From Boston to Bordeaux, revolution was in large measure the achievement of networks of wordsmiths, the best of whom were also orators whose shouted words could rally the crowd in the square and incit...
Exchange rates would be fixed, as under the gold standard, but now the anchor - the international reserve currency - would be the dollar rather than gold (though the dollar itself would notionally rem...
Elias Canetti once tried to imagine a world in which ‘all weapons [were] abolished and in the next war only biting [was] allowed’. Can we be sure there would be no genocides in such a radically disarm...
Drawing on the best modern scholarship, this book seeks to rescue the history of networks from the clutches of the conspiracy theorists, and to show that historical change often can and should be unde...
Desde que en 1579 se hubieron sacudido del dominio español, los holandeses habían estado a la vanguardia del capitalismo europeo. Habían creado un sistema de deuda pública que permitía al gobierno tom...
Debts were transferable, hence ‘pay the bearer’ rather than a named creditor.
Como señalaba Hayek: «Sostener que debemos planificar de forma deliberada la sociedad moderna porque se ha vuelto demasiado compleja es, por tanto, paradójico, y el resultado de un malentendido total...
Can a non-Western power really hope to benefit from downloading Western scientific knowledge, if it continues to reject that other key part of the West’s winning formula: the third institutional innov...
By allowing merchants to set up accounts denominated in a standardized currency, the Exchange Bank pioneered the system of cheques and direct debits or transfers that we take for granted today. This a...
But the foundation on which all of this rested was the underlying credibility of a borrower’s promise to repay. (It is no coincidence that in English the root of ‘credit’ is credo, the Latin for ‘I be...
Brexit was a dress rehearsal for the US presidential election of 2016. As in Britain, so in the United States, the political establishment took it for granted that the old ways would suffice.
Bread, cash, dosh, dough, loot, lucre, moolah, readies, the where-withal: call it what you like, money matters. To Christians, the love of it is the root of all evil. To generals, it is the sinews of...
Between 1929 and 1933, the public succeeded in increasing its cash holdings by 31 per cent; commercial bank reserves were scarcely altered (indeed, surviving banks built up excess reserves); but comme...
Although it performed the same functions as the Dutch Wisselbank, the Riksbank was also designed to be a Lanebank, meaning that it engaged in lending as well as facilitating commercial payments. By le...
Africa is in fact a more Christian continent than Europe. There are now, for example, more Anglicans in Nigeria than in England.
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Though this was not formally demonstrated until the 2010 mid-term elections to Congress – Facebook was a highly effective tool for political mobilization, especially when used to target local non-digi...
The price people are prepared to pay for a piece of a company tells you how much money they think that company will make in the future. In effect, stock markets hold hourly referendums on the companie...
The crisis prompted the issue of emergency paper money: in Britain, £1 and 10s Treasury notes; in the United States, the emergency currency that banks were authorized to issue under the Aldrich-Vreela...
The German Workers’ Party. Their principal goal, declared its leader in 1913, was ‘the maintenance and increase of [German] living space’ (Lebensraum) against the threat posed by Czech Halbmenschen (‘...