Showing titles in Economic History

Economics has the capacity to offer us deep insights into some of the most formidable problems of life and offer solutions to them, too. Combining a global approach with examples from everyday life, Partha Dasgupta describes the lives of two children who live very different lives in different parts of the world: the Midwest USA and in Ethiopia. He compares the obstacles facing them and the processes that shape their lives, their families, and their futures. He shows how economics uncovers these processes, finds explanations for them, and how it forms policies and solutions.

The English East India Company was the mother of the modern multinational. Its trading empire encircled the globe, importing Asian luxuries such as spices, textiles and teas. But it also conquered much of India with its private army and broke open China's markets with opium. The Company’s practices shocked its contemporaries and still reverberate today. This expanded edition explores how the four forces of scale, technology, finance and regulation drove its spectacular rise and fall.

Brought to you by Penguin. · The richest eight people control more wealth than the poorest half of the world combined. · Today, 60 per cent of the world's population lives on less than $5 a day. · Though global real GDP has nearly tripled since 1980, 1.1 billion more people are now living in...

The gripping, definitive account of the private family behind one of the most powerful financial institutions in the world. “Pulls the curtain back on one of the country's most powerful and mysterious financial institutions … It’s a must read.” ―William D. Cohan , New York Times...

Pack your cutlass and blunderbuss--it's time to go a-pirating! The Invisible Hook takes readers inside the wily world of late 17th- and early 18th-century pirates. With swashbuckling irreverence and devilish wit, Peter Leeson uncovers the hidden economics behind pirates' notorious, entertaining, and sometimes downright shocking behavior.

Written with the verve of such works as The Big Short, The History of the Future, and The Spider Network, here is the fascinating, true story of the rise of Ethereum, the second-biggest digital asset in the world, the growth of cryptocurrency, and the future of the internet as we know it...

When the Emancipation Proclamation was signed in 1863, the black community owned less than one percent of the United States' total wealth. More than 150 years later, that number has barely budged. The Color of Money pursues the persistence of this racial wealth gap by focusing on the generators of wealth in the black community: black banks. The catch-22 of black banking is that the very institutions needed to help communities escape the deep poverty caused by discrimination and segregation inevitably became victims of that same poverty.

A San Francisco Chronicle Bestseller An NPR Best Book of the Year The New York Times’s Global Economics Correspondent masterfully reveals how billionaires’ systematic plunder of the world—brazenly accelerated during the pandemic—has transformed 21st-century life and dangerously...

'Pulls off the rare feat of making you laugh, think and feel like you happened upon a top secret dossier' GEOFF NORCOTT 'MONEYMANIA is a page-turner and a must read if you wonder why the world is so screwed up.' PATRICK ALLEY, author of VERY BAD PEOPLE The anonymous author of TAXTOPIA takes us...

In this ambitious and groundbreaking history of the dollar, financial journalist and economic scholar Brendan Greeley makes a new argument about the origins of our money—and the people and nations who have surrendered to it. “Brimming with startling details, this is also serious financial...

Mark Koyama and Jared Rubin dive into the many theories of why modern economic growth happened when and where it did. They discuss recently advanced theories rooted in geography, politics, culture, demography, and colonialism. Pieces of each of these theories help explain key events on the path to modern riches. Why did the Industrial Revolution begin in eighteenth-century Britain? Why did some European countries, the United States, and Japan catch up in the nineteenth century? Why did it take until the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries for other countries? 

From one of the world's leading economists, a sweeping new history of the twentieth century - a century that left us vastly richer, yet still profoundly dissatisfied. Before 1870, most people lived in dire poverty, the benefits of the slow crawl of invention continually offset by a growing...

Brought to you by Penguin. Over the course of the 1850s and 1860s, during the first era of globalisation, the world experienced an unprecedented economic boom. Fuelling this expansion was an explosion in borrowing through the global bond market, which provided financing for the century’s most...

In Wealth, War, and Wisdom, legendary Wall Street investor Barton Biggs reveals how the turning points of World War II intersected with market performance. Biggs will help the 21st-century investor comprehend our own perilous times as well as choose the best strategies for the modern market economy.

Succinct, accessible, and authoritative, Thomas Piketty’s The Economics of Inequality is the ideal place to start for those who want to understand the fundamental issues at the heart of one the most pressing concerns in contemporary economics and politics. This work now appears in English for the first time.

En este libro pionero, Ray Dalio, uno de los inversores más importantes de nuestro tiempo, que previó la crisis financiera mundial de 2008 y la crisis de la deuda europea de [redacted-phone-number], comparte por primera vez su explicación al detalle de lo que él denomina «el ciclo largo de la deuda». Comprender este ciclo es vital para ayudar a los responsables públicos, los inversores y el público general a entender dónde estamos y adónde nos dirigimos en materia de deuda.

Why do stock and housing markets sometimes experience amazing booms followed by massive busts, and why is this happening more and more frequently? In order to answer these questions, William Quinn and John D. Turner take us on a riveting ride through the history of financial bubbles. As they do so, they help us understand why bubbles happen and why some have catastrophic economic, social, and political consequences while others have actually benefited society. 

Over the centuries, gold had stirred the passions for power and glory, for beauty and security, and even for immortality. No other object has commanded so much veneration over such a long period of time. The most striking feature of this long history is that gold led most of the...

The sweeping story of the world’s first financial crisis: “an astounding episode from the early days of financial markets that to this day continues to intrigue and perplex historians . . . narrative history at its best, lively and fresh with new insights” (Liaquat Ahamed, Pulitzer...

The world is a better place than it used to be. People are healthier, wealthier, and live longer. Yet the escapes from destitution by so many has left gaping inequalities between people and nations. In The Great Escape, Angus Deaton - one of the foremost experts on economic development and on poverty - tells the remarkable story of how, beginning 250 years ago, some parts of the world experienced sustained progress, opening up gaps and setting the stage for today's disproportionately unequal world.