Financial History (History)

La Tesorería General fue una de las instituciones centrales del aparato de gobierno borbónico en el siglo XVIII. Centrándose en ella y en sus relaciones con órganos creados conjuntamente (en particular, la secretaría del despacho de la Hacienda y, más tarde, el "ministro de Hacienda", y las intendencias de ejércitos y provincias), el libro estudia las reformas del gobierno de la Hacienda española en el siglo XVIII y los modelos políticos que se les asocian, cuestionando la homogeneidad del reformismo borbónico.

President Andrew Jackson’s conflict with the Second Bank of the United States was one of the most consequential political struggles in the early 19th century. A fight over the Bank's reauthorization, the “Bank War,” provoked fundamental disagreements over the role of money in politics, competing constitutional interpretations, equal opportunity in the face of a state-sanctioned monopoly, and the importance of financial regulation—all of which cemented emerging differences between Jacksonian Democrats and Whigs. As Stephen W. Campbell argues here, both sides in the Bank War engaged interregional communications networks funded by public and private money. The first reappraisal of this political turning point in American history in almost 50 years, The Bank War and the Partisan Press advances a new interpretation by focusing on the funding and dissemination of the party press.
Drawing on insights from the fields of political history, the history of journalism, and financial history, The Bank War and the Partisan Press brings to light a revolving cast of newspaper editors, financiers, and postal workers who appropriated the financial resources of pre-existing political institutions, and even created new ones, to enrich themselves and further their careers. The Bank propagated favorable media and tracked public opinion through its system of branch offices, while the Jacksonians did the same by harnessing the patronage networks of the Post Office.
Campbell’s work contextualizes the Bank War within larger political and economic developments at the national and international levels. Its focus on the newspaper business documents the transition from a seemingly simple question of renewing the Bank’s charter to a multi-sided, nationwide sensation that sorted the American public into ideologically polarized political parties. In doing so, The Bank War and the Partisan Press shows how the conflict played out on the ground level in various states--in riots, duels, raucous public meetings, politically orchestrated bank runs, arson, and assassination attempts. The resulting narrative moves beyond the traditional boxing match between Jackson and Bank president Nicholas Biddle, balancing political institutions with individual actors, and business practices with party attitudes.

Early modern states faced numerous challenges in subsisting their prisoners of war, not least the problems of remitting them money for their subsistence, which had to pass across hostile borders.  Examining how the British state achieved this in the War of the Spanish Succession (1702-13) shows the limits of modern scholarship on state formation and its focus on administrative reform and domestic resource mobilisation.  The project of power continued to rely on international Huguenot and even Jacobite financial networks, held together by personal trust and private interests, sometimes even while they were working for the enemy.  Success was achieved because British officials were able to tap into these networks through hubs such as London, Amsterdam, Paris and Madrid, and use them to maintain the flow of money abroad.

Despite the emphasis on materialism prompting many debates about the growth of the gold industry and the outbreak of the South African War in 1899, little research has focused on the  nancial institutions of South Africa’s early gold industry. The growth of the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE) is woven interchangeably with that of Witwatersrand’s gold industry. This article investigates why and how the Exchange came into existence, and its early interaction with southern Africa’s gold-mining revolution. Using original documentation from the JSE and its landlord, the Johannesburg Estate Company, the article juxtaposes accounts of the London Stock Exchange, with South African  nancial developments in the last quarter of the 19th century. It describes the intentional deregulation of stock exchange listing requirements that led to the establishment of the JSE. In addition, the article outlines the JSE’s organisational developments by quantifying and qualifying trends in membership numbers up until the end of the  rst ‘Golden Boom’ of 1890. The early institutional growth of the Exchange can be seen as a balancing of organisational power between the Exchange’s landowner, Barney Barnato’s Johannesburg Estate Company, and JSE members.

