経済史・経営史 — 全 下位分類

This book examines the dynamic interplay of consumer behaviour, trade networks, and long-distance alliances in driving economic growth across Qing China, Western Europe, and the Spanish American colonies from 1680 to 1840. Employing a reciprocal comparative framework, it illuminates the deep structural interconnections between Western and Chinese market systems. By utilising the innovative GECEM Database, which cross-references Western and Chinese primary sources to mine new archival data, the study constitutes a methodological advance that offers fresh insights into the Great Divergence debate.

Moving beyond an analysis of large-scale structures, this work emphasises the decisive agency of traders. By facilitating the bidirectional flow of Chinese goods to the West and European commodities to China, merchants catalysed a transformation: they reconfigured consumption, spawned new demand, and reshaped transcontinental socioeconomic relations.

The study situates these dynamics within critical geopolitical junctures: the establishment of maritime customs under the Kangxi emperor in 1680, the closure of trade and rise of the Canton system under Qianlong in 1756, and the outbreak of the Opium Wars in 1840. These turning points illuminate transformations in trade strategies, local economies, state capacity, and relations between merchants and officials across the Ming-Qing transition.

Engaging with recent scholarship, Global Powers offers a new perspective on Qing economic and political practices, as well as the dynasty's geopolitical tensions, through a local lens on foreign trade networks. It is an essential reading for specialists in global and economic history, sinology, East Asian studies, early modern history, as well as for economists and scholars of Sino-European relations.

Commodity trading companies are the unseen giants of global trade, quietly connecting producers and consumers across continents while navigating the complexities of volatile markets, geopolitical pressures, and economic transformations. Much like modern e-commerce platforms, these firms thrive not by owning the assets they move, but by mastering their flow-leveraging logistics, information, and risk management to create value. Against the backdrop of China's extraordinary economic transformation, this thesis adopts a qualitative historical approach to examine the evolution of commodity trading through the lens of Noble Group, one of Asia's most dynamic and diversified trading companies. By tracing Noble's strategies and adaptations, the study uncovers how these intermediaries have shaped and responded to the forces of globalization, offering critical insights into the hidden mechanisms driving the global economy.

In an innovative cultural history across the Iron Curtain, this book explores how a divided nation used the cosmos - as both a technological reality and a field of imagination - to navigate the challenges of the Cold War and compete for the future. Smithsonian curator Colleen Anderson transforms the history of the Space Age by demonstrating that Germans were not just observers of the US-Soviet rivalry, but active participants who used spaceflight to redefine their place in the world.

Connecting the technical and political history of space programs with space imaginations in popular culture, Anderson uncovers unexpected commonalities between two states otherwise opposed. Through vivid stories of street astronomers building telescopes from wartime rubble, the West German cult TV hit Space Patrol, and East German youth "training" for missions at the socialist equivalent of Space Camp, this book demonstrates how the unbounded cosmos offered a site for political and cultural maneuvering - and a canvas for imagining alternative futures - that was often impossible on Earth. From the 1978 mission of the first German in orbit to the international laboratory of Spacelab, Anderson reveals that for a divided people, technological dreams were not mere fantasies; they were essential tools for confronting a burdened past and forging a new future. Contributing to spaceflight history, Cold War scholarship, and German studies, this book speaks to the many ways technological dreams become instruments for negotiating memory, ideology, and the uncertainty of what lies ahead.

This book explains how ideology can be better integrated into economic history analysis, arguing that if economists and economic historians are to fully understand economic behaviour a much deeper appreciation of ideological processes is required. The book has two parts. The first part presents a comprehensive theory of ideology and ideological change that can be easily incorporated into economic analysis; the second provides an empirical case study of ideological change from East Germany of the 1960s.

The book demonstrates how current restrictive views of ideology found within mainstream economics can be enhanced by adopting a more expansive, multidisciplinary understanding of ideology and its role in the processes of economic change. Merging a view of ideology as a fluid and politically practical concept with the framework of change offered by institutional economics, the authors use this theory to provide an in-depth analysis of how the ideological case for the New Economic System in East Germany and for de-Stalinisation more generally in the 1960s was built. Rich in archival material, the book both deepens our understanding of economic change in the communist world in the post-Stalin era and demonstrates the multifaceted role of ideology in economic decision making. With a cutting-edge approach, this book will be a valuable resource for students of economics, economic history, political economy, as well as of communist and German history.

