A world of public debts : a political history / Nicolas Barreyre, Nicolas Delalande, editors.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Barreyre, Nicolas, 1975- editor.

Delalande, Nicolas, editor.

Series:

Palgrave studies in the history of finance

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Debts, Public.

Physical Description:

xliv, 564 pages : illustrations ; 22 cm.

Place of Publication:

Cham : Palgrave Macmillan, [2020]

Summary:

This book analyzes public debt from a political, historical, and global perspective. It demonstrates that public debt has been a defining feature in the construction of modern states, a main driver in the history of capitalism, and a potent geopolitical force. From revolutionary crisis to empire and the rise and fall of a post-war world order, the problem of debt has never been the sole purview of closed economic circles. This book offers a key to understanding the centrality of public debt today by revealing that political problems of public debt have and will continue to need a political response. Today's tendency to consider public debt as a source of fragility or economic inefficiency misses the fact that, since the eighteenth century, public debts and capital markets have on many occasions been used by states to enforce their sovereignty and build their institutions, especially in times of war. It is nonetheless striking to observe that certain solutions that were used in the past to smooth out public debt crises (inflation, default, cancellation, or capital controls) were left out of the political framing of the recent crisis, therefore revealing how the balance of power between bondholders, taxpayers, pensioners, and wage-earners has evolved over the past 40 years. Today, as the Covid-19 pandemic opens up a dramatic new crisis, reconnecting the history of capitalism and that of democracy seems one of the most urgent intellectual and political tasks of our time. This global political history of public debt is a contribution to this debate and will be of interest to financial, economic, and political historians and researchers. Chapters 13 and 19 are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

Contents:

Part I Political Crises and the Legitimacy of Public Debts (1770s-1860s)

1. An Empire of Debts? Spain and Its Colonial Realm

2. Publicity, Debt, and Politics: The Old Regime and the French Revolution

3. Politics of Credit: Government Borrowing and Political Regimes in Sweden

4. Public Debt and Democratic Statecraft in Nineteenth-Century France

Part II Global Capital, Imperial Expansions, and Changing Sovereignties (1860s-1914)

5. The Entanglements of Domestic Polities: Public Debt and European Interventions in Latin America

6. Leveraging Foreign Control: Reform in the Ottoman Empire

7. The Unforeseen Path of Debt Imperialism: Local Struggles, Transnational Knowledge, and Colonialism in Egypt

8. Trading Sovereignty for Capital? Public Debt in West Africa, 1871-1914

9. The Domestic Effects of Foreign Capital: Public Debt and Regional Inequalities in Late Qing China

10. Fiscal Federalism: Local Debt and the Construction of the Modern State in the United States and France

Part III The Great Transformation of Public Debts (1914-1970s)

11. The Financial Challenges of Total War: Britain, France, and Their Empires in the First World War

12. Beyond Democracy or Dictatorship: Structuring Sovereign Debt in Germany from Weimar to the Postwar Period

13. The Communist World of Public Debt (1917-1991): The Failure of a Countermodel?

14. Debt Without Taxation: Iraq, Syria, and the Crisis of Empires from the Mandates to the Cold War Era

Part IV The Political Roads to Financial Markets and Global Debt Crisis (1970s)

15. From Debt Dirigisme to Debt Markets in France and India

16. The Political Economy of Debt Crisis: State, Banks, and the Financialization of Public Debt in Italy since the 1970s

17. From a Multilateral Broker to the National Judge: The Law and Governance of Sovereign Debt Restructuring, 1980-2015

18. Of Bond Vigilantes, Central Bankers, and the Crisis of 2008

Part V Conclusion: On the Historical Uses of Numbers and Words

19. The History and Politics of Public Debt Accounting

20. The Words of Public Debts: A Political Repertoire. .

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Other Format:

Electronic version: World of public debts.

ISBN:

3030487938

9783030487935

OCLC:

1152490332