Markets and Governments in Economic History – serie

Few events in the history of humanity rival the Industrial Revolution. Following its onset in eighteenth-century Britain, sweeping changes in agriculture, manufacturing, transportation, and technology began to gain unstoppable momentum throughout Europe, North America, and eventually much of the world, with profound effects on socioeconomic and cultural conditions. In "The Institutional Revolution", Douglas W. Allen offers a carefully researched and thought-provoking account of how dramatic changes in institutions - the formal and informal rules that govern a society-resulted from the unprecedented economic development that took place during the Industrial Revolution. Fundamental to these changes were the many significant improvements in the ability to measure performance - whether of government officials, laborers, or naval officers - thereby reducing the amount of variance in daily affairs. Offering fascinating insight into how institutions address the cost of monitoring others, Allen provides readers along the way with an understanding of the critical roles of seemingly bizarre institutions, from dueling to the purchase of one's rank in the British Army.Engagingly written, "The Institutional Revolution" traces the dramatic shift from premodern institutions based on patronage, purchase, and personal ties toward modern institutions based on standardization, merit, and wage labor.

Since the economic reforms of the 1990s, India's economy has grown rapidly. To sustain growth and foreign investment over the long run requires a well-developed legal infrastructure for conducting business, including cheap and reliable contract enforcement and secure property rights. But it's widely acknowledged that India's legal infrastructure is in urgent need of reform, plagued by problems, including slow enforcement of contracts and land laws that differ from state to state. How has this situation arisen, and what can boost business confidence and encourage long-run economic growth? Tirthankar Roy and Anand V. Swamy trace the beginnings of the current Indian legal system to the years of British colonial rule. They show how India inherited an elaborate legal system from the British colonial administration, which incorporated elements from both British Common Law and indigenous institutions. In the case of property law, especially as it applied to agricultural land, indigenous laws and local political expediency were more influential in law-making than concepts borrowed from European legal theory. Conversely, with commercial law, there was considerable borrowing from Europe.In all cases, the British struggled with limited capacity to enforce their laws and an insufficient knowledge of the enormous diversity and differentiation within Indian society. A disorderly body of laws, not conducive to production and trade, evolved over time. Roy and Swamy's careful analysis not only sheds new light on the development of legal institutions in India, but also offers insights for India and other emerging countries through a look at what fosters the types of institutions that are key to economic growth.

We remember Thomas Edison as the inventor of the incandescent light bulb, but he deserves credit for something much larger, an even more singular invention that profoundly changed the way the world works: the modern electric utility industry. Edison's light bulb was the first to work within a system where a utility generated electricity and distributed it to customers for lighting. The story of how electric utilities went within one generation from prototype to an indispensable part of most Americans' lives is a story about the relationships between political and technological change. 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.

Who and what a government taxes, and how the government spends the money collected, are questions of primary concern to governments large and small, national and local. When public revenues pay for high-quality infrastructure and social services, citizens thrive and crises are averted. When public revenues are inadequate to provide those goods, inequality thrives and communities can verge into unrest—as evidenced by the riots during Greece’s financial meltdown and by the needless loss of life in Haiti’s collapse in the wake of the earthquake.In The Public Good and the Brazilian State, Anne G. Hanley assembles an economic history of public revenues as they developed in nineteenth-century Brazil. Specifically, Hanley investigates the financial life of the municipality—a district comparable to the county in the United States—to understand how the local state organized and prioritized the provision of public services, what revenues paid for those services, and what happened when the revenues collected failed to satisfy local needs. Through detailed analyses of municipal ordinances, mayoral reports, citizen complaints, and financial documents, Hanley sheds light on the evolution of public finance and its effect on the early economic development of Brazilian society. This deeply researched book offers valuable insights for anyone seeking to better understand how municipal finance informs histories of inequality and underdevelopment.

How and why does Denmark have one of the richest, most equal, and happiest societies in the world today? Historians have often pointed to developments from the late nineteenth century, when small peasant farmers worked together through agricultural cooperatives, whose exports of butter and bacon rapidly gained a strong foothold on the British market. This book presents a radical retelling of this story, placing (largely German-speaking) landed elites--rather than the Danish peasantry--at center stage. After acquiring estates in Denmark, these elites imported and adapted new practices from outside the kingdom, thus embarking on an ambitious program of agricultural reform and sparking a chain of events that eventually led to the emergence of Denmark's famous peasant cooperatives in 1882. A Land of Milk and Butter presents a new interpretation of the origin of these cooperatives with striking implications for developing countries today.

