In the introductory chapter, I develop the question that inspired my research: Why certain manifestations of historical imperialism are associated with positive developmental outcomes while others are blamed for persistent underdevelopment. I introduce the concepts of extractive institutions and military colonialism: the forceful recruitment in the military of borderland peoples to defend the territorial integrity of the state. Chapter 1 also presents the empirical puzzle that motivates the focus of the three main empirical chapters (4–6). It reveals that modern-day access to public goods changes precisely at the line of demarcation between the formerly civilian and military administered areas along the southern borders of the Habsburg Empire, a line that stretched for over three centuries through the territory of modern-day Croatia, Serbia, and Romania.

The history of environmental economics is interwined with other histories and movements. These include (1) humanitys thinking about its relationship to Nature; (2) a redefinition of economics from the study of material welfare to the study of tradeoffs, including tradeoffs between developing resources and preserving them; (3) rising consumer movements and a shift in economic focus from the producer to the consumer, which in turn facilitiated a shift from thinking about the exploitation of resources to the enjoyment of preserved landscapes; (4) developments in economic theories of externalities and public goods; and (5) the increasing involvement of economics in government policy, from agricultural and resource economics to planning government spending and regulation.

We desribe the basic geography of Brazil, showing the major biomes, rivers, and soil distribution of Brazil

In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, members of an established, English-speaking middle class built a new category of work for themselves. This book uses US, British, Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand occupation statistics, archives, professional journals, and newspapers to understand what the history of nursing, accountancy, teaching, medicine, law, engineering, journalism, and social work can tell us about class in the ‘long twentieth century’. This chapter gives a historical and theoretical introduction to the rise of the professional class as a distinctly transnational event. The Anglo world is not a matter of comparative ‘case studies’, but a network of English-speaking communities that were regionally distinctive but operated as part of a shared cultural and economic world. It was a world built on Indigenous dispossession. Settlers brought their moral frameworks to bear on the ‘civilizing’ that they believed they needed. The virtues that they built into each profession, such as duty, probity, and charity, were performed as real, embodied work in every settlement. Their morality was made material and invested for social and economic profit. They became virtue capitalists.

This introduction develops some ideas for thinking about the compartmentalized nature of international political economy under Bretton Woods and the institutional settlements of energy and finance that made it possible. After initial institutional failures, this compartmentalized global architecture came to oversee a politics of growth that eventually incorporated the Soviet Union as an enthusiastic participant. The Soviets likewise participated in the dismantling of that architecture precisely by helping rearrange the relationships of energy and finance that had established it in the first place. This book shows that a history of the development of post–Bretton Woods capitalism requires the inclusion of the Soviet Union as one of its architects.

During the Renaissance, central–northern Italy was both Europe’s intellectual and artistic hub and its most prosperous economy. From the seventeenth to early nineteenth century, the Italian economy drifted from center to periphery, in a long economic decline. During that decline, Italy was fragmented and subject to foreign occupations. Structural divides got deeper and a distance between citizens and public authorities emerged. We summarize the fruits of Italy’s “modern economic growth” since political unification through four periods in Italy’s transition from poverty to abundance: a) 1861–1896 slow growth and divergence from Western Europe’s leading economies, b) secular movement from “periphery” to the “center” of the developed world; 1896–1995 was a century of almost uninterrupted, if uneven, convergence with the world’s richest countries, c) 1995–2007 was a period of losing ground: slow growth and relative decline, d) 2008–2019 from relative to the absolute decline of the Italian economy.

This chapter introduces the extent and importance of black markets in Occupied France, reviews the historiography on the black market since 1945, and explains the central themes in the book.

This chapter presents the first annual estimates of Liberia’s economic performance based on archival data since its declaration of independence in 1847 until 2000. A lack of easily accessible data has been one of the main reasons why Liberia has appeared so infrequently in comparative work in African economic history. The collection of data was a central component of imperial governance, and historians have relied on the legacy of those efforts; independent states had both different incentives and, often, lower capacity. However, this chapter shows that it is possible to reconstruct through qualitative records annual estimates of trade and government finances dating back to Liberia’s foundation. These estimates then form the foundation for the first series of historical national accounts which can be used to compare Liberia to other countries. They show the Liberian economy during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when many other African economies were growing. A period of rapid economic growth began during the 1930s, which continued for much of the next half century before a catastrophic reversal from 1980. This chapter sets the stage for the more thematic chapters to follow.

There was an international financial crisis in 1825, centered on the London money market. Nine sovereign governments defaulted on their debts, more than 100 banks failed in England and Wales, and the British economy was thrown into recession. That crisis also featured speculation, new financial innovations, and large-scale mismanagement. Nobody was prosecuted for anything, nor was there any indication or suggestion that anybody should have been. The idea of prosecuting the entire financial community would have been unintelligible and unthinkable. But that was new. Throughout the long eighteenth century, crisis after crisis had been followed by efforts at public accountability, taking various forms from forensic accounting to prosecution before public tribunals. Demands for accountability never quite went away, but the 1825 crisis marked a shift. It was the first financial crisis that was not the fault of anybody in particular. How did certain forms of economic endeavor come to be understood as realms of impunity, where private actions might have disastrous public consequences and yet be exempted from public accountability? This book shows how the legal, cultural, and political order of financial capitalism moved from the world of the chambre de justice to the world of the nineteenth century and after, where financial crises and economic disasters were understood as inevitable outbursts of irrationality or as unpredictable accidents. Somehow, between about 1690 and about 1830, financial crises stopped being crimes and became natural disasters.

France was at the centre of a transnational process of nineteenth-century European state formation. Since states have often reformed themselves as a result of interaction with one another, the book begins by taking a wide angle on the development of the French case, situating it within the context of state formation in Europe and the Americas. Not only were the French influenced by the progress of rival states, they also shaped the way in which other European and American states were formed. Under Napoleon, for instance, the French exported their tax system across Europe, shaping the subsequent development of taxation in large parts of Germany, Italy and the Low Countries. Also discussed here is the historiography of the French state, and its emphasis on the Revolutionary and Napoleonic period of 1789–1815 as the formative years of the nineteenth-century French state. This book, by contrast, demonstrates the importance of the post-Napoleonic period in state formation, and the opening chapter outlines this argument.

This introduction sketches the main arguments about the contribution of farming books to the development of agrarian capitalism and lays the groundwork for the detailed argument in later chapters. It first offers a critique of the standard research paradigm, the enlightenment model, which only evaluates the role of books with respect to technological change and is insensitive to early modern social relations. It then explains the research method and scope, focused on British agricultural books printed between 1660 and 1800. Since the structure of the book is thematic, it presents a broad survey of agricultural books and authors to serve as a reference for the rest of the book. It ends by summarising how the core argument is developed over seven chapters.

The Introduction provides an overview of the themes and arguments of the book. It first situates this book within the larger literature on foreign banks in modern China, the history of globalization and the history of international and multinational banking. It then presents the ‘frontier bank’ and the Chinese frontier as a conceptual framework for understanding the activities of foreign banks in modern China. Then it introduces the four main themes of the book: financial internationalization, transnational networks, the conflict between nationalism and economic globalization, and risk. Finally, the Introduction discusses how this book fits into larger discussions about modern China’s relations with the global economy, modern Chinese economic development and economic globalization. The Introduction concludes with an overview of the book’s chapters.