When they tell the story of the origins of financial instruments and markets, most financial historians  begin in the Middle East, and go via the Mediterranean to the Northwest of Europe. Along the way financial instruments were introduced to communities of merchants, and improved. It is not mere chance that this route coincides with the string of successful pre-industrial economies – the Abbasid caliphate, medieval Italy, the early-modern Low Countries, and England on the brink of the Industrial Revolution – for financial historians firmly believe in a link between the growth of real economy and financial markets. In this respect the towns of the Hanseatic League, which formed a successful trade network in the North and Northwest of Europe, in the late Middle Ages, do not really fit into the story: financial instruments and markets of these towns hardly play a role in the grand narrative of financial history. Focusing on oft-used indicators for the performance of financial markets – size and scope of financial transactions, and liquidity of financial instruments – we contribute to the positioning of late-medieval Hansa towns in financial history. These were thin markets, connecting various social groups, and also offering creditors ample possibilities to resell their financial instruments. Contrary to what is often assumed, financial instruments issued by public bodies only played a modest role in these markets: rather, annuities issued by  private parties helped to redistribute savings.

Few financial crises, historically speaking, have attracted such attention as the Mississippi and South Sea Bubbles of 1719–20. The twin bubbles had major economic and political implications, sending shock waves through the whole of Europe; they astonished contemporaries, and, to a large extent, they still resonate today. This volume offers new readings of these events, drawing on fresh research and new evidence that challenge traditional interpretations. The chapters engage, in particular, with:

- the geographical frame of the 1719-20 bubbles
- their social, cultural, economic and political impact
- the ways in which contemporaries understood speculation
- the contributions and impact of a diverse array of participants
- popular and print memorialization of the events

Overall, the volume helps to rewrite the history of the 1719–20 bubbles and to recontextualize their place within eighteenth-century history.

A detailed study of the urban finances of the town of Ghent, during the second half of the 15th century. The focus lies particularly on the different financial policies enacted by subsequent political regimes during the turbulent final quarter of the century.

The polemic surrounding the 1753 Jewish Naturalization Bill was one of the major public opinion campaigns in Britain in the eighteenth century, as well as the most significant event in the history of Britain's Jews between their seventeenth-century admission and nineteenth-century emancipation. The bill proposed to offer Jews a private act of naturalization without the sacramental test. A costly and cumbersome process, the measure could have had only minor practical impact. Due to its symbolic significance, however, the bill ignited public clamor in hundreds of newspaper columns, pamphlets, and prints. What made it so resonant, and why was the opposition so successful in propagating opposition to the motion? It has been commonly argued that the entire affair was an instance of partisan conflict in which the Jews themselves played an incidental role. This paper throws light on the episode from an alternative perspective, arguing that a central reason for its resonance was that the discussion on the Jews evoked concerns with the expanding financial market and its sociopolitical implications. As Jews had by that time become emblematic of modern finance, they embodied contemporary anxieties about the economy, national identity, and their interrelations.

The thirteenth-century English exchequer carefully retained pipe rolls and referred to them over many decades. Most writers have concentrated on the annual audit function of the rolls, but they had a much longer-term significance for the exchequer's key task, collecting cash for the government. This article examines how the rolls were used to collect debts, and the procedures which made them manageable. It is based almost entirely on examples from pipe and memoranda rolls, mainly unpublished. It also demonstrates that use of the rolls is simpler than has recently been claimed.

The purchase of the town of Maqueda in 1483 by Gutierre de Cárdenas, chief accountant of the Catholic Monarchs, from Alonso Carrillo de Acuña, senior guard, was related, until 1491, to the prolix negotiation of an important royal loan of sixteen million maravedís for the War of Granada. The analysis of the documentation preserved on this subject reveals the complicated process of financing, execution, repayment and cancellation of the loan with its financial intermediaries, as well as the measures to maximize its possible benefits. Likewise, the comparative study of the tax sources related to Carrillo’s loan to the Crown provides us information about the public debt in the 15th century Castilian royal estate.

