This study examines the impact of British capital flows on the evolution of capital markets in four countries - Argentina, Australia, Canada, and the United States - over the years 1870 to 1914. In substantive chapters on each country it offers parallel histories of the evolution of their financial infrastructures - commercial banks, non-bank intermediaries, primary security markets, formal secondary security markets, and the institutions that provide the international financial links connecting the frontier country with the British capital market. At one level, the work constitutes a quantitative history of the development of the capital markets of five countries in the late nineteenth century. At a second level, it provides the basis for a useable taxonomy for the study of institutional invention and innovation. At a third, it suggests some lessons from the past about modern policy issues.

As awareness of the process of globalization grows and the study of its effects becomes increasingly important to governments and businesses (as well as to a sizable opposition), the need for historical understanding also increases. Despite the importance of the topic, few attempts have been made to present a long-term economic analysis of the phenomenon, one that frames the issue by examining its place in the long history of international integration. This volume collects eleven papers doing exactly that and more. The first group of essays explores how the process of globalization can be measured in terms of the long-term integration of different markets-from the markets for goods and commodities to those for labor and capital, and from the sixteenth century to the present. The second set of contributions places this knowledge in a wider context, examining some of the trends and questions that have emerged as markets converge and diverge: the roles of technology and geography are both considered, along with the controversial issues of globalization's effects on inequality and social justice and the roles of political institutions in responding to them. The final group of essays addresses the international financial systems that play such a large part in guiding the process of globalization, considering the influence of exchange rate regimes, financial development, financial crises, and the architecture of the international financial system itself. This volume reveals a much larger picture of the process of globalization, one that stretches from the establishment of a global economic system during the nineteenth century through the disruptions of two world wars and the Great Depression into the present day. The keen analysis, insight, and wisdom in this volume will have something to offer a wide range of readers interested in this important issue.

This study examines the impact of British capital flows on the evolution of capital markets in four countries - Argentina, Australia, Canada, and the United States - over the years 1870 to 1914. In substantive chapters on each country it offers parallel histories of the evolution of their financial infrastructures - commercial banks, non-bank intermediaries, primary security markets, formal secondary security markets, and the institutions that provide the international financial links connecting the frontier country with the British capital market. At one level, the work constitutes a quantitative history of the development of the capital markets of five countries in the late nineteenth century. At a second level, it provides the basis for a useable taxonomy for the study of institutional invention and innovation. At a third, it suggests some lessons from the past about modern policy issues.

This book is an economic survey of international capital mobility from the late nineteenth century to the present.

Collectively, mankind has never had it so good despite periodic economic crises of which the current sub-prime crisis is merely the latest example. Much of this success is attributable to the increasing efficiency of the world's financial institutions as finance has proved to be one of the most important causal factors in economic performance. In a series of insightful essays, financial and economic historians examine how financial innovations from the seventeenth century to the present have continually challenged established institutional arrangements, forcing change and adaptation by governments, financial intermediaries, and financial markets. Where these have been successful, wealth creation and growth have followed. When they failed, growth slowed and sometimes economic decline has followed. These essays illustrate the difficulties of co-ordinating financial innovations in order to sustain their benefits for the wider economy, a theme that will be of interest to policy makers as well as economic historians.