Economic History

The inspiration for this book comes from the words of Adam Smith: ‘Consumption is the sole end of and purpose of all production.…’ This book concentrates, in that spirit, on people rather on things; it describes the overall income and wealth of Britain, its growth, and how that income and wealth was produced by and distributed between different people in the population. Population growth has a central place, as do the changes in home and workplace, in the transformation of the lives of successive generations in Victorian and Edwardian Britain. Between 1830 and 1914 Britain became the world's major trading nation, carrier of the majority of the world's goods, by far the largest investor overseas, and the centre of the world's financial system. It was an exceptional time in the history of the country and one to which many look back, even a hundred years later, with nostalgia. This book describes and assesses what was achieved in those eighty-five years.

Social science and social reform flourished in Imperial Germany, and the historical economist Gustav Schmoller made fundamental contributions to both. Despite this, historians have neglected him. Questioning the term ‘German Historical School’ associated with Schmoller, this book reveals the European context of Schmoller's thought and the influence of empiricism, statistics, and advances in the natural sciences on his choice of methods. By exploring the social context in detail, it demonstrates how the nexus of young scholars around Schmoller fundamentally transformed German economics into a tool of social reform which was directly relevant to the many ‘social questions’ raised by rapid industrialization and urbanization in Germany in the 1860s. These reform efforts were novel in that they put forth the idea that inequality and poverty were ills emerging from the division of labour which society had an obligation to remedy. As a result, an awareness of the social implications of individual economic action emerged which proved remarkably useful for the development of social policy. Although the dissemination of this reform message influenced public opinion and put social reform on the political agenda, this book shows that Schmoller and his colleagues remained a beleaguered group, attacked from all political directions. It brings the fissures within German liberalism into sharp relief, revealing the persistence of a potent ideal of classlessness that fundamentally shaped German social policy. The author makes a unique and much-needed contribution to our understanding of the thought and milieu of Gustav Schmoller, the origins of social reform, and the development of the social sciences in Germany. The resulting volume addresses central questions in the historiography of the German Empire.

This book builds up a comprehensive analysis of the fiscal history of Europe over six centuries. It forms a fundamental starting-point for an understanding of the distinctiveness of the emerging European states, and highlights the issue of fiscal power as an essential prerequisite for the development of the modern state. The study underlines the importance of technical developments by the state, its capacity to innovate, and, however imperfect the techniques, the greater detail and sophistication of accounting practice towards the end of the period. New taxes had been developed, new wealth had been tapped, and new mechanisms of enforcement had been established. In general, these developments were made in western Europe; the lack of progress in some fiscal systems, especially those in eastern Europe, is an issue of historical importance in its own right and lends particular significance to the chapters on Poland and Russia. By the 18th century, ‘mountains of debt’ and high debt-revenue ratios had become the norm in western Europe, yet in the east only Russia was able to adapt to the western model by 1815. The capacity of governments to borrow, and the interaction of the constraints on borrowing and the power to tax had become the real test of the fiscal powers of the ‘modern state’ by 1800–15.

This volume on the social and economic history of colonial India traces the evolution of towns and merchant communities in north India from the decline of Mughal dominion to the consolidation of British Empire following the 1857 mutiny. It provides detailed studies of towns, bazaars, merchants and service people against the background of crucial developments in the political economy of pre-colonial and early colonial north India. It explores the patterns of social and political relations which derive from economic activity and not with economic development or with volumes of trade and production as such. It also analyses the social organisation, ideology and politics of the Indian middle classes of the later nineteenth century by tracing some of their indigenous origins in the society of the eighteenth-century successor states to the Mughal dominion and also in the conflicts and accommodations of early colonial rule. The book analyses the response of the inhabitants of the Ganga Valley to the upheavals in the eighteenth century that paved the way for the incoming British. It shows how the colonial enterprise was built on an existing resilient network of towns, rural bazaars, and merchant communities; and how in turn, colonial trade and administration were moulded by indigenous forms of commerce and politics.

This book explains how efforts to support global capitalism became a core objective of the League of Nations. Based on new research drawn together from archives on three continents, it explores how the world's first ever inter-governmental organization sought to understand and shape the powerful forces that influenced the global economy, and the prospects for peace. It traces how the League was drawn into economics and finance by the exigencies of the slump and hyperinflation after the First World War, when it provided essential financial support to Austria, Hungary, Greece, Bulgaria and Estonia and, thereby, established the founding principles of financial intervention, international oversight and the twentieth-century notion of international ‘development’. But it is the impact of the Great Depression after 1929 that lies at the heart of this history. The book examines how the League of Nations sought to combat economic nationalism, and promoted economic and monetary co-operation in a variety of, sometimes contradictory, ways. Many of the economists, bureaucrats and policy-advisors who worked for it played a seminal role in the history of international relations and social science, and their efforts did not end with the outbreak of the Second World War. In 1940 the League established an economic mission in the United States, where it contributed to the creation of organizations for the post-war world the United Nations Organization, the IMF, the World Bank, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization as well as to plans for European reconstruction and co-operation.

Consumers in eighteenth-century England were firmly embedded in an expanding world of goods, one that incorporated a range of novel foods (tobacco, chocolate, coffee and tea) and new supplies of more established commodities, including sugar, spices and dried fruits. Much has been written about the attraction of these goods, which went from being novelties or expensive luxuries in the mid seventeenth century to central elements of the British diet a century or so later. They have been linked to the rise of Britain as a commercial and imperial power, whilst their consumption is seen as transforming many aspects of British society and culture, from mealtimes to gender identity. Despite this huge significance to ideas of consumer change, we know remarkably little about the everyday processes through which groceries were sold, bought and consumed. In tracing the lines of supply that carried groceries from merchants to consumers, this book reveals how changes in retailing and shopping were central to the broader transformation of consumption and consumer practices, but also questions established ideas about the motivations underpinning consumer choices. It demonstrates the dynamic nature of eighteenth-century retailing; the importance of advertisements in promoting sales and shaping consumer perceptions, and the role of groceries in making shopping an everyday activity. At the same time, it shows how both retailers and their customers were influenced by the practicalities and pleasures of consumption. They were active agents in consumer change, shaping their own practices rather than caught up in a single socially-inclusive cultural project such as politeness or respectability.

How much did the British Empire cost, and how did Britain pay for it? This volume explores a source of funds much neglected in research on the financial structure of the Empire, namely revenue raised in the colonies themselves. Requiring colonies to be financially self-sufficient was one of a range of strategies the British government used to lower the cost of imperial expansion to its own Treasury. Focusing on British colonies in Africa, the book examines how their efforts to balance their budgets influenced their relationships with local political stakeholders as well as the imperial government. It finds that efforts to balance the budget shaped colonial public policy at every level, and that compromises made in the face of financial constraints shaped the political and economic institutions that were established by colonial administrations and inherited by the former colonies at independence.Using both quantitative data on public revenue and expenditure as well as archival records from archives in both the UK and the former colonies, this book follows the development of fiscal policies in British Africa from the beginning of colonial rule through the first years of independence. During the formative years of colonial administration, both the structure of taxation and the allocation of public spending reflected the two central goals of colonial rule: maintaining order as cheaply as possible, and encouraging export production. The book examines how the fiscal systems established before 1914 coped with the upheavals of subsequent decades, including the two world wars, the Great Depression, and finally the transfer of power.