Roman businessmen evidently faced a paradox. The requirements of ancient law made it impossible for them to convert into liquidity at any time the financial belongings at their disposal in the form of receivables; yet these were nevertheless considered to be intangible assets according to the classification of Gaius, the eminent law professor of the second half of the 2nd century. This ancient situation was so singular that it drew the attention of several French and German jurists throughout the second half of the 19th century , even inspiring several theses. What emerged is that nothing was set in stone. Well before the establishment of the Empire, in the late centuries of the Republic, innovations were introduced to refinance receivables . Later, imperial chanceries would perfect these legal institutions and go almost so far as to create financial instruments, while the tragic political crisis of the 3rd century spread.

This paper describes the adjustments and changes of Ming military system after the war against Wokou (1549-1564/1565), especially in the garrison army section and the expenditures. I discuss the administrative-military change, social change and the related historical trend (the Ming court lost the control of the army gradually) after the coastal challenge in the context of the previous military/militia divided system. Many garrison troops were cut, while some maintained, asking some more financial support paid by silver. The change of the military structure turned to be the key points of the dynasty’s decline: In a short-term perspective, the threats of piracy were solved; in a long-term perspective, over half a century later, the dynasty collapsed eventually.

Two long appendixes of the details of military arrangement and silver supplies, "the Defense Sites of Prefectures, Guards and Garrisons Along the Yangtze River" and "the Silver Supply Details of Minzhuang, Gongbing, Caojiang, Jiangfang, Haifang in South Zhili Prefectures and Counties," indicate the dilemma of the Ming system in the sense of corvee and silver.

In July 1696 the deputy-paymaster of the British army in Flanders, Richard Hill, was in the throes of a moral reckoning.  “I walk about as impudently as other men’, he told his friend William Blathwayt, the secretary at war, “but God knows I carry a serpent in my bosom which devours me”.  He had been forced to lie to public creditors across the region to find the money that the army required, selling them bills of exchange on the Pay Office in London in the full knowledge that the office did not received enough money from the Treasury to answer even a tenth of these bills.  His sense of the public interest, and the need to keep the British army in the field during the Nine Years War (1688-97) against Louis XIV and French tyranny, was therefore not enough to dilute his anguish at the moral betrayal this involved.  His experience, and that of the Pay Office in London during this period, therefore offers the opportunity to examine not only the depth of the connections between finance and morality in the early modern world, but also what it took to drive them apart.  Although morality was the bedrock of finance in this period, underpinning the shared trust that made commerce possible, it could clash with the moral duties that public officials dealing in finance owed to their king and country.  Officials such as Hill found themselves caught between the rising sense of impartial public duty and the continuing importance of personal commercial morality that uniquely characterised the early modern period.

The birth of the financial press in the UK in the early nineteenth century corresponded with a series of financial crises, from the crash of 1825, through the railway manias of the 1830s and 1840s, to the collapse of Overend and Gurney in 1866. Both boom and bust stimulated the demand for information, and a new breed of specialist journalist emerged to provide it. This chapter considers these pioneers of financial journalism, exploring how they viewed their responsibilities to readers, and assessing their role in an unstable and rapidly expanding market economy.

Published in: Steve Schifferes, Richard Roberts (eds), The Media and Financial Crises: Comparative and Historical Perspectives (Routledge, 2014).

"The Monetization of Silver in China: Ming China and Its Global Interactions," China’s Development from a Global Perspective (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017), pp. 274-296.


It is widely held that the sixteenth century was the beginning of broad economic globalization. As a typical case, the monetization of silver during the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) was part of the story of this globalization. In China, copper coins had been the ancient circulated currency for more than one thousand years since the Qin unified the whole country and minted these copper coins with a characteristic square hole. China is also the country that first invented and used paper money. This situation continued until the Ming, when silver eventually began to replace copper coins as the standard currency. However, the monetization of silver was a complicated, unusual process. During the early Ming, it was forbidden to exchange silver and gold, and they were not viewed as legal currencies. One prominent piece of evidence is that when we read Ming huidian (The Great Ming Code), we can find a “Law of Paper Money” (chaofa) and a “Law of Copper Coin” (qianfa), but we cannot find a “Law of Silver” (yinfa). This clearly indicates thatsilver was not an official currency during the early Ming. There were, therefore, no formal institutions or regulations for silver at all. During the whole social development of the late Ming, silver was nevertheless used across the entire society. It transitioned from an illegal currency to a legal one, and then developed as the standard currency and came, ultimately, to occupy the dominant position in the field of currency circulation. It was, to say the least, a most unusual monetization process.
Published in María Dolores Elizalde and Wang Jianlang eds., China’s Development from a Global Perspective (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017), pp. 274-296.