Relative to the other habited places on our planet, Hawai'i has a very short history. The Hawaiian archipelago was the last major land area on the planet to be settled, with Polynesians making the long voyage just under a millennium ago. Our understanding of the social, political, and economic changes that have unfolded since has been limited until recently by how little we knew about the first five centuries of settlement.Building on new archaeological and historical research, Sumner La Croix assembles here the economic history of Hawai'i from the first Polynesian settlements in 1200 through US colonization, the formation of statehood, and to the present day. He shows how the political and economic institutions that emerged and evolved in Hawai'i during its three centuries of global isolation allowed an economically and culturally rich society to emerge, flourish, and ultimately survive annexation and colonization by the United States. The story of a small, open economy struggling to adapt its institutions to changes in the global economy, Hawai'i offers broadly instructive conclusions about economic evolution and development, political institutions, and native Hawaiian rights.

The National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) was enacted by Congress in June of 1933 to assist the nation's recovery during the Great Depression. Its passage ushered in a unique experiment in US economic history: under the NIRA, the federal government explicitly supported, and in some cases enforced, alliances within industries. Antitrust laws were suspended, and companies were required to agree upon industry-level "codes of fair competition" that regulated wages and hours and could implement anti-competitive provisions such as those fixing prices, establishing production quotas, and imposing restrictions on new productive capacity.The NIRA is generally viewed as a monolithic program, its dramatic and sweeping effects best measurable through a macroeconomic lens. In this pioneering book, however, Jason E. Taylor examines the act instead using microeconomic tools, probing the uneven implementation of the act's codes and the radical heterogeneity of its impact across industries and time. Deconstructing the Monolith employs a mixture of archival and empirical research to enrich our understanding of how the program affected the behavior and well-being of workers and firms during the two years NIRA existed as well as in the period immediately following its demise.

Should the United States be open to commerce with other countries, or should it protect domestic industries from foreign competition? This question has been the source of bitter political conflict throughout American history. Such conflict was inevitable, James Madison argued in The Federalist Papers, because trade policy involves clashing economic interests. The struggle between the winners and losers from trade has always been fierce because dollars and jobs are at stake: depending on what policy is chosen, some industries, farmers, and workers will prosper, while others will suffer. Douglas A. Irwin's Clashing over Commerce is the most authoritative and comprehensive history of US trade policy to date, offering a clear picture of the various economic and political forces that have shaped it. From the start, trade policy divided the nation--first when Thomas Jefferson declared an embargo on all foreign trade and then when South Carolina threatened to secede from the Union over excessive taxes on imports. The Civil War saw a shift toward protectionism, which then came under constant political attack. Then, controversy over the Smoot-Hawley tariff during the Great Depression led to a policy shift toward freer trade, involving trade agreements that eventually produced the World Trade Organization. Irwin makes sense of this turbulent history by showing how different economic interests tend to be grouped geographically, meaning that every proposed policy change found ready champions and opponents in Congress.As the Trump administration considers making major changes to US trade policy, Irwin's sweeping historical perspective helps illuminate the current debate. Deeply researched and rich with insight and detail, Clashing over Commerce provides valuable and enduring insights into US trade policy past and present.

In 2005, more than two million Americans--six out of every 1,000 people--filed for bankruptcy. Though personal bankruptcy rates have since stabilized, bankruptcy remains an important tool for the relief of financially distressed households. In Bankrupt in America, Mary and Brad Hansen offer a vital perspective on the history of bankruptcy in America, beginning with the first lasting federal bankruptcy law enacted in 1898.Interweaving careful legal history and rigorous economic analysis, Bankrupt in America is the first work to trace how bankruptcy was transformed from an intermittently used Constitutional provision, to an indispensable tool for business, to a central element of the social safety net for ordinary Americans. To do this, the authors track federal bankruptcy law, as well as related state and federal laws, examining the interaction between changes in the laws and changes in how people in each state used the bankruptcy law. In this thorough investigation, Hansen and Hansen reach novel conclusions about the causes and consequences of bankruptcy, adding nuance to the discussion of the relationship between bankruptcy rates and economic performance.

