crashing down. In all of this, we see also the quiet but surprisingly central place of Japan. We see it again today, in the way that Japan has unwillingly led the world into a new age of post-bubble economics.

This is a biography of William McChesney Martin Jr. (1906–1998), the first paid president of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and the chairman of the Federal Reserve System (Fed) under Presidents Harry S. Truman to Richard Nixon. The extent of Martin's influence on the course of American economic history was significant: arguably he has done more to strengthen and reform the nation's most important financial institutions than has any other individual. This book recounts Martin's life story, and explains his lasting impact on the NYSE and the Fed, both troubled institutions that he transformed. It provides an inside look at the economic deliberations of five presidential administrations, and describes Martin's battles to bring about ethical and intelligent regulation of U.S. financial markets. Martin's experiences shed light not only on the evolution of the American financial system but also on critical issues that confront the system today.

Since the 1940s Americans and Britons have come to enjoy an era of rising material abundance. Yet this has been accompanied by a range of social and personal disorders, including family breakdown, addiction, mental instability, crime, obesity, inequality, economic insecurity, and declining trust. This book argues that well-being has lagged behind affluence in these societies, because they present an environment in which consistent choices are difficult to achieve over different time ranges and in which the capacity for personal and social commitment is undermined by the flow of novelty. The book's approach draws on economics and social science, makes use of the latest cognitive research, and provides a detailed and reasoned critique of modern consumer society, especially the assumption that freedom of choice necessarily maximizes individual and social well-being. The book falls into three parts. Part one analyzes the ways in which economic resources map on to human welfare, why choice is so intractable, and how commitment to people and institutions is sustained. It argues that choice is constrained by prior obligation and reciprocity. The second section then applies these conceptual arguments to comparative empirical studies of advertising, of eating and obesity, and of the production and acquisition of appliances and automobiles. Finally, in part three, the book investigates social and personal relations in the USA and Britain, including inter-personal regard, the rewards and reversals of status, the social and psychological costs of inequality, and the challenges posed to heterosexual love and to parenthood by the rise of affluence.

Cheap Street tells the history of London’s street markets and of the people who bought and sold there. From the 1850s anything that could be bought in a shop in London could also be bought in the street markets, which were the butcher, baker, greengrocer, provision merchant, haberdasher, tailor and furnisher of the working-class city. They sat uncomfortably on the edge of the law, barely tolerated by authorities that did not quite know whether to admire them for their efficient circulation of goods, or to despise them for their unregulated and ‘low’ character. They were the first recourse of immigrants looking to earn a living, and of privileged observers seeking a voyeuristic glimpse of street life. London’s street markets have frequently been overlooked, viewed as anomalous amongst the sophisticated consumer institutions of the modern city, the department stores and West-End shops. Cheap Street shows how the street markets, as an emanation of the informal economy that flourishes in the interstices of urban life, adapted nimbly to urban growth and contributed to consumer modernity, and how in doing so, they propagated myths about what it meant to live in London and be a Londoner. The book analyses the street markets through their legal and economic informality, material culture, sensory affects, and performative character, using varied documentary and visual evidence. It reshapes the interpretation of London’s urban geographies and consumer cultures, offering new insights into London’s history.

This book explores the many different strands in the language of civil society from the 16th to the 20th centuries. Through a series of case-studies it investigates the applicability of the term to a wide range of historical settings. These include ‘state interference’, voluntary associations, economic decision-making, social and economic planning, the ‘bourgeois public sphere’, civil society in wartime, the ‘inclusion’ and ‘exclusion’ of women, and relations between the state, the voluntary sector, and individual citizens. The contributions suggest that the sharp distinction between civil society and the state, common in much continental thought, was of only limited application in a British context. They show how past understandings of the term were often very different from (even in some respects the exact opposite of) those held today, arguing that it makes more sense to understand civil society as a phenomenon that varies between different cultures and periods, rather than a universally applicable set of principles and procedures.

