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Between 1500 and 1800, the North Sea region overtook the Mediterranean as the most dynamic part of the world. At its core the Anglo-Dutch relationship intertwined close alliance and fierce antagonism to intense creative effect. But a precondition for the Industrial Revolution was also the establishment in British North America of a unique type of colony — for the settlement of people and culture, rather than the extraction of things. England's republican revolution of 1649–53 was a spectacular attempt to change social, political, and moral life in the direction pioneered by the Dutch. This book argues that it was also a turning point in world history. In the revolution's wake, competition with the Dutch transformed the military-fiscal and naval resources of the state. One result was a navally protected Anglo-American trading monopoly. Within this context, more than a century later, the Industrial Revolution would be triggered by the alchemical power of American shopping.

Hundreds of years before a sixteenth-century crisis in European agriculture led to the origins of capital, investment, and finance, the silver mining industry exhibited many of the features of modern capitalism. Silver mines were large-scale businesses that demanded large investments and steady cash flow, achieved by spreading that risk through fungible shares and creating legal structures to protect entrepreneurs from financial disaster. This book argues that mining preceded agriculture as the first true capitalist enterprise of the modern world.

This history explores the many unrecognized, enduring linkages between the state of California and the country of Chile. The book begins in 1786, when a French expedition brought the potato from Chile to California, and it concludes with Chilean president Michelle Bachelet's diplomatic visit to the Golden State in 2008. During the intervening centuries, new crops, foods, fertilizers, mining technologies, laborers, and ideas from Chile radically altered California's development. In turn, Californian systems of servitude, exotic species, educational programs, and capitalist development strategies dramatically shaped Chilean history. The book develops a new set of historical perspectives—tracing eastward-moving trends in U.S. history, uncovering South American influences on North America's development, and reframing the Western Hemisphere from a Pacific vantage point.

Nineteenth-century Brazil's constitutional monarchy credibly committed to repay sovereign debt, borrowing repeatedly in international and domestic capital markets without default. Yet it failed to lay the institutional foundations that private financial markets needed to thrive. This study shows why sovereign creditworthiness did not necessarily translate into financial development. Using a vast array of archival evidence, this book shows that political commitment to a secure public debt was neither necessary nor sufficient to insure financial development in nineteenth-century Brazil.

To what extent is economic freedom good? This book tells the story of how the business community, and the trade associations and think tanks that it created, launched three powerful assaults during the last quarter of the twentieth century on the federal regulatory system and the state civil justice system, to accomplish a revival of the laissez faire political economy which dominated Gilded Age America. Although the consequences of these assaults became painfully apparent in a confluence of crises during the early twenty-first century, the patch-and-repair fixes that Congress and the Obama administration put into place did little to change that underlying laissez faire ideology and practice, and it continues to dominate the American political economy. In anticipation of the next confluence of crises, the author offers suggestions for more comprehensive governmental protections for consumers, workers, and the environment.

A clothier and a deeply religious man, Joseph Ryder faithfully kept a diary from 1733 until his death, 2.5 million words later, in 1768. Recently rediscovered and interpreted by the author of this book, Ryder's diary provides a real-life perspective on the relationship between capitalism and Protestantism at a time when Britain was rapidly changing from a traditional to a modern society. It also provides insights into the early modern family, the birth of industrialization, the history of Puritanism, the origins of Unitarianism, melancholy, and the making of the British middle class.

As China emerges as a global powerhouse, this book examines its economic past and the shaping of its financial institutions. A comparative study of foreign banking in prewar China, it surveys the impact of British overseas banknotes on China's economy before the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937. Focusing on the two leading British banks in the region, the book assesses the favorable and unfavorable effects of the British presence in China, with particular emphasis on Shanghai, and traces instructive links between the changing political climate and banknote circulation volumes. Drawing on recently declassified archival materials, the author revises previous assumptions about China's prewar economy, including the extent of foreign banknote circulation and the economic significance of the May Thirtieth Movement of 1925.

This book presents the biography of the extraordinary Spanish industrialist and entrepreneur Eduardo Barreiros, who was a conquistador. He conquered markets, not peoples, and these conquests began in his own country, Spain, not in Mexico or in Peru, where men such as Cortés and Pizarro made their names. Barreiros's triumphs included exports in countries as far removed and as far apart as Egypt and Venezuela and Portugal and Germany. Barreiros came to maturity in the 1950s, when the regime in Franco's Spain was almost as hostile to private enterprise as Communist ministers would have been. Successive Spanish ministers of industry, Suanzes in particular but also Sirvent and the alleged modernizer López Bravo, spurned independent entrepreneurs, and were still advocates of national syndicalism, which, in practice, was a kind of bureaucratic statism. Barreiros, who, with his brothers, created a large industrial empire from nothing in ten years, proved that these great men were mistaken. He was a motor manufacturer and made trucks, tractors, buses, and, finally, saloon cars. The later life of Barreiros had its frustrations as well as its triumphs.

This book focuses on intellectual piracy and presents an interpretive study of the American appropriation of forbidden European know-how from the perspective of a diplomatic historian of the early republic. The technology and the manner in which Americans acquired it came in three forms that were never quite independent of one another. First, there was the knowledge itself—the mechanical and scientific discoveries that made innovations possible. Second, there were the innovations that improved existing production processes and allowed for the creation of new products that were smuggled across the Atlantic Ocean. Third, and most important, were the workers who immigrated to North America, bringing with them the professional training they had acquired in Europe's factories. These three distinct historical phenomena constitute a unified problem from the perspective of the relations among states—namely, the rules and boundaries of national ownership of intellectual property on the international scene. The book focuses on the role policies relating to intellectual property played in promoting the appropriation of smuggled technology, which led to the emergence of the United States as the premier industrial power in the world. It discusses the evolution of the American approach to the problem of the relations between international boundaries and intellectual property from the colonial period to the age of Jackson, examines the role of federal and state governments in that transformation, and explains the contradictory American policy.

Over the past six decades, federal regulatory agencies have attempted different strategies to regulate the natural gas industry in the United States. All have been unsuccessful, resulting in nationwide gas shortages or massive gas surpluses, and costing the nation billions of dollars. Additionally, partial deregulation has led the regulatory agency to become more involved in controlling individual transactions among gas producers, distributors, and consumers. This book demonstrates that no affected group has gained from these experiments in public control and that all participants would gain from complete deregulation. Although losses have declined with partial deregulation in recent years, current regulatory practices still limit the growth of supply through the transmission system. This history of the regulation of natural gas is a cautionary tale for other natural resource or network industries that are regulated or are about to be regulated.