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This chapter covers discussion during and after the 1990s of factors that had long been considered as potential crime prevention—incarceration, demography, and economic expansion. With respect to these longtime candidates for credit in crime prevention, the 1990s were a cascade of best-case outcomes—high levels of incarceration, a drop in the proportion of the population in high-risk youth categories, and unprecedented prosperity for the same nine years that crime declined. With an epidemic of good tidings, a crime decline in the 1990s should have been expected, even though only about half of the actual crime drop appears to have been caused by favorable trends in longstanding correlates of crime rates.

This chapter explores, from a metropolitan perspective, the government's approach to the expansion of British influence beyond the territorial British Empire in the mid-nineteenth century, and the nature of the relationship that developed between Britain and several regions where such expansion occurred. It primarily concentrates on economics because commercial and financial intervention was recognized at the time as critical to reshaping such areas in Britain's interests, however those interests were ultimately defined. It also provides a general assessment of both Britain's success in this reshaping and the degree to which, in these years, the British economy in practice asserted its influence over such regions outside the colonial Empire. Free trade was a principle that involved British economic expansion overseas and implied an important role for the British government in the encouragement of this. In the mid-nineteenth century, British economic and political influence overseas expanded considerably.

This chapter focuses on the debate over the size of fiscal multipliers, which measure the impact of fiscal policy on output. The Great Recession has refocused attention on the effectiveness of fiscal policy multipliers, and there seems to be broad agreement that expansionary fiscal policy has a positive impact on growth, at least in the short term. However, it is unclear whether fiscal multipliers are larger or smaller than unity. Based on a comprehensive review of the literature, the chapter concludes that the size of first-year government spending multipliers lies between 0.3 and 1.0 during normal times, with revenue multipliers being significantly smaller. The size of multipliers tends to be influenced by a variety of factors, however, including the state of the economy, monetary policy stance, degree of trade openness, automatic stabilizers, and types of fiscal instruments used. In particular, multipliers could be significantly larger during economic downturns than during economic expansions. The finding has important policy implications for the design of fiscal adjustment plans.

Edward Gibbon, at the start of his epic history, looked back on the Age of the Antonines as the period when the human race was most happy, cultivated, and prosperous. It was ruled by emperors ‘severe to themselves, indulgent to the imperfections of others, just and beneficent to all mankind’. A historian with a more modest province, the history of Wales in the recent period, may perhaps look back on the Edwardian era from about 1905 down to the coming of war in 1914 as Wales's Antonine Age, a period when the economic prosperity, national awareness, and political creativity of the Welsh people were most effectively deployed for the benefit of themselves and their neighbours. Almost all the literature of this era, the periodicals, the daily press, the memoirs, and scholarly works provide testimony to the golden glow of optimism and hope that characterized this happy generation.

While architecture constructed on Hong Kong's harbor in the pre-handover period showed signs of the city being haunted by Sydney, and thus being perhaps less confident of its own identity than it might have seemed during that period of economic expansion, a much more traumatic civic haunting also became apparent during that pre-handover period. This was a haunting by Shanghai. The large flow of people from Shanghai to Hong Kong around 1949 was one way in which the fate of the two cities became linked, with many of those migrants going on to play significant roles in Hong Kong's political and economic life, even up to the present day. However, with the approach of the handover something else started to happen. As Hong Kong began to worry that its way of life might be threatened by reunification with the Mainland, it began to notice similarities between its historical trajectory.

This chapter discusses Bermuda's maritime economy as it settled into established trades and maritime activities. The island developed distinctive characteristics that set it apart within the larger British Atlantic world, on which it now almost entirely depended. Bermudians pursued a diverse array of maritime enterprises to better exploit Atlantic opportunities and cope with frequent imperial wars, piracy, rapid regional economic expansion, and market volatility. By connecting Anglo-American regions with each other and making their island an intelligence center, Bermudian tramp traders in small, fast sloops served larger imperial goals as they pursued profit for their own ends. The chapter examines how Bermuda's shipping and shipbuilding served to integrate British American shipping and commerce as a whole, and how the island became an important but almost invisible central hub of intercolonial commerce and communication.

This chapter presents the fifteenth century as a period of unprecedented maritime exploration and economic expansion overseas by Iberian powers, not only in the Americas but also in Africa and Asia. The enterprise of La Isabela drew upon various modes of expansion, combining elements from Columbus's own mercantile seafaring experience with the reconquest and colonial expansion of the Spanish Crown. European expansion in the fifteenth century was fueled by the fervor of the Iberian reconquista, the search for gold in Africa, and efforts to secure trade with Asia. It was made possible in large part by developments in shipbuilding technology and navigation, and Portugal led the way in this endeavor, capturing Ceuta on the Moroccan coast in 1415 and continuing throughout the fifteenth century to establish agricultural and trading entrepots along the west coast of Africa.

