Charles Mackay's book "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds" enjoys extraordinarily high renown in the financial industry and among the press and the public. It also has an extraordinarily low reputation among historians.This paper argues that Mackay's sins of commission...

It is well known that the great Railway Mania in Britain in the1840s had a great impact on accounting. This paper contributes a description and analysis of the events that led to this revolution, and of the key role played by Robert Lucas Nash in those events. He was a pioneer in accounting and...

The British Railway Mania of the 1840s was by many measures the greatest technology mania in history, and its collapse was one of the greatest financial crashes. It has attracted surprisingly little scholarly interest. In particular, it has not been noted that it provides a convincing...

The first three sections illustrate how the British establishment viewed gilts mispricing around 1870, and how the markets reacted to a government debt conversion proposal of that year. This is followed by a section on general government policy towards investors in national debt instruments....

British government bonds formed the deepest, most liquid, and most transparent financial market of the 19th century. This paper shows that those bonds had long periods, extending over decades, of anomalous behavior, in which Consols, the largest and best known of these instruments, were...

Can industrial policy be effective when dealing with a revolutionary new technology? Mark Casson's recent book, "The World's First Railway System," offers the intriguing claim that a slight dose of central planning by the British government in the 1840s would have produced a dramatically more...

Walter Bagehot is remembered today primarily as a proponent of the doctrine of lender of last resort, in which central banks pump money into the economy to ameliorate the damage from a financial crisis. But none of the growing number of publications about him appear to investigate in depth...