A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY21 start with S start with S
It is only when a prime necessity thrusts itself upon public attention by its absence that a person ceases to take it for granted. Only when he no longer has it, does he realize what an important ingredient for his palate and digestion is plain, ordinary salt, necessary alike for man and beast. He then recalls that the salt licks and salt springs have from the earliest times been centers of interest and development.
The author has searched into the archives of most of the states of the old confederacy, and also into departments of knowledge remote from her own, so that she has had to delve into geological libraries, consult colleagues in the fields of chemistry and physiology, and do more sums in arithmetic than have fallen to her lot since she was in the primary school. But it has been a pleasant and profitable search.
Economic modernity is so closely associated with nationhood that it is impossible to imagine a modern state without an equally modern economy. Even so, most people would have difficulty defining a modern economy and its connection to nationhood. In Saving the Nation, Margherita Zanasi explores this connection by examining the first nation-building attempt in China after the fall of the empire in 1911.
Challenging the assumption that nations are products of technological and socioeconomic forces, Zanasi argues that it was notions of what constituted a modern nation that led the Nationalist nation-builders to shape China’s institutions and economy. In their reform effort, they confronted several questions: What characterized a modern economy? What role would a modern economy play in the overall nation-building effort? And how could China pursue economic modernization while maintaining its distinctive identity? Zanasi expertly shows how these questions were negotiated and contested within the Nationalist Party. Silenced in the Mao years, these dilemmas are reemerging today as a new leadership once again redefines the economic foundation of the nation.
Diverted by the dramatic military and political events of July 1944, few Americans realized the significance of an international conference taking place at Bretton Woods, a mountain resort in New Hampshire, far from the battle zones. There United Nations experts were completing plans for a world monetary and financial system that they hoped would create a prosperous, efficient global economy and avert economic tensions that might lead to another world war. Until the dollar crisis of 1971, decisions made at Bretton Woods provided the institutions and rules for international finance. The conference ushered in an era of unprecedented expansion of world trade and prosperity.
Based on extensive research in previously unavailable sources, A Search for Solvency relates intriguing and often complicated issues of economic analysis and diplomatic history. It offers a succinct and comprehensive survey of international monetary development from the collapse of the pre–World War I gold standard to the devaluation of the dollar in 1971. In effect, it explains the origins of late twentieth-century global inflation and currency problems.
The author details how the ghost of the Great Depression, the failure of monetary reconstruction efforts after World War I, and the memory of the nineteenth-century gold standard guided efforts to construct the Bretton Woods system. This preoccupation with the past, as well as political constraints, produced a monetary system protected against past dangers—fluctuating currencies, controls, and deflation—but dangerously vulnerable to inflationary pressures. The weaknesses of Bretton Woods, a system geared to an era in which economic power was concentrated in the United States, became visible in the 1960s and painfully apparent by the mid-1970s.
John L. Neufeld offers a comprehensive historical treatment of the economics that shaped electric utilities. Compared with most industries, the organization of the electric utility industry is not—and cannot be—economically efficient. Most industries are kept by law in a state of fair competition, but the capital necessary to start an electric company—generators, transmission and distribution systems, and land and buildings—is so substantial that few companies can enter the market and compete. Therefore, the natural state of the electric utility industry since its inception has been a monopoly subject to government oversight. These characteristics of electric utilities—and electricity’s importance—have created over time sharp political controversies, and changing public policies have dramatically changed the industry’s structure to an extent matched by few other industries. Neufeld outlines the struggles that shaped the industry’s development, and shows how the experience of electric utilities provides insight into the design of economic institutions, including today’s new large-scale markets.
The latest addition to the University of Chicago Press’s Collected Works of F. A. Hayek series, The Sensory Order and Other Writings on the Foundations of Theoretical Psychology pairs the book, originally published in 1952, with additional essays related to The Sensory Order’s key themes, including a student paper from 1920 in which Hayek outlined the basic ideas he fully developed in the 1952 book. Rounding out the volume is an insightful introduction by editor Viktor Vanberg that sketches out the central problems Hayek was grappling with when he wrote The Sensory Order and the influential role this early thinking on theoretical psychology would play over the next six decades of his career. The book also features ample footnotes and citations for further reading, making this an essential contribution to the series.
In this broad, interdisciplinary study, William Van Norman describes how each type of plantation and the amount of manual labor it required directly influenced the nature of slave life in that community. Slaves on coffee plantations lived in a unique context in comparison to that of their fellow slaves on sugar plantations, one that gave them greater flexibility in cultural and artistic creativity. To gain a deeper understanding of plantation slavery in Cuba, Van Norman explores what life and labor was like for coffee slaves and how it was different from what sugar slaves experienced. Shade-Grown Slavery reconstructs their world and in turn deconstructs the picture we now have of Cuba in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Ultimately, Shade-Grown Slavery reveals the lives of enslaved Africans on Cuban coffee plantations and shows how they were able to maintain and transform their cultural traditions in spite of slavery.
