This dissertation focuses on the relationship between cotton, slavery and finance. At its core is a consideration of the Atlantic credit networks that supported the cultivation of cotton across the antebellum South. Planters ...

How does the condition of statelessness, which is usually thought of as a political problem, affect the economic and monetary lives of ordinary people?

From 1716 to 1845, the Scottish financial system functioned with no official central bank or lender of last resort, no public (or private) monopoly on currency issuance, no legal reserve requirements, and no formal limits ...

This dissertation describes and analyzes the financial boom that made Russia the largest net international debtor in the world by 1914, as well as the Bolshevik default of 1918 -- one of the biggest in international financial ...

During the second half of the nineteenth century, peasant smallholders in the Bengal delta – an alluvial tract formed out of the silt deposits of the Ganges, Brahmaputra, and Meghna river-systems – expanded their cultivation ...

This dissertation investigates the growth and decline of a major Mediterranean commercial economy at the crossroads of Christian Europe and the Muslim Middle East from 1100 to 1400. New and old evidence uncovers the ...

This dissertation is an economic and institutional history of the first comprehensive public health and welfare system in the Western world. Based on previously unexamined archival and archaeological evidence from several ...