Данная книга — первое комплексное исследование характера и факторов движения курсов акций российских промышленных предприятий на фондовом рынке дореволюционной России. Изучение биржевых процессов конца XIX — начала ХХ вв. позволяет глубже понять формирование рынка капиталов, механизмы финансирования процессов индустриализации в дореволюционной России. Была ли фондовая биржа в С.-Петербурге действенным механизмом мобилизации акционерного капитала или ареной спекуляции (как полагали некоторые современники и исследователи более позднего времени); в какой степени политические события и менявшаяся экономическая конъюнктура определяли спрос и предложение на бирже; какова была степень взаимосвязи курсов российских акций на биржах С.-Петербурга и Парижа — эти вопросы представляют интерес и сегодня. Формирование и развитие фондового рынка в современной России делает актуальным обращение к историческому опыту деятельности этого института рыночной экономики в дореволюционной России.
Конкретно-историческое исследование проводится в данной работе в основном на материалах, характеризующих рынок дивидендных бумаг на С. Петербургской бирже, иг-равшей особую роль в формировании акционерного капитала в Российской империи. Анализ временных рядов цен акций крупных промышленных компаний потребовал при-менения математических методов, в том числе и современных методов нелинейной дина-мики, синергетики.
Книга ориентирована на широкий круг историков, экономистов, а также всех, кто интересуется экономической историей дореволюционной России.

《明史·食货志》考源——以计数为中心 “The Statistics: Tracing the Source of the Food and Money Essay in the History of Ming,” Graduate Students’ Journal of Peking University 北京大学研究生学志 25.2 (2009): 60-71.

Based on the Shihuozhi (“Essay on Food and Commodities”) in the History of Ming, this paper focuses on complex and confused numbers and calculation (“counts”) of the Ming government.  In re-examining several sources of Shihuozhi, the characteristics, and the bases, one can learn more about the record’s nature and making process. In other words, the statistics lead us to the source of the records and its making process.

2 A partire dal 1959-60 il Banco comincia ad operare direttamente anche al di fuori dell'area laziale. Al 31 dicembre 1974 il Banco di Santo Spirito costituiva la seconda banca italiana di credito ordinario per massa fiduciaria controllata. 3 E. PONTI, Il Banco di Santo Spirito fondato da S. S. Paolo V con breve del 13 dicembre 1605, con prefazione di LUIGI CAPRI-CRUCIANI, Roma, Banco di Santo Spirito, 1941; ID., Il Banco di Santo Spirito e la sua funzione economica in Roma papale (1605-1870), Roma, Officina Poligrafica Laziale, 1951. Dello stesso A. sono probabilmente i Cenni Storici sul Banco di Santo Spirito, in «Archivi Storici delle Aziende di Credito», I, 1956, pp. 485-499. 4 M. MONACO, Le finanze pontificie al tempo di Paolo V. La fondazione del primo banco pubblico in Roma (Banco di S. Spirito), Lecce, Milella, 1974.