Understanding the challenges of corporate governance is central to our comprehension of the economic dynamics driving corporations today. Among the most important institutions in capitalism today, corporations and joint-stock companies had their origins in Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. And as they became more prevalent, the issue of internal governance became more pressing. At stake—and very much contested—was the allocation of rights and obligations among shareholders, directors, and managers.
This comprehensive account of the development of corporate governance in Britain and Ireland during its earliest stages highlights the role of political factors in shaping the evolution of corporate governance as well as the important debates that arose about the division of authority and responsibility. Political and economic institutions confronted similar issues, including the need for transparency and accountability in decision making and the roles of electors and the elected, and this book emphasizes how political institutions—from election procedures to assemblies to annual reporting—therefore provided apt models upon which companies drew readily. Filling a gap in the literature on early corporate economy, this book provides insight into the origins of many ongoing modern debates.
Author Jon Wallace tells the story of evolving living conditions as the sheep industry came to encompass innumerable families of modest means. The transformation improved many New Mexicans’ lives and helped establish the territory as a productive part of the United States. There was a cost, however, with widespread ecological changes to the lands—brought about in large part by heavy grazing. Following the US annexation of New Mexico, new markets for mutton and wool opened. Well-connected, well-financed Anglo merchants and growers who had recently arrived in the territory took advantage of the new opportunity and joined their Hispanic counterparts in entering the sheep industry.
The Sheep Industry of Territorial New Mexico situates this socially imbued economic story within the larger context of the environmental consequences of open-range grazing while examining the relationships among Hispanic, Anglo, and Indigenous people in the region. Historians, students, general readers, and specialists interested in the history of agriculture, labor, capitalism, and the US Southwest will find Wallace’s analysis useful and engaging.
ONE OF THE WALL STREET JOURNAL'S 10 BEST BOOKS OF 2024
How inflation and deflation fears shape American democracy.
Many foundational moments in American economic history—the establishment of paper money, wartime price controls, the rise of the modern Federal Reserve—occurred during financial panics as prices either inflated or deflated sharply. The government’s decisions in these moments, intended to control price fluctuations, have produced both lasting effects and some of the most contentious debates in the nation’s history.
A sweeping history of the United States’ economy and politics, Shock Values reveals how the American state has been shaped by a massive, ever-evolving effort to insulate its economy from the real and perceived dangers of price fluctuations. Carola Binder narrates how the pains of rising and falling prices have brought lasting changes for every generation of Americans. And with each brush with price instability, the United States has been reinvented—not as a more perfect union, but as a reflection of its most recent failures.
Shock Values tells the untold story of prices and price stabilization in the United States. Expansive and enlightening, Binder recounts the interest-group politics, legal battles, and economic ideas that have shaped a nation from the dawn of the republic to the present.
Opening with Hayek's arguments against market socialism, the volume continues with his writings on the economics of war, many in response to the proposals made in John Maynard Keynes's famous pamphlet, How to Pay for the War. The last section presents articles that anticipated The Road to Serfdom, Hayek's classic meditation on the dangers of collectivism. An appendix contains a number of topical book reviews written by Hayek during this crucial period, and a masterful introduction by the volume editor, Bruce Caldwell, sets Hayek's work in context.
Socialism and War will interest not just fans of The Road to Serfdom, but anyone concerned with the ongoing debates over the propriety of government intervention in the economy.
"When he wrote The Road to Serfdom, [Hayek's] was a voice in the wilderness. Now the fight [has] been taken up by people all over the world, by institutions and movements, and the ideas that seemed so strange to many in 1944 can be found from scholarly journals to television programs."—Thomas Sowell, Forbes
"Intellectually [Hayek] towers like a giant oak in a forest of saplings."—Chicago Tribune
"Each new addition to The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek, the University of Chicago's painstaking series of reissues and collections, is a gem."—Liberty on Volume IX of The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek
Thomas Prentice Kettell was an outstanding spokesman of that group of pre-Civil War Northerners who earnestly believed that it was possible to save their country from the horrors of a sectional conflict, who worked many years to prevent the threatened dissolution of the Union, but zealously supported the national government during the Civil War in the hope that military victory would achieve what thirty years of wrangling, negotiation, and compromise had failed to accomplish-namely the preservation of a united North and South. Most of this Northern group were linked by economic ties to the planters of the South. As merchants, shippers, and financiers they largely depended upon the cotton trade for much of their prosperity; hence they opposed governmental policies which they believed would disturb their connections with the South and the foundations on which their economic prosperity and well being rested. But the fact that their ideas and position were founded on selfish economic interests did not make their action dishonest or unpatriotic.
Southern Wealth and Northern Profits was favorably received in the South where Kettell’s free trade principles, sympathetic attitude toward slavery, and his interest in Southern economic development had long been known. Moderate Southerners hoped the book might be helpful toward a compromise that would prevent secession, whereas radicals hoped it would further the cause of secession.
