The Economics of World War I

The Economics of World War I
Author: Stephen Broadberry
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 363
Release: 2005-09-29
Genre: History
ISBN: 1139448358

This unique volume offers a definitive new history of European economies at war from 1914 to 1918. It studies how European economies mobilised for war, how existing economic institutions stood up under the strain, how economic development influenced outcomes and how wartime experience influenced post-war economic growth. Leading international experts provide the first systematic comparison of economies at war between 1914 and 1918 based on the best available data for Britain, Germany, France, Russia, the USA, Italy, Turkey, Austria-Hungary and the Netherlands. The editors' overview draws some stark lessons about the role of economic development, the importance of markets and the damage done by nationalism and protectionism. A companion volume to the acclaimed The Economics of World War II, this is a major contribution to our understanding of total war.

Financing the First World War

Financing the First World War
Author: Hew Strachan
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 282
Release: 2004
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780199257270

The First World War was costly in treasure as well as lives. Before its outbreak many commentators reckoned that the great powers could not afford to fight or that economic dislocation would bring war to a rapid close. They were wrong. This is the first full history of how the war was financed. It resulted in hyper-inflation in the 1920s and, in due course, in New York's displacement of London as the world's money market. Its effects are still with us today.

Britain, France, and the Financing of the First World War

Britain, France, and the Financing of the First World War
Author: Martin Horn
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
Total Pages: 266
Release: 2002
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780773522947

Fighting the First World War consumed lives, material, and money. Millions died; more suffered. By the war's end, the political map of Europe had been redrawn as empires disappeared and new states arose. In Britain, France, and the Financing of the First World War Martin Horn traces the financial contours of the war, which crippled France financially, leaving Britain, itself weakened, to contest international financial leadership with the United States, the principal beneficiary of the war.Horn shows that victory followed not only from the ability to arm and feed mass armies but also from the capacity to raise money. Fighting the war imposed new demands on the belligerents, extending the power of the state and forcing cooperation among allies. Given their long tradition of hostility, adapting to these new realities was a wrenching process for Britain and France. Britain financed the war not only to win but also to preserve its prewar financial dominance; France financed it to survive and to ensure that the stability of the Third Republic was not threatened.

The Impact of the First World War on International Business

The Impact of the First World War on International Business
Author: Andrew Smith
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2016-10-26
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1317398106

People throughout the world are now commemorating the centenary of the start of the First World War. For historians of international business and finance, it is an opportunity to reflect on the impact of the war on global business activity. The world economy was highly integrated in the early twentieth century thanks to nearly a century of globalisation. In 1913, the economies of the countries that were about to go war seemed inextricably linked. The Impact of the First World War on International Business explores what happened to international business organisations when this integrated global economy was shattered by the outbreak of a major war. Studying how companies responded to the economic catastrophe of the First World War offers important lessons to policymakers and businesspeople in the present, concerning for instance the impact of great power politics on international business or the thesis that globalization reduces the likelihood of inter-state warfare. This is the first book to focus on the impact of the First World War on international business. It explores the experiences of firms in Britain, France, Germany, Japan, China, and the United States as well as those in neutral countries such as the Netherlands, Sweden, and Argentina, covering a wide range of industries including financial services, mining, manufacturing, foodstuffs, and shipping. Studying how firms responded to sudden and dramatic change in the geopolitical environment in 1914 offers lessons to the managers of today’s MNEs, since the world economy on the eve of the First World War has many striking parallels with the present. Aimed at researchers, academics and advanced students in the fields of Business History, International Management and Accounting History; this book goes beyond the extant literature on this topic namely due to the broad range of industries and countries covered. The Impact of the First World War on International Business covers a broad range of geographical areas and topics examining how private firms responded to government policy and have based their contributions mainly on primary sources created by business people.

War, Wine, and Taxes

War, Wine, and Taxes
Author: John V. C. Nye
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 174
Release: 2018-06-26
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0691190496

In War, Wine, and Taxes, John Nye debunks the myth that Britain was a free-trade nation during and after the industrial revolution, by revealing how the British used tariffs—notably on French wine—as a mercantilist tool to politically weaken France and to respond to pressure from local brewers and others. The book reveals that Britain did not transform smoothly from a mercantilist state in the eighteenth century to a bastion of free trade in the late nineteenth. This boldly revisionist account gives the first satisfactory explanation of Britain's transformation from a minor power to the dominant nation in Europe. It also shows how Britain and France negotiated the critical trade treaty of 1860 that opened wide the European markets in the decades before World War I. Going back to the seventeenth century and examining the peculiar history of Anglo-French military and commercial rivalry, Nye helps us understand why the British drink beer not wine, why the Portuguese sold liquor almost exclusively to Britain, and how liberal, eighteenth-century Britain managed to raise taxes at an unprecedented rate—with government revenues growing five times faster than the gross national product. War, Wine, and Taxes stands in stark contrast to standard interpretations of the role tariffs played in the economic development of Britain and France, and sheds valuable new light on the joint role of commercial and fiscal policy in the rise of the modern state.

Lords of Finance

Lords of Finance
Author: Liaquat Ahamed
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 584
Release: 2009
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9781594201820

Argues that the stock market crash of 1929 and subsequent Depression occurred as a result of poor decisions on the part of four central bankers who jointly attempted to reconstruct international finance by reinstating the gold standard.

The Crucible of Revolutionary and Napoleonic Warfare and European Transitions to Modern Economic Growth

The Crucible of Revolutionary and Napoleonic Warfare and European Transitions to Modern Economic Growth
Author: Patrick Karl O'Brien
Publisher: Library of Economic History
Total Pages: 312
Release: 2021-12-17
Genre: History
ISBN: 9789004472730

"Historiographically, this book rests on the fact that European transitions to modern economic growth were obstructed and promoted by the Revolution in France and 15 years of geopolitical conflict sustained by Napoleon in order to establish French Hegemony over the states and economies of Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and overseas commerce. The chapters reveal that the nature and significance of connections between geopolitical and economic forces lend coherence to a collaborative endeavour utilising comparative methods to address a mega question: What might be plausibly concluded about the economic costs and the benefits of this protracted conjuncture of Revolutionary and Napoleonic Warfare?"--

Titan

Titan
Author: William R. Nester
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
Total Pages: 425
Release: 2016-05-31
Genre: History
ISBN: 0806155345

When the leaders of the French Revolution executed Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette in 1793, they sent a chilling message to the hereditary ruling orders in Europe. Believing that monarchy anywhere presented a threat to democratic rule in France, the leaders of the revolution declared war on European aristocracies, including those of Great Britain. For more than twenty years thereafter, France and England waged a protracted war that ended in British victory. In Titan, William R. Nester offers a deeply informed and thoroughly fascinating narrative of how England accomplished this remarkable feat. Between 1789 and 1815, British leaders devised, funded, and led seven coalitions against the revolutionary and Napoleonic governments of France. In each enterprise, statesmen and generals searched for order amid a complex welter of bureaucratic, political, economic, psychological, technological, and international forces. Nester combines biographies of great men—the likes of William Pitt, Horatio Nelson, and Arthur Wellesley—with an explanation of the critical decisions they made in Britain’s struggle for power and his own keen analysis of the forces that operated beyond their control. Their efforts would eventually crush France and Napoleon and establish a system of European power relations that prevented a world war for nearly a century. The interplay of individuals and events, the importance of conjunctures and contingency, the significance of Britain's island character and resources: all come into play in Nester's exploration of the art of British military diplomacy. The result is a comprehensive and insightful account of the endeavors of statesmen and generals to master the art of power in a complex battle for empire.