An essential history of India's economic growth since 1947, including the legal reforms that have shaped the country in the shadow of colonial rule.Economists have long lamented how the inefficiency of India's legal system undermines the country’s economic capacity. How has this come to be? The prevailing explanation is that the postcolonial legal system is understaffed and under-resourced, making adjudication and contract enforcement slow and costly.Taking this as given, Law and the Economy in a Young Democracy examines the contents and historical antecedents of these laws, including how they have stifled economic development. Economists Roy and Swamy argue that legal evolution in independent India has been shaped by three factors: the desire to reduce inequality and poverty; the suspicion that market activity, both domestic and international, can be detrimental to these goals; and the strengthening of Indian democracy over time, giving voice to a growing fraction of society, including the poor.Weaving the story of India's heralded economic transformation with its social and political history, Roy and Swamy show how inadequate legal infrastructure has been a key impediment to the country's economic growth during the last century. A stirring and authoritative history of a nation rife with contradictions, Law and the Economy in a Young Democracy is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand India's current crossroads—and the factors that may keep its dreams unrealized.

A sweeping history of the American invention of modern money.Economists endlessly debate the nature of legal tender monetary systems—coins and bills issued by a government or other authority. Yet the origins of these currencies have received little attention. Dror Goldberg tells the story of modern money in North America through the Massachusetts colony during the seventeenth century. As the young settlement transitioned to self-governance and its economy grew, the need to formalize a smooth exchange emerged. Printing local money followed. Easy Money illustrates how colonists invented contemporary currency by shifting its foundation from intrinsically valuable goods—such as silver—to the taxation of the state. Goldberg traces how this structure grew into a worldwide system in which, monetarily, we are all Massachusetts. Weaving economics, law, and American history, Easy Money is a new touchstone in the story of monetary systems.

An illuminating history of America’s original credit market.  The Continental Dollar is a revelatory history of how the fledgling United States paid for its first war. Farley Grubb upends the common telling of this story, in which the United States printed cross-colony money, called Continentals, to serve as an early fiat currency—a currency that is not tied to a commodity like gold, but rather to a legal authority. As Grubb details, the Continental was not a fiat currency, but a “zero-coupon bond”—a wholly different species of money. As bond payoffs were pushed into the future, the money’s value declined, killing the Continentals’ viability years before the Revolutionary War would officially end.  Drawing on decades of exhaustive mining of eighteenth-century records, The Continental Dollar is an essential origin story of the early American monetary system, promising to serve as the benchmark for critical work for decades to come.

CHOSEN AS ONE OF THE WALL STREET JOURNAL’S 10 BEST BOOKS OF 2025A definitive history of the United States’ recovery from the Great Depression—and the New Deal's true part in it.FDR’s New Deal has long enjoyed a special place in American history and policy—both because it redefined the government’s fundamental responsibilities and because Roosevelt’s “bold experimentation” represented a type of policymaking many would like to see repeated.But “the thing about bold experiments,” economist George Selgin reminds us, “is that they often fail.” In False Dawn Selgin draws on both contemporary sources and numerous studies by economic historians to show that, although steps taken during the Roosevelt administration’s first days raised hopes of a speedy recovery from the Great Depression, instead of fulfilling those hopes, subsequent New Deal policies proved so counterproductive that over seventeen percent of American workers—more than the peak unemployment rate during the COVID-19 crisis—were still either unemployed or on work relief six years later.By distinguishing the New Deal’s successes from its failures, and explaining how the U.S. finally managed to lay the specter of mass unemployment to rest, Selgin draws salient lessons for dealing with future recessions.

A new history of crisis responses in the central bank’s formative years.The long-standing description of the Federal Reserve as a “lender of last resort” refers to the central bank’s emergency liquidity provision for financial entities in periods of crisis. As Mark Carlson shows, this function was foundational to how the Fed was designed but has, at times, proven challenging to implement. The Young Fed examines the origins of the Federal Reserve’s emergency liquidity provision which, along with the setting of monetary policy, has become a critical responsibility. Focusing on the Fed’s response to the financial crises of the 1920s, Carlson documents the formative deliberations of central bank policymakers regarding how to assist banks experiencing distress; the lessons that were learned; and how those lessons shaped subsequent policies. Carlson depicts an early Fed that experimented with a variety of approaches to crises, ranging from bold spectacles featuring cash-filled armored cars to behind-the-scenes interventions to prevent inducing panics or bank runs. The Young Fed weaves previously unpublished material from the Fed archives into a watershed work in American economic history: a deeply sourced account of how the world’s most important central bank became a lender of last resort.