This study examines the impact of British capital flows on the evolution of capital markets in four countries - Argentina, Australia, Canada, and the United States - over the years 1870 to 1914. In substantive chapters on each country it offers parallel histories of the evolution of their financial infrastructures - commercial banks, non-bank intermediaries, primary security markets, formal secondary security markets, and the institutions that provide the international financial links connecting the frontier country with the British capital market. At one level, the work constitutes a quantitative history of the development of the capital markets of five countries in the late nineteenth century. At a second level, it provides the basis for a useable taxonomy for the study of institutional invention and innovation. At a third, it suggests some lessons from the past about modern policy issues.
Historians have so far made few attempts to assess directly the costs and benefits of Britain's investment in empire. This book presents answers to some of the key questions about the economics of imperialism: how large was the flow of finance to the empire? How great were the profits on empire investment? What were the social costs of maintaining the empire? Who received the profits, and who bore the costs? The authors show that colonial finance did not dominate British capital markets; returns from empire investment were not high in comparison to earnings in the domestic and foreign sectors; there is no evidence of continued exploitative profits; and empire profits were earned at a substantial cost to the taxpayer. They depict British imperialism as a mechanism to effect an income transfer from the tax-paying middle class to the elites in which the ownership of imperial enterprise was heavily concentrated, with some slight net transfer to the colonies in the process.
This study examines the impact of British capital flows on the evolution of capital markets in four countries - Argentina, Australia, Canada, and the United States - over the years 1870 to 1914. In substantive chapters on each country it offers parallel histories of the evolution of their financial infrastructures - commercial banks, non-bank intermediaries, primary security markets, formal secondary security markets, and the institutions that provide the international financial links connecting the frontier country with the British capital market. At one level, the work constitutes a quantitative history of the development of the capital markets of five countries in the late nineteenth century. At a second level, it provides the basis for a useable taxonomy for the study of institutional invention and innovation. At a third, it suggests some lessons from the past about modern policy issues.
This book is a study of the capital transfers to the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and, for the latter decades of that period, of the transfers from the United States to the rest of the world - particularly Canada, the Caribbean, Mexico, and Central and South America. It provides a quantitative estimate of the level and industrial composition of those transfers, and qualitative descriptions of the sources and uses of those funds; and it attempts to assess the role of those foreign transfers in the economic development of the recipient economies. In the process, it describes the evolution of the American domestic capital market. Finally, it explores the issue of domestic political response to foreign investment, attempting to explain why the political reaction was so negative and so intense in Latin America and in the American West, but so positive in Canada and the eastern United States.
Historians have so far made few attempts to assess directly the costs and benefits of Britain's investment in empire. This book presents answers to some of the key questions about the economics of imperialism: how large was the flow of finance to the empire? How great were the profits on empire investment? What were the social costs of maintaining the empire? Who received the profits, and who bore the costs? The authors show that colonial finance did not dominate British capital markets; returns from empire investment were not high in comparison to earnings in the domestic and foreign sectors; there is no evidence of continued exploitative profits; and empire profits were earned at a substantial cost to the taxpayer. They depict British imperialism as a mechanism to effect an income transfer from the tax-paying middle class to the elites in which the ownership of imperial enterprise was heavily concentrated, with some slight net transfer to the colonies in the process.
A number of major blockades, including the Continental System in the Napoleonic Wars, the War of 1812, the American Civil War, and World Wars I and II, in addition to the increased use of peacetime blockades and sanctions with the hope of avoiding war, are examined in this book. The impact of technology and organizational changes on the nature of blockades and their effectiveness as military measures are discussed. Legal, economic, and political questions are explored to understand the various constraints upon belligerent behavior. The analysis draw upon the extensive amount of quantitative material available from military publications.
