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Should businessmen who commit fraud go to prison? This question has been asked repeatedly since 2008; it was also raised in nineteenth-century Britain, when the spread of corporate capitalism created enormous new opportunities for dishonesty. Historians have presented Victorian Britain as a haven for white-collar criminals, beneficiaries of a prejudiced criminal justice system which only dealt harshly with offences by the poor. This book challenges these beliefs. Based on an unparalleled sample of legal cases—many examined here for the first time—it presents a radical new interpretation of the relationship between capitalism and the law. Initially, there were no criminal sanctions against publishing false prospectuses, concealing losses in balance sheets, and even misappropriating company money. But parliament became convinced of the need to criminalize these practices to protect the culture of stock market investment on which mid-Victorian prosperity increasingly rested. Persuading judges to play along was harder, with many invoking the principle of caveat emptor to exonerate defendants. But by the end of the century, successful prosecutions of company executives were commonplace. These trials performed multiple functions. They stabilized confidence in times of crisis. They dramatized the class blindness of the law. And they were increasingly seen as essential as faith in a self-regulating economy ebbed. The criminalization of fraud therefore has far-reaching implications for our understanding of nineteenth-century Britain. It also has relevance today in light of the ongoing economic crisis and the issues it raises regarding business ethics and the role of the state.

Conventional accounts often conceive the genesis of capitalism in Europe within the conjunctures of agricultural, commercial, and industrial revolutions. Challenging this widely believed cliché, this volume traces the history of capitalism across civilizations, tenth century onwards, and argues that capitalism was neither a monolithic entity nor exclusively an economic phenomenon confined to the West. Looking at regions as diverse as England, South America, Russia, North Africa, and East, South, West, and Southeast Asia, the book explores the plurality of developments across time and space. The chapters analyse aspects such as historical conjunctures, commodity production and distribution, circulation of knowledge and personnel, and the role of mercantile capital, small producers, and force—all the while stressing the necessity to think beyond present-day national boundaries. The book argues that the multiple histories of capitalism can be better understood from a trans-regional, intercontinental, and interconnected perspective.

Since the 1940s Americans and Britons have come to enjoy an era of rising material abundance. Yet this has been accompanied by a range of social and personal disorders, including family breakdown, addiction, mental instability, crime, obesity, inequality, economic insecurity, and declining trust. This book argues that well-being has lagged behind affluence in these societies, because they present an environment in which consistent choices are difficult to achieve over different time ranges and in which the capacity for personal and social commitment is undermined by the flow of novelty. The book's approach draws on economics and social science, makes use of the latest cognitive research, and provides a detailed and reasoned critique of modern consumer society, especially the assumption that freedom of choice necessarily maximizes individual and social well-being. The book falls into three parts. Part one analyzes the ways in which economic resources map on to human welfare, why choice is so intractable, and how commitment to people and institutions is sustained. It argues that choice is constrained by prior obligation and reciprocity. The second section then applies these conceptual arguments to comparative empirical studies of advertising, of eating and obesity, and of the production and acquisition of appliances and automobiles. Finally, in part three, the book investigates social and personal relations in the USA and Britain, including inter-personal regard, the rewards and reversals of status, the social and psychological costs of inequality, and the challenges posed to heterosexual love and to parenthood by the rise of affluence.

This book explores the many different strands in the language of civil society from the 16th to the 20th centuries. Through a series of case-studies it investigates the applicability of the term to a wide range of historical settings. These include ‘state interference’, voluntary associations, economic decision-making, social and economic planning, the ‘bourgeois public sphere’, civil society in wartime, the ‘inclusion’ and ‘exclusion’ of women, and relations between the state, the voluntary sector, and individual citizens. The contributions suggest that the sharp distinction between civil society and the state, common in much continental thought, was of only limited application in a British context. They show how past understandings of the term were often very different from (even in some respects the exact opposite of) those held today, arguing that it makes more sense to understand civil society as a phenomenon that varies between different cultures and periods, rather than a universally applicable set of principles and procedures.