In 1784 the ship Empress of China set sail for Canton and initiated the direct tea trade between China and the United States. The United States thereafter grew to be the second-largest importer of tea, known as “green gold,” from China in the nineteenth century. Carrying tea to America and continental Europe not only demonstrated U.S. cultural and political independence, but also allowed Americans to procure new lines of commercial credit from Netherlands and China, usually in the form of promissory notes, pieces of paper that represented gold and silver before English bills of exchange came into wide use in the China trade. By examining three types of credit extended from Chinese merchants to their American counterparts before 1815, this article challenges the understanding of the Old China trade as a strictly hard-money system and, at the same time, elaborates the power of credit in the early American economy. Handsome profits from the tea trade and new lines of credit from China enabled American businessmen to accumulate large amounts of capital within a short period. Furnished with “green gold” and “paper gold,” China traders in New England and the mid-Atlantic states helped reshape the U.S. economy and link the Pacific and Atlantic worlds.

The study of prisoners of war has taken on a number of useful forms in military history. Historians have often looked at the experiences of POWs to understand how individual soldiers, captors, and civilians understand the concept of surrender or to see how enemies interact when there is no fighting. Historians have used these experiences to show how local populations, when confronted with the captured foe, conceive of a war and their enemy. This approach can give great insight into the nature of a conflict. Additionally, military historians have demonstrated the value POWs as a source of military intelligence. More generally, the subject of POWs has lent itself to the study of human rights, which has provided insight into how societies value human lives and conduct wars. Nevertheless, most scholarship on POWs examines the relationship between POWs and their captors, elucidating the obligations of a government towards its captives. On the other hand, there has been relatively little exploration of the obligations of a government towards its own troops in captivity. This approach can also provide insight into how societies conceive of conflicts and human life. Using original archival research, this paper seeks to balance these two approaches by examining the British government's administration of POWs during the War of the Spanish Succession and, in turn, elucidate the obligations of belligerent powers in eighteenth century Europe towards their captives as well as towards their own subjects in captivity. This will be done by examining how the British government handled French POWs in Britain, and how it administered British subject troops held in captivity in France and Spain during the war. This naturally leads to an examination of the supervisors, troops, and civilian contractors (both local and foreign) required in accomplishing the necessary tasks of an eighteenth century fiscal-military state.

This article explores the ways in which Philadelphia banker Nicholas Biddle financed the political economy of cotton and slavery. Most historians have focused on Biddle's political interactions with President Andrew Jackson during the Bank War, either ignoring or minimizing the banker's southern investments in the late 1830s. By examining the complexities of the antebellum era credit system, we can see how Biddle and his business partners provided financing for, functioned within, and extracted profits from a region that depended to a significant extent on the commodification of land, cotton, and slaves. Biddle invested in the South because he saw the expansion of the Cotton Kingdom in lands once occupied by Native Americans and that would soon be worked by enslaved African Americans as consistent with his own nationalistic assumptions and as crucial to the recovery from the Panic of 1837, the bank's profits, and the restoration of American credit abroad.

