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This is a book about hope and international finance. The repudiation of Russia’s debt by the Bolsheviks in 1918 affected French investors for several generations. The reason for this was the sheer volume of money lent by institutional investors and private citizens alike. This book focuses on the reasons which prompted French investors to hope they would eventually be repaid. In this financial context, hope was reflected in the fluctuations of Russian bond prices. Indeed, in view of the extreme nature of the repudiation, the prices of Russian sovereign debt experienced only a modest decline. As a matter of fact, they actually increased after the repudiation, and their yields were well below those observed nowadays when sovereign debts are repudiated. Far from being a sign of irrational behaviour, this trend can be attributed to expectations that one or more extreme events could occur. Governments have four key incentives to repay their debts: fear of a loss of reputation and consequent exclusion from capital markets; fear of armed intervention; trade sanctions; and seizure of collateral. In the Russian case, investors remained hopeful for the aforementioned reasons but they also hoped that a third-party government would stand in for the Russian government and fulfil its obligations. This book assesses the relative weight of each of these reasons to hope and shows why investors refused to view their repudiated bonds as valueless.

This extensive revision of the first edition of People and the Land Through Time incorporates research over the last two decades to bring the field of historical ecology from an ecological perspective up to date. It emphasizes the use of new sources of data and interdisciplinary data analysis to interpret ecological processes in the past. It describes a diversity of past ecosystems, and how they affect current ecosystem structure and function as well as offering insight into current structure and process, and assisting in predicting the future. This historical perspective highlights the varied and complex roles of indigenous people in historic ecosystems and as well as the importance of past and present climatic fluctuations. The book begins with an introduction to the importance of history for ecological studies, and then has three chapters which explain methods and approaches to reconstructing the past, using both traditional and novel sources of data and analysis. The following five chapters discuss ways people have influenced natural systems, starting with the most primitive, manipulating fire, and proceeding through altering species ranges, hunting and gathering, agriculture and finally structuring landscapes through land surveys, trade and urbanization. Two chapters then deal with diversity, extinction and sustainability in a changing world. The final chapter integrates the rest of the book especially in terms of the importance of history in basic ecological studies, global change and understanding conservation. Throughout, the emphasis is on the potential for evidence-based research in historical ecology, and the new frontiers in this exciting field.