For the greater part of recorded history the most successful and powerful states were autocracies; yet now the world is increasingly dominated by democracies. In A Free Nation Deep in Debt, James Macdonald provides a novel answer for how and why this political transformation occurred. The pressures of war finance led ancient states to store up treasure; and treasure accumulation invariably favored autocratic states. But when the art of public borrowing was developed by the city-states of medieval Italy as a democratic alternative to the treasure chest, the balance of power tipped. From that point on, the pressures of war favored states with the greatest public creditworthiness; and the most creditworthy states were invariably those in which the people who provided the money also controlled the government. Democracy had found a secret weapon and the era of the citizen creditor was born. Macdonald unfolds this tale in a sweeping history that starts in biblical times, passes via medieval Italy to the wars and revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and ends with the great bond drives that financed the two world wars.
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A Free Nation Deep in Debt: The Financial Roots of DemocracyFor the greater part of recorded history the most successful and powerful states were autocracies; yet now the world is increasingly dominated by democracies. In A Free Nation Deep in Debt, James Macdonald provides a novel answer for how and why this political transformation occurred. The pressures of war finance led ancient states to store [...]
Debt, Development, and DemocracyIn the 1970s and 1980s the countries of Latin America dealt with their similar debt problems in very different ways–ranging from militantly market-oriented approaches to massive state intervention in their economies–while their political systems headed toward either democracy or authoritarianism. Applying the tools of modern political economy to a developing-country context, Jeffry Frieden analyzes the [...]
Hidden Debts: A memoir of ItalyMartin Attwood was a lecturer in Italian art and history in Tuscany and Umbria for several years.In this memoir, the author not only writes about phenomena from the past but describes emotional, sometimes violent scenes set in the modern day back streets amid the low life in the ancient city of Perugia. A precocious and [...]
The Administration of Debt Relief by the International Financial Institutions: A Legal Reconstruction of the HIPC Initiative (Beiträge zum ausländischen öffentlichen Recht und Völkerrecht)This study addresses the mechanisms of debt relief for Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) jointly coordinated by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. It describes the content of the HIPC program and classifies it as a legally non-binding instrument under public international law. A case study on Ghana illustrates the HIPC relief process, [...]
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