The economic history of colonization of India is a contested field. Nationalist historiography emphasized the drain of wealth and deindustrialization. Imperialist historiography point to the globalization of the economy, construction of the railway network and access to the international capital market. This book brings together empirical evidence over four centuries to assess India’s long run development from 1600 and emphasizes the decline and stagnation in agriculture and the failure of colonial policy to increase productivity in this sector.

The chapter argues that prior to Hitler’s accession, Germany’s corporate elite was fatefully ambivalent toward Jews: sympathetic to those who were part of it, suspicious of those who were critical of it or newly arrived in the country. This ambivalence meant that corporate executives were generally neither antisemites nor anti-antisemites or that they were simultaneously both.

The chapter argues that Germany’s major corporate leaders largely agreed between 1918 and 1932 on a self-serving analysis of Germany’s economic problems and an unpopular approach to dealing with them (the Consensus) but splintered and dithered in identifying an appropriate political vehicle for these views (the Dissensus). As a result, they neither defended the Republic nor brought Hitler to power.

This introduction provides a broad overview of the literature on caravan trade and economic history of the Middle East up to the nineteenth century. It is first a survey of existing literature on caravan trade with an emphasis on the role of caravans in the creation of regional markets. It moves then to challenging the paradigm of Silk Roads and argues against the idea of a homogeneous decline of overland trade since the seventeenth century. This introduction helps in bringing back Bedouin, camels, steppe and desert as historical actors by discussing sources and scholarly debates (the relationship between nomads and the Ottoman State in particular).

The Introduction summarizes some relevant works on the topic of Dutch American slavery and presents the main argument of the book. It contends that slavery in New York was primarily rural, that it was profitable, and that the slave population grew mainly on account of its own domestic growth. It will show that New York’s slaves were controlled, bullied, and punished severely, but many were also given a surprising latitude to move around on their own, especially after the American Revolution, when New York’s slaves gradually gained legal freedoms and negotiated, through their own initiative, more room to operate.

The Introduction provides the general context for what this book calls the communal currency tradition in British society. Its chronology starts in the early 1790s when the French revolutionary government’s experiment with the state-issued fiat paper currency, the assignat, caused heated discussion in Britain, which eventually consolidated Britain’s currency exceptionalism. The recent revival of the state theory of money (neo-chartalism) provides a reference point for the book’s unique theoretical outlook, which is explained by drawing upon the existing literature on economics, sociology and historical studies. After an overview of the development of monetary ideas, the communal currency tradition, which was closely associated with the idea of voluntary acceptance, is further explained based upon the writings of Edmund Burke and his involvement in the legal ban on the circulation of assignats in England. The broad outline of the book’s discussion is delineated by presenting the scope of communal currency as it impacted the economic, political, cultural and social aspects of British society.

Marx summed up Europe’s many impacts on world history as showing “what human activity can bring about” – namely, the capacity to undo and remake the human world. Although we have become increasingly aware of the negative side of this release of human energies, in war, ecological destruction, and imperial domination, the positive one survives in the closer contact between peoples, modern industry’s potential to reduce poverty, and the expansion of practical knowledge and scientific understanding. Remaking the World argues that what put Europe at the center of these changes was first the division and fragmentation that persisted through much of its history and then the emergence of spheres of activity that were autonomous in the sense of regulating themselves by principles derived from the activities carried on within them, as opposed to “teleocratic” domains governed by norms that were generated outside themselves. Unlike other attempts to grasp European distinctiveness which focus chiefly on economics and industry, it gives equal attention to culture, science, and the politics of liberty, and makes comparisons based on substantial discussions of counterparts to these developments elsewhere.