This book chronicles how the concept of organizing people to serve economic ends emerged in early modern and colonial India. It examines rules of cooperation, why people decided to join forces, how disputes were settled, and how cooperative communities became increasingly unstable in more modern times. It focuses on five dimensions: actor, agent, time, purpose, and region. The leading actors are peasants, labourers, artisans, merchants/bankers, and the states. The rules of cooperation that formed inside communities of merchants and others were respected by the states. However, these rules would eventually become unstable due to the integration of India within a global-industrial economy and the introduction of a new rule of law in the old guise of ‘custom’. As a result, the endogamous guild, a kind of collective that used marriage rules to secure cooperative ties, became weaker, to be supplanted by other forms of organization. Collectives controlled property, managed resources, supplied training, and conducted negotiations. The regional angle is important because regions differed on the composition of enterprise, and globalization and colonialism unfolded unevenly across space. The book presents an economic history of institutional change in South Asia.

This book overturns nostalgic stereotypes of antiquated storekeepers, suggesting that nineteenth- and early twentieth-century grocers were important but unsung innovators of business models and retail technologies that fostered the rise of contemporary retailing. They wrestled with fundamental changes in the structures of retailing and commercial capitalism, including the development of mass production, distribution, and marketing; the growth of regional and national markets; the emergence of new organizational and business methods; and the introduction of retail technologies such as the cash register. Yet today we know very little about the considerable achievements of small businessmen and their corner stores and even less about their major contributions to the making of “modern” commercial enterprise in the United States. Combining the archival sources and storekeepers’ stories along with sales records, credit reports, and legislative efforts, the book explores how evolving commercial, legal, and social institutions changed the course and development of the grocery trade. This story is told through grocers’ eyes, illuminating the day-to-day problems, challenges, and tasks associated with running small businesses and showing how local retailers made possible a national grocery trade.

A wool merchant on the edge of the Cotswolds, John Heritage of Moreton in Marsh, traded between 1498 and 1520, and kept a record of his business in an account book. At this time commerce played a major role in English society, and although the wool trade was in decline, Heritage was still active in gathering wool from the producers and supplying the London merchants who sent it overseas. He was also making large profits from farming, by grazing large flocks of sheep and selling wool and animals. The general trends in society that are illuminated by this one trader include the importance of the enclosure movement, which enabled a small number of graziers and farmers to supply the market for wool and meat efficiently from specialized pastures. More important, however, were the large numbers of peasant producers who each sold relatively small quantities of wool, but cumulatively provided a high proportion of the surplus. Peasants could make a profit from the skilful management of the open fields which were attached to their villages, and this was not therefore just an age of rampant individualism. The village was still very active, and there were tensions between acquisitive individuals and the peasant communities, which could lead to the collapse of the village, but sometimes the encloser and grazier met with effective resistance.

This book traces the growth of customs and excise, and their integral role in shaping the framework of industrial England; including state power, technical advance, and the evolution of a consumer society. Central to this structure was the development of two economies — one legal and one illicit. If there was a unique English pathway of industrialization, it was less a distinct entrepreneurial and techno-centric culture, than one predominantly defined within an institutional framework spearheaded by the excise and a wall of tariffs. This process reached its peak by the end of the 1770s. The structure then quickly started to crumble under the weight of the fiscal-military state, and Pitt's calculated policy of concentrating industrial policy around cotton, potteries, and iron — at the expense of other taxed industries. The breakthrough of the new political economy was the erosion of the illicit economy; the smugglers' free trade now became the state's most powerful weapon in the war against non-legal trade. If at the beginning of the period covered by this book state administration was predominantly deregulated and industry regulated, by the close the reverse was the case.