Between the Great War and Pearl Harbor, conservative labor leaders declared themselves America's “first line of defense” against Communism. This account shows how the American Federation of Labor (AFL) fanned popular anticommunism but defended Communists' civil liberties in the aftermath of the 1919 Red Scare. The AFL's “commonsense anticommunism,” it argues, steered a middle course between the American Legion and the American Civil Liberties Union, helping to check campaigns for federal sedition laws. But in the 1930s, frustration with the New Deal order led labor conservatives to redbait the Roosevelt administration and liberal unionists, and abandon their reluctant civil libertarianism for red scare politics. That frustration contributed to the legal architecture of federal anticommunism that culminated with the McCarthyist fervor of the 1950s. Relying on untapped archival sources, the author reveals how labor conservatives and the emerging civil liberties movement debated the proper role of the state in policing radicals and grappled with the challenges to the existing political order posed by Communist organizers. Surprising conclusions about familiar figures, such as J. Edgar Hoover, and unfamiliar episodes, like a German plot to disrupt American munitions manufacture, make her story a fresh retelling of the interwar years.

This book chronicles how the concept of organizing people to serve economic ends emerged in early modern and colonial India. It examines rules of cooperation, why people decided to join forces, how disputes were settled, and how cooperative communities became increasingly unstable in more modern times. It focuses on five dimensions: actor, agent, time, purpose, and region. The leading actors are peasants, labourers, artisans, merchants/bankers, and the states. The rules of cooperation that formed inside communities of merchants and others were respected by the states. However, these rules would eventually become unstable due to the integration of India within a global-industrial economy and the introduction of a new rule of law in the old guise of ‘custom’. As a result, the endogamous guild, a kind of collective that used marriage rules to secure cooperative ties, became weaker, to be supplanted by other forms of organization. Collectives controlled property, managed resources, supplied training, and conducted negotiations. The regional angle is important because regions differed on the composition of enterprise, and globalization and colonialism unfolded unevenly across space. The book presents an economic history of institutional change in South Asia.

This book overturns nostalgic stereotypes of antiquated storekeepers, suggesting that nineteenth- and early twentieth-century grocers were important but unsung innovators of business models and retail technologies that fostered the rise of contemporary retailing. They wrestled with fundamental changes in the structures of retailing and commercial capitalism, including the development of mass production, distribution, and marketing; the growth of regional and national markets; the emergence of new organizational and business methods; and the introduction of retail technologies such as the cash register. Yet today we know very little about the considerable achievements of small businessmen and their corner stores and even less about their major contributions to the making of “modern” commercial enterprise in the United States. Combining the archival sources and storekeepers’ stories along with sales records, credit reports, and legislative efforts, the book explores how evolving commercial, legal, and social institutions changed the course and development of the grocery trade. This story is told through grocers’ eyes, illuminating the day-to-day problems, challenges, and tasks associated with running small businesses and showing how local retailers made possible a national grocery trade.

A wool merchant on the edge of the Cotswolds, John Heritage of Moreton in Marsh, traded between 1498 and 1520, and kept a record of his business in an account book. At this time commerce played a major role in English society, and although the wool trade was in decline, Heritage was still active in gathering wool from the producers and supplying the London merchants who sent it overseas. He was also making large profits from farming, by grazing large flocks of sheep and selling wool and animals. The general trends in society that are illuminated by this one trader include the importance of the enclosure movement, which enabled a small number of graziers and farmers to supply the market for wool and meat efficiently from specialized pastures. More important, however, were the large numbers of peasant producers who each sold relatively small quantities of wool, but cumulatively provided a high proportion of the surplus. Peasants could make a profit from the skilful management of the open fields which were attached to their villages, and this was not therefore just an age of rampant individualism. The village was still very active, and there were tensions between acquisitive individuals and the peasant communities, which could lead to the collapse of the village, but sometimes the encloser and grazier met with effective resistance.

Home economics emerged at the turn of the twentieth century as a movement to train women to be more efficient household managers. At the same moment, American families began to consume many more goods and services than they produced. To guide women in this transition, professional home economists had two major goals: to teach women to assume their new roles as modern consumers and to communicate homemakers' needs to manufacturers and political leaders. This book charts the development of the profession from its origins as an educational movement to its identity as a source of consumer expertise in the interwar period to its virtual disappearance by the 1970s. Working for both business and government, home economists walked a fine line between educating and representing consumers while they shaped cultural expectations about consumer goods as well as the goods themselves. The author looks beyond 1970s feminist scholarship that dismissed home economics for its emphasis on domesticity to reveal the movement's complexities, including the extent of its public impact and debates about home economists' relationship to the commercial marketplace.