In A Legacy in Peanuts, Columbus, Georgia native Haisten Willis tells the story of Columbus's own Tom's Foods, a firm that aided the South's industrialization and played a major role in establishing the humble peanut as a cash crop. In the 1920s, founder Tom Huston revolutionized both the manufacturing and marketing of peanuts through his patented shelling machines and the creation of the company's signature product, Tom's Toasted Peanuts. With an assist from legendary scientist George Washington Carver, Huston turned Tom's into a multimillion-dollar business in just a few years-before losing it all on another big business bet. Future Columbus mayor Walter Richards then took over, stabilizing Tom's and expanding its lineup to include crackers and candy during his three decades at the helm.

The stuff of childhood memories, lazy afternoons, and countless workplace break rooms, the story of Tom's Foods reveals fundamental truths about business, farming, factory labor, race relations, innovation, and class in the twentieth-century South. By following the four largest players in the company's history-Huston, Richards, longtime president J. W. "Bill" Feighner, and midwestern billionaire Michael Heisley, who purchased Tom's as a distressed asset in 1993 and proved to be its final owner before a 2005 bankruptcy-Willis illuminates a complex story of the modernizing South.

The book presents Robert Fulton, the purported inventor of the steamboat, in a new and more significant light: as a hustler. Except for Benjamin Franklin, Fulton was the most famous and iconic inventor of the early American republic, a position he held into the twentieth century. But he did not invent the steamboat, nor did any of his other claimed inventions ever gain much traction in his day. Rather he copied or elaborated the ideas of others, seldom achieving adoption or success with any of his knockoffs. Indeed, his greatest invention was himself, posing as an "engineer" and a "gentleman." But hustlers have played an important and largely unrecognized role in American history. Even America's most famous inventor, Thomas Edison, admitted to having something of the hustler in him. These were people who, in the modern argot, chose to "fake it till you make it." Fulton finally made it, and along the way his rags-to-riches story reveals much about the economies and patent systems of England, France, and the United States, where he spent his whole life. And the key roles of capital and political influence in his final success reveals much about innovation in the industrialized world that first appeared in his lifetime.

This book offers the first comparative analysis of politically motivated bank runs in Habsburg Austria, focusing on events in Vienna (1848), Prague (1903), and Ljubljana (1908/09). These episodes have received little attention outside narrow national historiographies. This project brings to light a broader pattern of financial instability driven by political populism and nationalist agitation, thereby filling a significant gap in both financial and historical literature.

From the revolutionary upheaval of Vienna in 1848 to the nationalist flashpoints of Prague and Ljubljana in the early 20th century, the book traces how banks confronted waves of public panic by publishing increasingly detailed, sometimes daily, financial reports to stabilize public confidence. Drawing on a wealth of historical newspapers, financial publications, and archival material, the book reveals how these acts of transparency often fuelled controversy rather than calming it. In the absence of strong regulation, voluntary disclosure practices created a precarious information ecosystem. The book analyses that environment, showing how media growth, ethnic conflict, and the demand for quantification intersected to shape a volatile and easily manipulated form of financial trust. The author adopts an innovative interdisciplinary approach combining economic history, media, and accounting studies, rooting the analysis in historical data and mixed methods research including both textual analysis and original quantitative research. Econometric appendices at the end of the book reconstruct time series data on withdrawals, deposits and credit that may be of particular interest to economics scholars. This book will be a valuable insight into a little-known period of financial history, and appeal to researchers from a broad range of fields.

Waters of Destiny tells the story of how sugarcane came to be produced at industrial scale in the Florida Everglades, thanks to a federal flood-control system that led to the devastation of downstream ecosystems and communities. It tells how the demand for both flood protection and water supply outstripped the system's capacity to deliver, necessitating painful tradeoffs. Water managers and advocates have been trying to solve this operational conundrum for decades, but South Florida's environment radically limits water-control options. Scientists advocate restoring drained wetlands to allow floodwaters to once again spread across the landscape, but they have been repeatedly foiled by Big Sugar, for whom any loss of cane acreage threatens their refineries' profit margins. Drawing on scores of interviews and years of observation, Schwartz reveals how, in the late 1990s, state and federal officials squandered a moment of peak bipartisan support for Everglades restoration, enacting an $8 billion program that-while much ballyhooed-relied on speculative technological "moonshots" in lieu of confronting Big Sugar. The program's "failure to launch" in the quarter-century since, Schwartz argues, was an inevitable consequence of this political failure.

