1st Edition

Economic Crises and Global Politics in the 20th Century

Edited By Alexander Nützenadel, Cornelius Torp Copyright 2014
    200 Pages
    by Routledge

    194 Pages
    by Routledge

    This book analyses the history of economic crises from the angle of international politics and its transformation throughout the 20th century. While political and economic debates in the wake of the present financial crisis are revolving around the question of how to create effective forms of global governance, historians have discovered a long tradition of international economic regulation that can be traced back to the late 19th century. In the global economy, sovereign defaults, banking crises and currency crashes have been recurrent phenomena. At the same time, alongside the growing globalization of commodity and capital markets, nation-states have introduced new forms of regulation both on the national and international level. The experience of economic crises has been an important driver behind numerous initiatives to foster global politics.

    The purpose of the book is to reconnect economic history with the perspectives of political economy and the history of international relations. It forms a dialogue between the disciplines that have been increasingly separated throughout the past decades. With first-rate economic historians and political economists writing for a wider audience, it simultaneously makes public debates and methods of recent cutting-edge research in economic history within a wider academic community.

    This book was originally published as a special issue of the European Review of History.

    1. Introduction Alexander Nützenadel and Cornelius Torp

    2. Crises and policy responses within the political trilemma: Europe, 1929 – 36 and 2008 – 11 Nikolaus Wolf

    3. Public debt and financial crises in the twentieth century Moritz Schularick

    4. What do we need to bring about a financial crisis? A long-term look at the development of banking systems, money supply and crises 1850 – 2010 Jyrki Johannes Lessig

    5. Financial crises and the balance of power in international finance, 1890 – 2010 Youssef Cassis

    6. The German transfer problem, 1920 – 33: a sovereign-debt perspective Albrecht Ritschl

    7. Economic crises in the ASEAN area: types and responses Vincent Houben

    8. Crying on Lombard Street: fixing sovereign defaults in the 1890s Juan H. Flores

    9. The crisis before the crisis: the ‘problems of modern society’ and the OECD, 1968 – 74 Matthias Schmelzer

    10. Finance is History! Harold James

    Biography

    Alexander Nützenadel is Professor of Social and Economic History at Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany.

    Cornelius Torp teaches history at Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg, Germany. In the last years, he has been Research Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, and the Freiburg Centre for Advanced Studies.