Most published material in English on the Cuban economy is written by non-Cubans. The goal of this book is to present, in English, a spectrum of views on various aspects of the Cuban economy from twelve Cuban economists respected in Cuba for their work. The book’s temporal focus is the Special Period, 1990-2009, though it also presents the previous thirty years as necessary background. The work is divided into three thematic sections of four chapters each: (1) the macroeconomy; (2) socioeconomic issues; and (3) specific branches of production. Individual chapters address the macroeconomy, foreign trade, planning, the economic aspects of living in Cuba, poverty, demographics, labor, tourism, agriculture, and knowledge-based sectors. The authors emphasize empirical support for the positions they present as they advance the principal theme that yokes the different chapters: the extent to which the economic changes that occurred over the Special Period influenced how the Cuban economy functions now and as prelude to more major changes that will come in the future. A second important theme throughout the chapters is Cuba’s continued commitment to making choices that improve human well-being and enhance the building of a socialist economy, albeit with many new ideas on both what is possible and necessary to bring these goals about.

The United States is in transit from an industrial to a postindustrial society, from a modern to a postmodern culture, and from a national to a global economy. This book asks how we can distinguish the uniquely American elements of these changes from more global influences, focusing on the ways in which economic imperatives give shape to the shifting experience of being American. Drawing on a wide knowledge of American history and literature, the latest social science, and contemporary social issues, it investigates continuity and change in American race relations, politics, religion, conception of selfhood, family, and the arts. The chapter paints a vivid picture of contemporary America, showing how postmodernism is perceived and felt by individuals, and focusing attention on the strengths and limitations of American democracy.

This book traces the growth of customs and excise, and their integral role in shaping the framework of industrial England; including state power, technical advance, and the evolution of a consumer society. Central to this structure was the development of two economies — one legal and one illicit. If there was a unique English pathway of industrialization, it was less a distinct entrepreneurial and techno-centric culture, than one predominantly defined within an institutional framework spearheaded by the excise and a wall of tariffs. This process reached its peak by the end of the 1770s. The structure then quickly started to crumble under the weight of the fiscal-military state, and Pitt's calculated policy of concentrating industrial policy around cotton, potteries, and iron — at the expense of other taxed industries. The breakthrough of the new political economy was the erosion of the illicit economy; the smugglers' free trade now became the state's most powerful weapon in the war against non-legal trade. If at the beginning of the period covered by this book state administration was predominantly deregulated and industry regulated, by the close the reverse was the case.

This book investigates political thought under the conditions of the postwar welfare state, focusing on the Federal Republic of Germany (1949–89). It argues that the welfare state informed and altered basic questions of democracy as those institutions take on broader and more concrete forms after the 1950s. These questions were especially important for West Germany, given its recent experience with the collapse of capitalism, the disintegration of democracy, and National Socialist dictatorship after 1930. Three central issues emerged. First, the development of a nearly all-embracing set of social services and payments recast the problem of how social groups and interests related to the state, as state agencies and affected groups generated their own clientele, their own advocacy groups, and their own expert information. Second, the welfare state blurred the line between state and society that is constitutive of basic rights and the classic world of liberal freedom. Rights became claims on the state, and social groups became integral parts of state administration. Third, the welfare state potentially reshaped the individual citizen, who became wrapped up with mandatory social insurance systems, provisioning of money and services related to social needs, and the regulation of everyday life. This book describes how West German experts sought to make sense of this vast array of state programs, expenditures, and bureaucracies aimed at solving social problems. Coming from politics, economics, law, social policy, sociology, and philosophy, they sought to conceptualize their state, which was now social (one German word for the welfare state is indeed Sozialstaat), and their society, which was permeated by state policies.

Despite its small size and population, the Dutch Republic functioned as the hub of world trade, shipping, and finance for nearly two centuries. This is the first detailed account of that hegemony from its sixteenth-century origins to the final collapse of the Dutch trading system in the eighteenth century.