This book investigates political thought under the conditions of the postwar welfare state, focusing on the Federal Republic of Germany (1949–89). It argues that the welfare state informed and altered basic questions of democracy as those institutions take on broader and more concrete forms after the 1950s. These questions were especially important for West Germany, given its recent experience with the collapse of capitalism, the disintegration of democracy, and National Socialist dictatorship after 1930. Three central issues emerged. First, the development of a nearly all-embracing set of social services and payments recast the problem of how social groups and interests related to the state, as state agencies and affected groups generated their own clientele, their own advocacy groups, and their own expert information. Second, the welfare state blurred the line between state and society that is constitutive of basic rights and the classic world of liberal freedom. Rights became claims on the state, and social groups became integral parts of state administration. Third, the welfare state potentially reshaped the individual citizen, who became wrapped up with mandatory social insurance systems, provisioning of money and services related to social needs, and the regulation of everyday life. This book describes how West German experts sought to make sense of this vast array of state programs, expenditures, and bureaucracies aimed at solving social problems. Coming from politics, economics, law, social policy, sociology, and philosophy, they sought to conceptualize their state, which was now social (one German word for the welfare state is indeed Sozialstaat), and their society, which was permeated by state policies.

Despite its small size and population, the Dutch Republic functioned as the hub of world trade, shipping, and finance for nearly two centuries. This is the first detailed account of that hegemony from its sixteenth-century origins to the final collapse of the Dutch trading system in the eighteenth century.

This is the first modern study of the Fellowship of Merchant Adventurers—sixteenth-century England’s premier trading company—in its final century of existence as a privileged organization. Over this period the company’s main trade, the export of cloth to northwest Europe, was overshadowed by rising traffic with the wider world, whilst its privileges were continually criticized in an era of political revolution. But the company and its membership were not passive victims of these changes; rather, they were active participants in the commercial and political dramas of the century. Using thousands of neglected private merchant papers, the book views the company from the perspective of its members, in the process bringing to life the complex social worlds of early modern merchants. It addresses the challenge of maintaining corporate unity in the face of internal disagreements and external attacks. It restores the centrality of the Merchant Adventurers within three important historical narratives: England’s transition from the margins to the centre of the European, and later global, economy; the rise and fall of the merchant corporation as a major form of commercial government in premodern Europe; and the political history of the corporation in an era of state formation and revolution.

This book offers a new approach to the pre-industrial past in Europe and the Mediterranean basin from the Roman Republic to the fall of Napoleon. It takes as its starting point E. A. Wrigley’s concept of ‘organic economies’ and their reliance on the land for energy and raw materials. It first considers the constraints on productivity, transportation, and the spatial organization of the economy. The second section analyses the constraints imposed by military technology and by the organic economy on the tactical, operational, and strategic use of armed force, and the consequences of the spread of firearms in recorded history’s first energy revolution. This is followed by an analysis of the military and economic constraints on the political integration of space through the formation of geographically extensive political units. The volume concludes with the demographic and economic consequences of the investment of manpower and resources in war. This volume also considers why so much potential or organic economies to support economic and political development remained unrealized. Endemic mass poverty curtailed demand, limiting incentives for investment and innovation, and keeping output growth below what was technologically possible. Resource shortages prevented rulers from establishing a fiscal apparatus capable of appropriating such resources as were physically available. But economic inefficiency also created under-utilized resources that could potentially be mobilized in pursuit of political power. The volume gives an innovative account of this potential — and why it was realized in the ancient world rather than the medieval west — together with a new analysis of the gunpowder revolution and the inability of rulers to meet the consequential costs within the confines of an organic economy.

The financial humbling of a great power in any age demands explanation. In the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–14) Louis XIV's France had to fight way beyond its borders and the costs of war rose to unprecedented heights. With royal income falling as economic activity slowed down, the widening gap between revenue and expenditure led the government into a series of desperate expedients. Ever-larger quantities of credit, often obtained through fairly novel and poorly-understood financial instruments, were combined with ill-advised monetary manipulations. Moreover, through poor ministerial management the system of earmarking revenues for spending descended into chaos. All this forced up the cost of loans, foreign exchange, and military logistics as government contractors and bankers built the mounting risks into the price of their contracts and sought to profit from the situation. There was already a problem with controlling royal contractors, who ran the entire financial machinery, but this only grew worse, not least because the government further indemnified and bailed out men deemed too essential to fail. In some cases entrepreneurs even managed to penetrate the corridors of the ministries, either as heads of royal agencies or even as junior ministers. This added up to nothing less than an early military-industrial complex. As state debt climbed to astronomical levels and financial instruments collapsed in value France's chances of remaining the superpower of the age shrank. The military decline of a great power often goes hand-in-hand with its financial decline, but rarely so dramatically as in early eighteenth-century France.