Le fiere di cambio sono istituzioni ben consolidate che scandiscono il calendario della finanza europea con un ritmo costante nel corso dei secoli XVI-XVII. Dopo essersi spostate dalla Francia -Lione -alla Franca Contea -Besançon -le fiere, nel 1579, si trasferiscono in Italia, a Piacenza, sotto la protezione dei duchi Farnese. I successivi anni dal 1580 al 1610-20 circa segnano con certezza l'apogeo di questa istituzione finanziaria: nel giro di pochi giorni e quattro volte l'anno, si concentra in un unico luogo una quantità di credito immediatamente disponibile per il circuito finanziario internazionale. Nessun operatore di un certo rilievo può permettersi di non partecipare o di non essere rappresentato in questo evento. Nel 1621, forti della loro egemonia, gli operatori genovesi, vincendo anche forti resistenze da parte dei banchieri fiorentini, veneziani e lombardi, spostano le fiere da Piacenza a Novi Ligure sotto la diretta giurisdizione della Repubblica di Genova. In seguito, dalla metà degli anni Venti del Seicento si assisterà ad una netta frammentazione del mercato fieristico internazionale che vedrà Piacenza nuovamente al centro dell'attività economica europea. Henry Lapeyre, Simón Ruiz et les «asientos» de Philippe II, Paris, Armand Colin, 1953; Giulio Mandich, Le pacte de ricorsa et le marché des changes au XVII e siècle, Paris, Armand Colin, 1953; Id., Delle fiere genovesi di cambi particolarmente studiate come mercati periodici del credito, in «Rivista di Storia Economica», 4, 1939, pp. 257-276 e Id., Di una tentata speculazione cambiaria in Venezia nel 1636, in «Rivista di Storia Economica», 7, 1943, pp. 1-10. Alcune di queste considerazioni già in Claudio Marsilio, Le fiere di cambio nella prima metà del XVII secolo: evoluzione di un'antica istituzione finanziaria, in Banca, crédito y capital: la monarquía hispánica y los antiguos países bajos (1505-1700), a cura di Carmen Sanz Ayán, Bernardo I. García García, Madrid, Fundación Carlos de Amberes, 2006, pp. 59-82 e Id., La frammentazione del network finanziario delle fiere di cambio genovesi (1621-1640 circa), in Debito pubblico e mercati finanziari in Italia fra età moderna ed età contemporanea, Atti del Convegno Internazionale di Studi, Fondazione Famiglia Legler, Brembate di Sopra (Bergamo), 25-27 maggio 2006, in corso di pubblicazione. (2) Enrique Otte, Sevilla y las ferias genovesas: Lyon y Besançon, 1503-1560, in Rapporti Genova-Mediterraneo-Atlantico, Atti del V Congresso Internazionale di Scienze Storiche Rapporti Genova-Mediterraneo-Atlantico, a cura di Raffaele Belvederi, Genova, [s.n.], 1996, pp. 249-277; Giorgio Doria, Consideraciones sobre las actividades de un "factor-cambista" genovés al servicio de la corona española, in Dinero y crédito, a cura di Alfonso Otazu, Madrid, Editorial Moneda y Crédito, 1978, pp. 279-293; Id., Mezzo secolo di attività finanziaria di un doge di Genova, Wirtschaftskräfte und Wirtschaftswege, I, Mittelmeer und Kontinent, Festschrift für Hermann Kellenbenz, a cura di Jurgen Schneider, Band 4, Nürnberg, Klett-Cotta, 1978, pp. 731-744 , ora anche in Id., Nobiltà e investimenti a Genova in età moderna, Genova, Istituto di Storia Economica, 1995, pp. 175-188; Giuseppe Felloni, All'apogeo delle fiere genovesi: banchieri ed affari di cambio a Piacenza nel 1600, in Studi in onore di Gino Barbieri, vol. II, Pisa, Ipem, 1983, pp. 883-901, ripubblicato in Id., Scritti di storia economica, Genova, Società Ligure di Storia Patria, 1998 Id., Gli investimenti finanziari genovesi in Europa tra il Seicento e la Restaurazione, Milano, 1977 e Id., Asientos, juros y ferias de cambio (1541-1675, in Dinero y crédito, pp. 335-359.

This study, my professorial thesis, or Habilitationsschrift, focuses on administrative confusion and social disruptions in the Habsburg monarchy from the Thirty Years' War to Charles VI (r. 1711-40). I will demonstrate that these two aspects were the by-product of state formation in early modern composite monarchies. Whereas the advent of the 'fiscal-military state' (Brewer 1989) transformed our understanding of central bureaucracies over the past three decades, these days most studies of early modern state formation apply top-down perspectives.
By contrast, my study approaches the Habsburg monarchy's re-emergence after 1648 based on two distinctively different premises: First, individual actions and structural developments entail differing consequences for central institutions and the geographically more remote areas; and, second, by analysing these developments from outside the courtly and urban settings, I am arguing that state integration in the centre was accompanied by increasing state disintegration and loss of cohesion on the lower administrative levels. As the central government tried to cope with war-induced stress, its actions started to tear apart the administrative and social fabric that held traditional society together. By emphasising the crucial role of local actors, regional interlinkages, and the disintegrating consequences that warfare had on state formation, my book offers a counter-narrative to traditional interpretations in the fields of History, IR, and Historical Sociology.