Little is known of Antonio Serra except that he wrote his extraordinary 1613 Short Treatise on the Causes that Make Kingdoms Abound in Gold and Silver even in the Absence of Mines in a Neapolitan jail, and that he died there soon afterwards. However, the influence of this work represents a...

Covering the colonial Empire (including West Indies, India, Singapore, West Africa and East Africa), this book is a detailed revisionist history of the British imperial manipulations of colonial currency systems to facilitate the rise of sterling to world supremacy via the gold standard, and to...

In the modern Western world, we tend to be insured by the state or for-profit insurers. We have privileged this system over mutual or micro-insurance, whose long and rich history we tend to forget. Yet, mutual and micro-insurance is becoming increasingly important, both in the Western and in the...

This book explores the period from World War I through the 1920s in order to answer the question: did a financial "bubble" form, and if so, could it have been anticipated? Using new data and over 100 years of stock market returns, real-life models used by investors and modern research, the...

"Professor Nicholas Mayhew is Professor of Numismatics and Monetary History at Oxford, a former Deputy Director of the Ashmolean Museum, Director of the Winton Institute for Monetary History and Fellow of St Cross College. Over the course of his forty-year career, Mayhew has made key...

Foreword-- Patrick Karl O'Brien 1. Introduction 2. The Habsburg Fiscal and Financial Inheritance 3. Deficit Phobia. From International Public Credit to Domestic Credit 4. Easing the Tax Burden 5. French Inspiration 6. Expansion of State Finance 7. Authority and Control of the King's Money 8....

"The collapse of the Bretton Woods system in the early 1970s resulted in a transition to fluctuating rather than fixed currency system. This brought sterling into the turmoil of the world currency markets, and by the end of the 1970s, sterling had quietly ended its role as an international...