Brexit is likely to lead to the largest shift in Britain’s economic orientation in living memory. Some have argued that leaving the EU will enable Britain to revive markets in Commonwealth countries with which it has long-standing historical ties. Their opponents argue that such claims are based on forms of imperial nostalgia which ignore the often uncomfortable historical trade relations between Britain and these countries, as well as the UK’s historical role as a global, rather than chiefly imperial, economy. This book explores how efforts to promote a ‘British World’ system, centred on promoting trade between Britain and the Dominions, grew and declined in influence between the 1880s and 1970s. At the beginning of the twentieth century many people from London, to Sydney, Auckland, and Toronto considered themselves to belong to culturally British nations. British politicians and business leaders invested significant resources in promoting trade with Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa out of a perception that these were great markets of the future. However, ideas about promoting trade between ‘British’ peoples were racially exclusive. From the 1920s onwards colonized and decolonizing populations questioned and challenged the bases of British World networks, making use of alternative forms of international collaboration promoted firstly by the League of Nations and then by the United Nations. Schemes for imperial collaboration amongst ethnically ‘British’ peoples were hollowed out by the actions of a variety of political and business leaders across Asia and Africa who reshaped the functions and identity of the Commonwealth.

This book is the first of three volumes covering the history of printing and publishing at the University of Oxford. This book starts from its tentative and obscure beginnings in the late fifteenth century, and then moves to the appointment of the Oxford bookseller Joseph Barnes as university printer in 1584, through a succession of university printers and the establishment of a university press in the latter half of the seventeenth century, and then to the crisis that led the University to take over the so-called Bible Press in 1780. It is a history of the books printed at Oxford, of the men (and very occasionally women) who printed, published, and sold them, and of the other individuals, many of them members of the University, whose activities and decisions shaped the development of printing and publishing at Oxford — most notably William Laud, John Fell, and William Blackstone. This first volume explores the range of works produced by the university printers that later became a university press, paying specific attention to works of natural philosophy, divinity, history, literature, music, law, and medicine as well as works in modern, oriental, and classical languages. It also considers works printed for the University itself, and the activities of the Bible Press which printed bibles and other ‘privileged’ works. Finally, the volume traces the growing influence of the university press on the city of Oxford, and its place in the national and international book trade.

This second volume on the history of Oxford University Press starts in 1780. In that year the Press still produced a handful of academic titles a year and rented its bible privilege to members of the book trade. By 1896 it had a huge printing works in Oxford (employing hundreds of workers who had to be managed and trained) which made some of its own paper, ink, and type — material that slowly changed the look and feel of Oxford books; it printed millions of bibles year; it had a large London business which distributed privileged and secular books; it had become a major publisher of textbooks and of reference works, particularly dictionaries; it had developed for its titles both a considerable UK market and an international one, particularly in North America and the British Empire. In part this rapid evolution was made possible by the flexible relationship between the Press and the University, and was powered by the Bible Partnership (1780–1881) in which the Delegates worked with members of the book trade to exploit new technologies and new markets. Co-operation with the firm of Macmillan from the 1860s to the 1880s taught the Press how to be a large-scale publisher of secular books, particularly schoolbooks. This process required the Press to change the ways in which it related to and paid its authors. By the mid-1880s the Press needed no further tuition and became entire unto itself, finally replacing even its agents in New York with its own wholly-owned branch. Starting from its traditional publishing strengths (bibles and service books, divinity, and classics), the Press expanded its subject range to include educational books, science, mathematics, medicine, history, law, literature, and dictionaries.