In 1995, the Baring Brothers collapsed over a weekend, brought down by the 'rogue trader' Nick Leeson. Utilizing British and American archives, this work charts Baring Brothers development from wool merchants to one of the most powerful global financial institutions. It also analyses the errors which led to its downfall.

In 1995, the Baring Brothers collapsed over a weekend, brought down by the 'rogue trader' Nick Leeson. Utilizing British and American archives, this work charts Baring Brothers development from wool merchants to one of the most powerful global financial institutions. It also analyses the errors which led to its downfall.

"Focuses on networks of people, information, conveyances, and other resources and technologies that moved slave-based products from suppliers to buyers and users." (page 3) The book examines the credit and financial systems that grew up around trade in slaves and products made by slaves.

Whose fault are financial crises, and who is responsible for stopping them, or repairing the damage? Impunity and Capitalism develops a new approach to the history of capitalism and inequality by using the concept of impunity to show how financial crises stopped being crimes and became natural disasters. Trevor Jackson examines the legal regulation of capital markets in a period of unprecedented expansion in the complexity of finance ranging from the bankruptcy of Europe's richest man in 1709, to the world's first stock market crash in 1720, to the first Latin American debt crisis in 1825. He shows how, after each crisis, popular anger and improvised policy responses resulted in efforts to create a more just financial capitalism but succeeded only in changing who could act with impunity, and how. Henceforth financial crises came to seem normal and legitimate, caused by impersonal international markets, with the costs borne by domestic populations and nobody in particular at fault.

A comprehensive survey of international financial history across three thousand years that reveals how previous crises were successfully overcome.