Banking and Economic Growth in Sweden before World War I

1978 ◽  
Vol 38 (3) ◽  
pp. 650-680 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lars G. Sandberg

The article sketches the history of Swedish commercial banking from 1656 until World War I, with special attention to the post-1850 period. Emphasis is placed on the relationships between economic growth and banking. International comparisons based on the quantitative measures developed by Rondo Cameron and Raymond Goldsmith are made. It is concluded that at all stages of its early industrialization Sweden had a remarkably large and efficient banking system. This, in turn, was largely the result of the general population's long experience with banking and paper money and their generally high levels of literacy and education.

1955 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 13-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
Penelope Hartland

Within the sweep of Canada's economic progress, I should liketo devote special attention to one period—from about 1900 to the outbreak of World War I—as die period of most rapid growth in the history of Canada since die union of the separate provinces under Confederation in 1867, with die possible exception of die war-stimulated 1940's. I propose to point out certain parallels between that remarkable expansionary period and a much earlier one. I shall also attempt to isolate die important factors responsible for the upsurge of growdi after 1900.


Author(s):  
Philip T. Hoffman ◽  
Gilles Postel-Vinay ◽  
Jean-Laurent Rosenthal

Prevailing wisdom dictates that without banks countries would be mired in poverty. Yet somehow much of Europe managed to grow rich long before the diffusion of banks. This book draws on centuries of loan data from France to reveal how credit abounded well before banks opened their doors. The book shows how a vast system of shadow credit enabled nearly a third of French families to borrow in 1740, and by 1840 funded as much mortgage debt as the American banking system of the 1950s. The book traces how this extensive private network outcompeted banks and thrived prior to World War I—not just in France but in Britain, Germany, and the United States—until killed off by government intervention after 1918. Overturning common assumptions about banks and economic growth, the book paints a revealing picture of an until-now hidden market of thousands of peer-to-peer loans made possible by a network of brokers who matched lenders with borrowers and certified the borrowers' creditworthiness. The book challenges widespread misperceptions about French economic history, such as the notion that banks proliferated slowly, and the idea that financial innovation was hobbled by French law. By documenting how intermediaries in the shadow credit market devised effective financial instruments, this compelling book provides new insights into how countries can develop and thrive today.


Author(s):  
Odile Moreau

This chapter explores movement and circulation across the Mediterranean and seeks to contribute to a history of proto-nationalism in the Maghrib and the Middle East at a particular moment prior to World War I. The discussion is particularly concerned with the interface of two Mediterranean spaces: the Middle East (Egypt, Ottoman Empire) and North Africa (Morocco), where the latter is viewed as a case study where resistance movements sought external allies as a way of compensating for their internal weakness. Applying methods developed by Subaltern Studies, and linking macro-historical approaches, namely of a translocal movement in the Muslim Mediterranean, it explores how the Egypt-based society, al-Ittihad al-Maghribi, through its agent, Aref Taher, used the press as an instrument for political propaganda, promoting its Pan-Islamic programme and its goal of uniting North Africa.


Transfers ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 102-120
Author(s):  
Michael Pesek

This article describes the little-known history of military labor and transport during the East African campaign of World War I. Based on sources from German, Belgian, and British archives and publications, it considers the issue of military transport and supply in the thick of war. Traditional histories of World War I tend to be those of battles, but what follows is a history of roads and footpaths. More than a million Africans served as porters for the troops. Many paid with their lives. The organization of military labor was a huge task for the colonial and military bureaucracies for which they were hardly prepared. However, the need to organize military transport eventually initiated a process of modernization of the colonial state in the Belgian Congo and British East Africa. This process was not without backlash or failure. The Germans lost their well-developed military transport infrastructure during the Allied offensive of 1916. The British and Belgians went to war with the question of transport unresolved. They were unable to recruit enough Africans for military labor, a situation made worse by failures in the supplies by porters of food and medical care. One of the main factors that contributed to the success of German forces was the Allies' failure in the “war of legs.”


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura A Talbot ◽  
E Jeffrey Metter ◽  
Heather King

ABSTRACT During World War I, the 1918 influenza pandemic struck the fatigued combat troops serving on the Western Front. Medical treatment options were limited; thus, skilled military nursing care was the primary therapy and the best indicator of patient outcomes. This article examines the military nursing’s role in the care of the soldiers during the 1918 flu pandemic and compares this to the 2019 coronavirus pandemic.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Robert Nemes

Abstract Hungary has a long, rich history of wine production. Historians have emphasized wine's importance to the development of both the Hungarian economy and Hungarian nationalism. This article ties together these historiographical threads through a case study of a small village in one of Hungary's most famous wine regions. Tracing the village's history from the 1860s to World War I, the article makes three main claims. First, it demonstrates that from the start, this remote village belonged to wider networks of trade and exchange that stretched across the surrounding region, state, and continent. Second, it shows that even as Magyar elites celebrated the folk culture and peasant smallholders of this region, they also cheered the introduction of what they saw as scientific, rational agriculture. This leads to the last argument: wine achieved its place in the pantheon of Hungarian culture at a moment when the local communities that had grown up around its production and stirred the national imagination were undergoing dramatic and irreversible change.


2019 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 372-396
Author(s):  
Maja Spanu

International Relations scholarship disconnects the history of the so-called expansion of international society from the presence of hierarchies within it. In contrast, this article argues that these developments may in fact be premised on hierarchical arrangements whereby new states are subject to international tutelage as the price of acceptance to international society. It shows that hierarchies within international society are deeply entrenched with the politics of self-determination as international society expands. I substantiate this argument with primary and secondary material on the Minority Treaty provisions imposed on the new states in Central, Eastern and Southern Europe admitted to the League of Nations after World War I. The implications of this claim for International Relations scholarship are twofold. First, my argument contributes to debates on the making of the international system of states by showing that the process of expansion of international society is premised on hierarchy, among and within states. Second, it speaks to the growing body of scholarship on hierarchy in world politics by historicising where hierarchies come from, examining how diverse hierarchies are nested and intersect, and revealing how different actors navigate these hierarchies.


Author(s):  
Brent A. R. Hege

AbstractAs dialectical theology rose to prominence in the years following World War I, the new theologians sought to distance themselves from liberalism in a number of ways, an important one being a rejection of Schleiermacher’s methods and conclusions. In reading the history of Weimar-era theology as it has been written in the twentieth century one would be forgiven for assuming that Schleiermacher found no defenders during this time, as liberal theology quietly faded into the twilight. However, a closer examination of this period reveals a different story. The last generation of liberal theologians consistently appealed to Schleiermacher for support and inspiration, perhaps none more so than Georg Wobbermin, whom B. A. Gerrish has called a “captain of the liberal rearguard.” Wobbermin sought to construct a religio-psychological method on the basis of Schleiermacher’s definition of religion and on his “Copernican turn” toward the subject and resolutely defended such a method against the new dialectical theology long after liberal theology’s supposed demise. A consideration of Wobbermin’s appeals to Schleiermacher in his defense of the liberal program reveals a more complex picture of the state of theology in the Weimar period and of Schleiermacher’s legacy in German Protestant thought.


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