A theological map of markets as ambiguous-and improvable-moral contexts

Do markets corrupt us, or support our character? They do both, argues Christina McRorie in The World of Markets. She engages empirical research on economic decision-making to identify both the conditions under which markets encourage selfish and opportunistic behaviors and those under which markets do the opposite, encouraging just and even generous actions. This influence over our decisions suggests that markets may also shape our agency itself, over time. How should Christians make theological sense of this?

Highlighting the tensions woven into the theological concept of "the world"-given that it is beloved by God and yet also a dangerous realm of moral darkness-The World of Markets builds a case for viewing markets as ambiguous worlds that mediate both sin and grace in our daily lives by influencing our moral agency. In light of God's own love for the world, it proposes that Christians are called to approach markets with an attitude that balances critique with appreciation and to collaborate with others to make markets more grace-filled contexts. Toward this end, The World of Markets identifies concrete ways that markets can become a world where it is easier to be good.

This book is the first systematic scholarly analysis of Stephen Girard's views on race, gender, class, and enslavement, connecting the details of Girard's life with litigation surrounding his estate and school.

By the time Girard died, the merchant-banker was one of the wealthiest men in the United States. He shocked the people of his adopted city and nation by posthumously devoting his fortune to philanthropic projects-most notably the construction of a charity school for White orphan boys. For nearly two hundred years, Girard's name has been mired in controversy because of his last will and testament, which became the centerpiece of numerous legal battles. With narrative sophistication and probing analysis, this book combines a succinct overview of Girard's life with much-needed context for making sense of his decisions and legacy. In doing so it further addresses controversial topics in the modern U.S. public sphere-freedom of religion, institutional racism, gender equality, the relationship of private philanthropy to the public good-directing the reader to reconsider the health of American republican institutions in the twenty-first century in the light of Girard's history and legacies.

Augmented by many historical images and primary-source documents, including the text of his much-debated last will and Supreme Court arguments about his philanthropy, the book is an ideal resource for students and scholars of American history, Atlantic world studies, legal history, history of education, and history of philanthropy.

This volume focuses on how the national elites in Central and South-Eastern Europe perceived the peasantry during the process of building the modern state and democratic political systems. The central theme of the discussion is the integration of peasants into the political system, with the aim of transforming them from the dependent subjects of various public figures to active citizens. The politicization of the rural world, in terms of increasing peasants' participation in public affairs and their identification with ideas concerning the "common good," was integral to the modern transformation of societies in these regions. The studies in this volume examine the relationship between the peasantry and central and local state institutions, such as the administration, schools and the army; associations of all kinds; and social figures, including intellectuals, teachers, local notables and priests, who sought to uplift the rural world as part of the modernization agenda.

This book argues that the European Coal and Steel Community in 1951 solved the historic French-German conflict over control of the coal deposits of the Ruhr valley. The product of a political bargain among the United States, France and Germany, the Treaty of Paris introduced radical new rules into the European order. For the first time in European history, cartels and powerful anticompetitive concentrations of economic power were banned.

The volume ties the problem of ensuring secure access to Ruhr coal to the larger security dilemma that long haunted French-German relations. It argues that, in effect, wars and cartels were alternative solutions to the same underlying dilemma in the period from the mid-19th to mid-20th centuries, which featured three wars and two armed occupations involving France and Germany. It discusses the importance of the economic complementarity between coal and ore in relation to the economic and security relations between France and Germany. Above all, it highlights the role played by the novel competition law regime in permanently ending the old cycle of wars and cartels that had cursed Europe through the end of World War II.

Beyond Wars and Cartels will be invaluable to those interested in postwar European history seen from a new angle as well as specialists in antitrust and competition law who compare US and American law, historians and political scientists.

This cultural history of thinking machines examines conceptions of the human as an automaton and the possibility of mechanised thought in philosophical and literary works from the seventeenth century to the 1840s, with particular emphasis on the Romantic period.

In the 2020s, there has been no escaping the debate over AI. Yet strong AI remains as much science fiction today as it was in the nineteenth century. Media archaeology has highlighted the ruptures and dead ends of technological development, recovering forgotten and obsolete technologies. Failed and imagined attempts to create thinking machines from Thomas Hobbes to Charles Babbage and from E.T.A Hoffmann to Edgar Allan Poe not only illuminate their own historical contexts; they also reveal the origins of the utopian hopes and dystopian fears that continue to shape responses to mechanised thought. Artificial Intelligence before Computers argues that we can move beyond the Romantic myth of AI only by recognising its historical roots.

Drawing on case studies from Britain, Germany and the United States, this book will appeal to postgraduates and scholars in history, philosophy, literary studies and media studies, as well as non-specialist readers seeking to understand the long history of AI.