A Concise History of International Finance

Larry Neal is Emeritus Professor of Economics at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and was Visiting Professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science from 2006 to 2014. Specialising in financial history and European economies, he is author of The Rise of Financial Capitalism: International Capital Markets in the Age of Reason (Cambridge, 1991). His recent work includes editing the two Cambridge History of Capitalism volumes - The Rise of Capitalism: From Ancient Origins to 1848 and The Spread of Capitalism: From 1848 to the Present (Cambridge, 2014), and authoring 'I Am Not Master of Events': The Speculations of John Law and Lord Londonderry in the Mississippi and South Sea Bubbles (2012). For many years he was editor of the journal Explorations in Economic History, which now awards an annual prize in his name for the best article published each year. He is past President of the Economic History Association and the Business History Conference and was the Founding Director of the European Union Center at the University of Illinois in 1998, which awards an annual prize in his name for an outstanding book on the European Union. He has been the recipient of fellowships from the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung (1982), when he visited the University of Paderborn in Germany, as well as the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the Fulbright Commission (1996–7), when he visited the London School of Economics and Political Science. He was a visiting professor at the California Institute of Technology in 1998, and the University of California, Los Angeles in 2008, and was named one of the first ten Fellows of the Cliometric Society in 2010.

• 1. Introduction; 2. Distant beginnings: the first 3,000 years; 3. The Italians invent modern finance; 4. The rise of international financial capitalism: the seventeenth century; 5. The 'big bang' of financial capitalism: financing and refinancing the Mississippi and South Sea Companies, 1688–1720; 6. The rise and spread of financial capitalism, 1720–89; 7. Financial innovations during the 'birth of the modern', 1789–1830: a tale of three revolutions; 8. British recovery and attempts to imitate in the US, France and Germany, 1825–50; 9. Financial globalization takes off: the spread of sterling and the rise of the gold standard, 1848–79; 10. The first global financial market and the classical gold standard, 1880–1914; 11. The Thirty Years War and the disruption of international finance, 1914–44; 12. The Bretton Woods era and the re-emergence of global finance, 1945–73; 13. From turmoil to the 'Great Moderation', 1973–2007; 14. The sub-prime crisis and the aftermath, 2007–14; References; Index.

'This is the most impressive, most comprehensive, and most up-to-date single volume history of finance there is. Its central argument about the beneficial effects of financial innovation - along with the many cautionary tales of how and why things go sour, of the consequences of adequate mechanisms for ensuring commitment and responsibility - make it at once a classic, whose influence will endure a long time.' Harold James, author of The End of Globalization: Lessons from the Great Depression