Financial History and History

2016 ◽  
pp. 16-40
Author(s):  
Youssef Cassis
Keyword(s):  
Economic Theory ◽  
Financial Crisis ◽  
Economic History ◽  
First Century ◽  
Statistical Techniques ◽  
Financial History ◽  
Historical Approach ◽  
New Challenges ◽  
Essential Contribution ◽  
Specific Contribution

This chapter reflects on the connections between financial history and history, with particular attention to the specific contribution of the historical approach to a field that necessarily also draws from other disciplines, especially economics. It provides a historiographical survey of a field that matured in the 1980s and 1990s and considers the new challenges and the new opportunities that arose prior to the turn of the twenty-first century, with the growing use of formal economic theory and high-powered statistical techniques, the deepening divorce between economic history and history, the rise of financial economics, and also the financial crisis of 2008. The chapter argues that in order to survive as a distinct specialism and provide an essential contribution to the understanding of financial phenomena, financial history will have to integrate new theoretical and methodological trends, but obey the fundamental principles of the historical approach.

The Oxford Handbook of Banking and Financial History

2016 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Financial Crisis ◽  
Great Depression ◽  
Economic History ◽  
Financial Crises ◽  
Financial Regulation ◽  
Financial History ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Historical Reflection ◽  
Methodological Aspects

The financial crisis of 2008 aroused widespread interest in banking and financial history among policy makers, academics, journalists, and even bankers, in addition to the wider public. References in the press to the term ‘Great Depression’ spiked after the failure of Lehman Brothers in November 2008, with similar surges in references to ‘economic history’ at various times during the financial turbulence. In an attempt to better understand the magnitude of the shock, there was a demand for historical parallels. How severe was the financial crash? Was it, in fact, the most severe financial crisis since the Great Depression? Were its causes unique or part of a well-known historical pattern? And have financial crises always led to severe depressions? Historical reflection on the recent financial crises and the long-term development of the financial system go hand in hand. This volume provides the material for such a reflection by presenting the state of the art in banking and financial history. Nineteen highly regarded experts present twenty-one chapters on the economic and financial side of banking and financial activities, primarily—though not solely—in advanced economies, in a long-term comparative perspective. In addition to paying attention to general issues, not least those related to theoretical and methodological aspects of the discipline, the volume approaches the banking and financial world from four distinct but interrelated angles: financial institutions, financial markets, financial regulation, and financial crises.

Mathematics without Apologies

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Harris
Keyword(s):  
Number Theory ◽  
Financial Crisis ◽  
Pop Culture ◽  
First Century ◽  
2008 Financial Crisis ◽  
Dinner Party ◽  
Mathematical Life ◽  
Personal Experiences ◽  
The 2008 Financial Crisis ◽  
Guided Tour

What do pure mathematicians do, and why do they do it? Looking beyond the conventional answers, this book offers an eclectic panorama of the lives and values and hopes and fears of mathematicians in the twenty-first century, assembling material from a startlingly diverse assortment of scholarly, journalistic, and pop culture sources. Drawing on the author's personal experiences as well as the thoughts and opinions of mathematicians from Archimedes and Omar Khayyám to such contemporary giants as Alexander Grothendieck and Robert Langlands, the book reveals the charisma and romance of mathematics as well as its darker side. In this portrait of mathematics as a community united around a set of common intellectual, ethical, and existential challenges, the book touches on a wide variety of questions, such as: Are mathematicians to blame for the 2008 financial crisis? How can we talk about the ideas we were born too soon to understand? And how should you react if you are asked to explain number theory at a dinner party? The book takes readers on an unapologetic guided tour of the mathematical life, from the philosophy and sociology of mathematics to its reflections in film and popular music, with detours through the mathematical and mystical traditions of Russia, India, medieval Islam, the Bronx, and beyond.

The Early History of Financial Economics, 1478–1776. By Geoffrey Poitras. Cheltenham and Northampton: Edward Elgar, 2000. Pp. x, 522.

2002 ◽  
Vol 62 (1) ◽  
pp. 268-269
Author(s):  
Larry Neal
Keyword(s):  
Economic History ◽  
Financial Analysis ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Economic Thought ◽  
Financial History ◽  
X 522 ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Wealth Of Nations ◽  
Simon Fraser University

Economic historians usually have to explain to their economist colleagues the difference between economic history, which focuses on facts, and history of economic thought, which focuses on ideas. Our colleagues in finance departments, typically fascinated by episodes in financial history treated by economic historians, are bound to be disappointed in the lack of attention given to the development of ideas in finance by historians of economic thought. Geoffrey Poitras, a professor of finance at Simon Fraser University, makes a valiant effort to remedy these oversights in his collection of vignettes that highlight the sophistication of financial instruments and analysts of financial markets well before the time of Adam Smith. Starting in 1478 with the publication of the Treviso Arithmetic, a typical textbook of commercial arithmetic for Italian merchants, and ending with brief snippets from the Wealth of Nations, Poitras treats the reader to a fascinating potpourri of excerpts from various manuals, brief biographies of pioneers in financial analysis, and historical discursions on foreign-exchange and stock markets.