This chapter describes the economy in North Carolina, which is influenced by events at the national level. Indeed, because the U.S. economy is so highly integrated in national markets, much of North Carolina's change and development are linked to national trends. For example, national economic expansions and recessions are echoed at the state level by similar booms and busts. In addition, national technological, demographic, and production changes are mirrored at the state level. The chapter sets the national context for North Carolina's economy by tracing the nation's economic development since 1970. This analysis serves as the basis for evaluating North Carolina's economic progress. Although three and a half decades constitute but the blink of an eye in recorded history, life changed more dramatically between 1970 and 2005 than was the case in some earlier centuries. Like never before, people, countries, and economies became interrelated and interconnected.

The first modern gold rush began when gold was discovered in Northern California simultaneous with the United States acquiring California in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. In the long run, this remarkable coincidence helped send the nation on its trajectory toward global power. In the short run, three traits of this rush—its wealth, its boom of population and demand, and its isolation—created a dynamic in California that caused consequences that would be shared by other rushes across the world: catastrophic effects on the indigenous population, a telescoped development into a modern economy, and expanding connections to a wider world. That third effect was fed by another coincidence. The gold strike of 1848 came just as American and European interests in the Pacific world were maturing. The near-instant expansion of national influence—in this case, toward Asia—suggests another possible pattern of gold-rush imperialism.

This introductory chapter briefly explores how labor market experiences influence crime. The general public easily accepts the idea that crime can be attributed to a poor economy. But recurring anomalies suggest that this may not, or at least not always, be true. For example, during the Great Depression of the 1930s the rates of some crimes declined, even though unemployment rates exceeded twenty-five percent for extended periods. During the 1960s, along with sustained economic expansion the United States experienced large increases in both property and violent crime rates. Considering the link between economy and crime more globally, it is no secret among criminologists that comparative poverty rates are not highly correlated with crime rates within western industrialized nations. And while some of the poorest nations of the word have high crime rates, many poor countries have relatively low rates.

This chapter describes the events that led to the mainstream acceptance of Chinese food in the United States. This dramatic turn of events came as a result of two developments: a profound demographic and socioeconomic transformation of Chinese America; and the expansion of the American economy. At the conjunction of these developments is Chinatown's metamorphosis from a target of intense racial hatred to a popular tourist destination. The United States's rapidly growing economy generated more wealth and leisure as well as a swelling army of tourists, hungry for new things to see and to savor. A steadily increasing number of these travelers, especially those in the lower-middle and working classes, went to Chinatown to sightsee. It is in Chinatown that many American mass consumers discovered Chinese food.

This chapter describes the reasons for Florida's historic commitment to the Democratic Party and how that loyalty lasted up to World War II. The Civil War and the events of Reconstruction positioned Florida, like the South, solidly in the Democratic-fold. That relationship was strengthened further under the leadership of Democratic President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the programs of the New Deal. It was the New Deal that provided Floridians with their only relief from a crippling Depression that devastated the state for 14 long years. After World War II, Florida's leaders pursued tourism, population growth, and modernization in an effort to avoid a return to the crippling effects of the Great Depression. The postwar population and economic expansion brought prosperity to the state, but it also triggered a confrontation between natives and newcomers over whose political and cultural values would direct the state's modernization. That confrontation defined the 1950s and led to a political free-for-all in which natives blocked school desegregation, refused to reapportion the state, and blocked redistricting of the legislature. The outcome of this clash remained unresolved at the end of the decade of the 1950s and so did Florida's future.

This chapter argues that in a number of Woolson’s early Civil War poems and stories, her affection for Zeph Spalding gets displaced onto the Confederate brigadier general John Hunt Morgan. In this guise among others, Zeph haunts Woolson’s writing throughout her career: in Anne (1880), Woolson’s first novel, as Captain Ward Heathcote; and in Horace Chase (1894), Woolson’s last novel, as the eponymous Yankee businessman. Throughout, Zeph functions as a cipher that reveals Woolson’s understanding of the Civil War and its aftermath, the economic expansion that followed, and the imperialist zeitgeist of nineteenth-century America.

This chapter examines night life in American cities after the electrification in the 1920s. It explains that after electrification nighttime entertainment was still concentrated in the most brilliantly illuminated streets but they drew a different type of crowd: younger, more open to working-class participation, and not quite so heavily male. It also discusses how electricity enabled economic expansion to take place during hours of darkness as it encouraged night work in factories and night travel on trolleys.

This chapter looks at how the Song dynasty (960–1279) reconsolidated central power and eliminated the provincial regimes that had developed in the wake of Tang decentralization. During the first thirty years after 960, they fostered astute policies that promoted and took advantage of continuing economic expansion. To administer their new polity, the Song emperors recruited through the examination system a new class of bureaucratic elite that Western writings on China often call the ‘literati’. The aristocrats of Tang had given way to the merchants and bureaucrats of Song. However, although the Song expanded Chinese economic and political power into South China, it never completed the conquest of all the traditional Chinese lands in the north. The Song coexisted with a series of alien or conquest dynasties to its north and west.