Jeffrey Sklansky’s wide-ranging study comprises three chronological parts devoted to major episodes in the career of the money question. First, the fight over the innovation of paper money in colonial New England. Second, the battle over the development of commercial banking in the new United States. And third, the struggle over the national banking system and the international gold standard in the late nineteenth century. Each section explores a broader problem of power that framed each conflict in successive phases of capitalist development: circulation, representation, and association. The three parts also encompass intellectual biographies of opposing reformers for each period, shedding new light on the connections between economic thought and other aspects of early American culture. The result is a fascinating, insightful, and deeply considered contribution to the history of capitalism.
As the Warsaw bureau chief for the Financial Times, Jan Cienski spent more than a decade talking with the people who did something that had never been done before: recreating a market economy out of a socialist one. Poland had always lagged behind wealthier Western Europe, but in the 1980s the gap had grown to its widest in centuries. But the corrupt Polish version of communism also created the conditions for its eventual revitalization, bringing forth a remarkably resilient and entrepreneurial people prepared to brave red tape and limited access to capital. In the 1990s, more than a million Polish people opened their own businesses, selling everything from bicycles to leather jackets, Japanese VCRs, and romance novels. The most business-savvy turned those primitive operations into complex corporations that now have global reach.
Well researched and accessibly and entertainingly written, Start-Up Poland tells the story of the opening bell in the East, painting lively portraits of the men and women who built successful businesses there, what their lives were like, and what they did to catapult their ideas to incredible success. At a time when Poland’s new right-wing government plays on past grievances and forms part of the populist and nationalist revolution sweeping the Western world, Cienski’s book also serves as a reminder that the past century has been the most successful in Poland’s history.
Hayek argues that the vast number of elements whose interactions create social structures and institutions make it unlikely that social science can predict precise outcomes. Instead, he contends, we should strive to simply understand the principles by which phenomena are produced. For Hayek this modesty of aspirations went hand in hand with his concern over widespread enthusiasm for economic planning. As a result, these essays are relevant to ongoing debates within the social sciences and to discussion about the role government can and should play in the economy.
In this deeply researched and multifaceted study, Marco G. Meniketti demonstrates how the landscape of the small Caribbean island of Nevis preserves and reveals artifacts and evidence of the highly complex and interrelated seventeenth- to nineteenth-century “Atlantic Economy,” comprising early capitalist sugar production, the African slave trade, and European settlement.
Sugar Cane Capitalism and Environmental Transformation is based on twelve seasons of meticulous archaeological field work and documentary research. Although Nevis was once a bustling hub of the British colonial project, the emigration of emancipated slaves and abandonment by European planters left large swathes of Nevis vacant. Reclaimed by forests and undisturbed by later waves of economic development, the island—dotted with fascinating ruins, debris from the sugar industry, windmills, chimneys, and multistoried great house—provided Meniketti with an ideal subject for archaeological inquiry.
Through intensive archaeological and landscape surveys of multiple key plantation sites, Meniketti traces the development of Nevis from its initial European settlement in 1627 to its central role as a British mercantile hub and a laboratory and prototype of capitalist sugar cultivation. His nuanced analysis explains the backdrop of European political and economic rivalries, of which the colonial agro-industrial enterprises were the physical manifestations, and makes telling comparisons with Dutch and French archaeological sites. The work also compares and contrasts the adoption of capitalist modes of sugar production and socialization at wealthy and middling plantation sites.
Supported with a wealth of photos, tables, and maps, Sugar Cane Capitalism and Environmental Transformation offers a vital case study of one island whose environment and archaeological record illuminates the complex webs of Atlantic history.
Surabaya is Indonesia’s second largest city but is not well known to the outside world. Yet in 1900, Surabaya was a bigger city than Jakarta and one of the main commercial centers of Asia. Collapse of sugar exports during the 1930s depression, followed by the Japanese occupation, revolution, and independence, brought on a long period of stagnation and retreat from the international economy. Not until the export boom of the 1990s did Surabaya regain prominence as Southeast Asia’s leading non–capital–city industrial area.
Previous thinking on Indonesia is being reassessed in light of recent political and economic upheaval. Surabaya, City of Work offers an alternative to the Jakarta-centric focus of most writing on the country. It is a multifaceted view of a fascinating and complex city in the dimensions of time and space, economy and society, and the current transition toward decentralization makes it highly topical.
Exploration of this eventful economic history gives new insight into Indonesia’s modern economic development. Industrialization is recognized as being associated with rapid urbanization, but this is the first study of Indonesia from an explicitly urban perspective. Surabaya, City of Work takes a broad approach that links industrialization to socioeconomic trends, the increasing role of government, changing land use, and trade patterns.
This well–illustrated local history encompassing national events and trends will be a central work on Indonesia for years to come.
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