History

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This book offers a new approach to the pre-industrial past in Europe and the Mediterranean basin from the Roman Republic to the fall of Napoleon. It takes as its starting point E. A. Wrigley’s concept of ‘organic economies’ and their reliance on the land for energy and raw materials. It first considers the constraints on productivity, transportation, and the spatial organization of the economy. The second section analyses the constraints imposed by military technology and by the organic economy on the tactical, operational, and strategic use of armed force, and the consequences of the spread of firearms in recorded history’s first energy revolution. This is followed by an analysis of the military and economic constraints on the political integration of space through the formation of geographically extensive political units. The volume concludes with the demographic and economic consequences of the investment of manpower and resources in war. This volume also considers why so much potential or organic economies to support economic and political development remained unrealized. Endemic mass poverty curtailed demand, limiting incentives for investment and innovation, and keeping output growth below what was technologically possible. Resource shortages prevented rulers from establishing a fiscal apparatus capable of appropriating such resources as were physically available. But economic inefficiency also created under-utilized resources that could potentially be mobilized in pursuit of political power. The volume gives an innovative account of this potential — and why it was realized in the ancient world rather than the medieval west — together with a new analysis of the gunpowder revolution and the inability of rulers to meet the consequential costs within the confines of an organic economy.

The financial humbling of a great power in any age demands explanation. In the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–14) Louis XIV's France had to fight way beyond its borders and the costs of war rose to unprecedented heights. With royal income falling as economic activity slowed down, the widening gap between revenue and expenditure led the government into a series of desperate expedients. Ever-larger quantities of credit, often obtained through fairly novel and poorly-understood financial instruments, were combined with ill-advised monetary manipulations. Moreover, through poor ministerial management the system of earmarking revenues for spending descended into chaos. All this forced up the cost of loans, foreign exchange, and military logistics as government contractors and bankers built the mounting risks into the price of their contracts and sought to profit from the situation. There was already a problem with controlling royal contractors, who ran the entire financial machinery, but this only grew worse, not least because the government further indemnified and bailed out men deemed too essential to fail. In some cases entrepreneurs even managed to penetrate the corridors of the ministries, either as heads of royal agencies or even as junior ministers. This added up to nothing less than an early military-industrial complex. As state debt climbed to astronomical levels and financial instruments collapsed in value France's chances of remaining the superpower of the age shrank. The military decline of a great power often goes hand-in-hand with its financial decline, but rarely so dramatically as in early eighteenth-century France.