The Revival of Quantification: Reflections on Old New Histories

2021 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-25
Author(s):  
Steven Ruggles
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social History ◽  
Economic History ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
The United States ◽  
First Century ◽  
Third Wave ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Second Wave

AbstractQuantitative historical analysis in the United States surged in three distinct waves. The first quantitative wave occurred as part of the “New History” that blossomed in the early twentieth century and disappeared in the 1940s and 1950s with the rise of consensus history. The second wave thrived from the 1960s to the 1980s during the ascendance of the New Economic History, the New Political History, and the New Social History, and died out during the “cultural turn” of the late twentieth century. The third wave of historical quantification—which I call the revival of quantification—emerged in the second decade of the twenty-first century and is still underway. I describe characteristics of each wave and discuss the historiographical context of the ebb and flow of quantification in history.

American Institutional Studies: Present Knowledge and Past Trends

1971 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-105 ◽  
Author(s):  
James H. Soltow
Keyword(s):  
Economic Theory ◽  
Economic History ◽  
Present Knowledge ◽  
Quarter Century ◽  
The Past

The production of economic history, like that in many fields of scholarly endeavor, increased sharply in the past quarter-century, compared to the rate of output in earlier eras. While the “new” economic history, with its emphasis on economic theory and measurement, has attracted considerable attention during the last decade, “traditional” economic history, written along institutional lines, has continued to be significant, both quantitatively (in terms of numbers of books and articles) and qualitatively (as assessed by contributions to our understanding of economic processes.)

Mercantilism Revisited

1980 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 773-791 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. C. Coleman
Keyword(s):  
Economic Theory ◽  
Economic Policy ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Economic History ◽  
Extreme Case ◽  
Economic Thought ◽  
The State ◽  
Economic Situation ◽  
The Status

The intention of this paper is to look at some of the problems which arise in attempts to provide ‘explanations’ of mercantilism and especially its English manifestations. By ‘explanations’ I mean the efforts which some writers have made causally to relate the historical appearance of sets of economic notions or general recommendations on economic policy or even acts of economic policy by the state to particular long-term phenomena of, or trends in, economic history. Historians of economic thought have not generally made such attempts. With a few exceptions they have normally concerned themselves with tracing and analysing the contributions to economic theory made by those labelled as mercantilists. The most extreme case of non-explanation is provided by Eli Heckscher's reiterated contention in his two massive volumes that mercantilism was not to be explained by reference to the economic circumstances of the time; mercantilist policy was not to be seen as ‘the outcome of the economic situation’; mercantilist writers did not construct their system ‘out of any knowledge of reality however derived’. So strongly held an antideterminist fortress, however congenial a haven for some historians of ideas, has given no comfort to other historians – economic or political, Marxist or non-Marxist – who obstinately exhibit empiricist tendencies. Some forays against the fortress have been made. Barry Supple's analysis of English commerce in the early seventeenth century and the resulting presentation of mercantilist thought and policy as ‘the economics of depression’ has passed into the textbooks and achieved the status of an orthodoxy.

Statistics and Economic History

1941 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 26-41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Kuznets
Keyword(s):  
Statistical Analysis ◽  
Economic History ◽  
Raw Materials ◽  
The Other ◽  
Economic Study ◽  
Statistical Research ◽  
Historical Approach ◽  
The Past ◽  
Economic Inquiry ◽  
Analytical Tools

This paper deals with the relation between statistical analysis as applied in economic inquiry and history as written or interpreted by economic historians. Although both these branches of economic study derive from the same body of raw materials of inquiry—the recordable past and present of economic society—each has developed in comparative isolation from the other. Statistical economists have failed to utilize adequately the contributions that economic historians have made to our knowledge of the past; and historians have rarely employed either the analytical tools or the basic theoretical hypotheses of statistical research. It is the thesis of this essay that such failure to effect a close interrelation between historical approach and statistical analysis needs to be corrected in the light of the final goal of economic study.

scholarly journals The Difficulties of Achieving Successful Tax Reform

2016 ◽  
pp. 30-47 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon James
Keyword(s):  
Economic Theory ◽  
Economic Efficiency ◽  
Systematic Approach ◽  
Tax Reform ◽  
Political Process ◽  
Economic Environment ◽  
The Political ◽  
Essential Contribution ◽  
The Many ◽  
Theoretical Considerations

This chapter sets out the issues that should be considered in developing successful tax reform. Economic theory makes an essential contribution to the development of tax reform, incorporating issues of both economic efficiency and equity. However, other theoretical considerations demonstrate that successful tax design may be considerably more difficult than seems to be widely thought. In addition, there are matters of tax administration and compliance that have to be taken into account. The changing socio-economic environment within which tax systems have to operate as well, as the political process of tax reform, are also important. Finally, the chapter shows how to develop a systematic approach which can incorporate the many important issues that should be included in developing successful tax reform.

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