The first generation of modern Indian economists in the late nineteenth century became known as the Early Nationalists, as they began India’s fight for independence. When historians and political theorists analyse them, they often portray them as political scientists and nation-builders who mostly regurgitated existing European economic thinking. Much less has been written on their contribution to economics, despite them being the first generation of modern economists in India. This book shows how they produced original, forward-thinking knowledge on economic development. The intention is not to define development a priori, but to use development as an overarching focus to tease out the concepts, theories, models and policy prescriptions that the first generation of modern Indian economists studied and disseminated, and to bring these Indian economists into the global debate around what progress and development mean. This book places these economists into the history of economics and offers economic historians new sources on the Indian economy at the end of the nineteenth century. The book explores their understanding of how India’s economy evolved, their prescriptions for bringing progress back to India, the economic consequences of imperialism, and a global plan for development. By relocating development economics to another time and space, the book uncovers new variations on the idea of development.

The Introduction outlines the book’s scope and familiarizes the reader with the history of Angang and industrial Manchuria. In the process, it positions Mao-era China within multiple bodies of scholarship: The global history of late industrialization; the transnational history of Manchuria; the intersection of geopolitics and technological transfers; and the study of state-owned enterprises in China.

Contrary to the claims of Vietnamese historiography, Chinese settlers had arrived in the water world well before the Viet. Their presence owed much to Cambodia’s focus on maritime trade, its encouragement of multiethnic trading communities, and conflict with Siam over the crucial Gulf of Siam passageway. Chinese from Fujian and Guangdong became the largest demographic group in the kingdom, overseeing foreign trade and forming their own mercenary armies. Their numbers and influence grew further as a result of the dynastic transition from Ming to Qing, competition among armed mercantile organizations for control over the East Asian sea-lanes, and the scramble between Cochinchina and Siam for influence over Cambodia. The enterprising Mo Jiu embodied and exploited these trends in forging his own polity at The Port.

The Miracle

In 1981, the south Indian state of Kerala was among the poorest regions in India. The state's average income was about a third smaller than the national average. In the late 1970s, by average income, Kerala was in the bottom third of India's thirty-odd states. In 2022, per capita income in the state was 50–60 per cent higher than the national average. Among those states large in land size, populous and with a diversified economic base, the state was the fifth richest in terms of average income in 2022. Gujarat, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Telangana were the other four. None of the others saw such a sharp change in relative ranking.

Kerala's economy did not grow steadily throughout these forty years. The acceleration, catching up and overtaking were not more than fifteen years old, twenty at the most. Income growth rates were low for much of the 1980s and the 1990s. The numbers changed sharply only in recent decades. The roots of this extraordinary growth performance, however, were much older. This book is a search for these roots.

It is not a common practice among economists to treat a state in India as the subject of long-term economic history. But ‘Kerala is different’ from all other Indian states. A huge scholarship building from the 1970s and drawing in many social scientists insisted it was different. Although poor, the population of the state lived much longer than the average Indian and had a significantly higher literacy rate than in the rest of India. The scholarship trying to explain this anomaly was mindful of history. But the history had a narrow purpose. It was made to work for a specific question: how did an income-poor region make great strides in human development? The discourse that emerged to answer the question had two critical weaknesses. First, it was too state-focused and neglected to analyse enough market-led changes. Second, it took income poverty for granted. Neither the question nor the answers offered are useful to explain the recent acceleration in income. The explanations could not show how the basic premise of a low income might change someday because the research agenda did not consider that prospect very likely.

Nineteenth-century London was not only the greatest city ever known but it also had an immense port. Sarah Palmer explores how London’s maritime dimension, which included major industries, shaped London physically, economically, socially and profoundly affected the lives and livelihoods of many inhabitants. Until now, the relationship between London and its port has not been sufficiently explored by either the many London historians or by the relatively few historians of the Port of London. Port engineering, architecture, shipbuilding and port labour have received much attention, but are generally considered in isolation from the wider London context. She draws on such existing studies, as well as much new material based on archival research, to provide a wider perspective.

Introduction to the topic, explanation of the objectives and discussion of the state of research.

