This three-volume reset edition looks at the origins and consequences of seminal financial crises throughout history, combining contemporary texts from nineteen financial disasters between 1763 and 1994 with academic interpretations of the major causes and consequences of each crisis. Rare public and private papers provide both source material on the background of each disaster as well as first-hand accounts of how contemporaries viewed and responded to unfolding events. These documents contain evaluations of the underlying causes of the various crises including, among many others, the connection between politics and banking in revolutionary France during the Assignat Inflation; the restructuring of the British financial system after the Crisis of 1825; limited liability and the Overend & Gurney scandal; the creation of the US Federal Reserve after the Crisis of 1907; the German hyperinflation of the 1920s; the Great Crash of 1929; and the role of computerised trading in the 1987 New York Stock Market Crash.