This book starts with what seems an uncontroversial observation: in spite of impressive economic and technological successes through the first four decades of the twentieth century, it became abundantly clear by 1945 that the German and Japanese brands of capitalism had not worked out very well. Both countries had industrialised more or less effectively. But they remained relatively poor compared with Britain and the United States. They also suffered from extreme social tensions. These factors were both cause and effect of the countries entangling themselves in a war that they could not win, and which made their social and economic situations horrendous, at least initially. Yet, in stark contrast, from the early 1950s onwards, German and Japanese forms of capitalism have played out surprisingly well, with increasing levels of wealth, which was distributed more equitably, and substantially eased social tensions, all of this without any bellicose behaviour. What is more, this remarkable performance has been sustained over an extraordinarily long period of time. The primary question posed in this book, then, is this: Why, in general, have things worked out so much better the second time around? The chapters that follow seek to provide an answer to that simple question.

We can consider, quite rightly, that this book, while being the collective work of more than 70 authors, is overall the posthumous work of Pedro Lains, who sadly passed away on 16 May 2021. Pedro always expressed concern about southern Europe not being sufficiently represented in the analyses of the continent’s economic past. Therefore, he believed that the countries of the Iberian Peninsula shared sufficient common features so as to deserve a monograph, published in English, to address their trajectory and facilitate their integration in European economic history.

His efforts with this book were titanic. He designed the structure of a text that had to span from the Early Middle Ages to the present day. The perspective that he sought was not to analyse the Iberian territories separately but to integrate them in a common vision.

Just over a century old, John Maynard Keynes’s The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919) remains a seminal document of the twentieth century. At the time, the book was a prescient analysis of political events to come. In the decades that followed, this still controversial text became an essential ingredient in the unfolding of history. In this essay, we review the arc of experience since 1919 from the perspective of Keynes’s influence and his changing understanding of economics, politics, and geopolitics. We identify how he, his ideas, and this text became key reference points during times of turbulence as actors sought to manage a range of shocks. Near the end of his life, Keynes would play a central role in planning the world economy’s reconstruction after World War II. We argue that the “global order” that evolved since then, marked by increasingly polarized societies, leaves the community of nations ill prepared to provide key global public goods or to counter critical collective threats.

This brief chapter illustrates the object of the book: to analyse the various dimensions of the notion of power (economic, political, cultural etc.). It also outlines the contents of the book and its political objective, the strategy of structural reforms aimed at reducing inequalities in the social distribution of power.

This book will have two primary aims of analysis: the migration of Flemings and their settlement. The first will be to identify systems and build models of migratory movements within a long-term perspective, i.e. understanding migration paths and causes, networks, strategies and migrants’ personalities. The second will focus on what is commonly known as ‘integration’, that is, the immigrants’ settlement, acculturation and acquisition of their social, economic and political position in the host country. In addition to a detailed treatment of these two aims, the book attempts to evaluate the economic impact of the immigrant community on a specific industry. I will argue that the success of the immigrants was not solely reflected in the rise of their average earnings, but also in the fact that their skills and human capital acquired prior to emigration contributed to the development of the English textile industry in the fourteenth century.

This chapter introduces the study, setting, argument, and plan of progression of Bankrolling Empire. In particular, I introduce the Jhaveri family of Ahmedabad and identify how the Mughal state provided new opportunities and challenges for the family by the early seventeenth century. The reader is left with the idea that traditional explanations of Mughal collapse such as bigotry of emperors, superior fighting power of rival warlords, and communal distrust between Muslim rulers and Hindu subjects are not adequate. Instead, I suggest financial crises were the chief cause that tipped Mughal administration beyond recovery. Such transformations in state and locality in Mughal Gujarat are highlighted by focusing on four generations of a remarkable business family, the Jhaveris of Ahmedabad, and their relations with political elites. The Jhaveris were deeply involved in political intrigue, courtly life, and the finances of Mughal officials and their rivals across two centuries.