A World of Public Debts: A Political History

by Nicolas Barreyre (Editor), Nicolas Delalande (Editor)

Overview

This book analyzes public debt from a political, historical, and global perspective. It demonstrates that public debt has been a defining feature in the construction of modern states, a main driver in the history of capitalism, and a potent geopolitical force. From revolutionary crisis to empire and the rise and fall of a post-war world order, the problem of debt has never been the sole purview of closed economic circles. This book offers a key to understanding the centrality of public debt today by revealing that political problems of public debt have and will continue to need a political response.

Today’s tendency to consider public debt as a source of fragility or economic inefficiency misses the fact that, since the eighteenth century, public debts and capital markets have on many occasions been used by states to enforce their sovereignty and build their institutions, especially in times of war. It is nonetheless striking to observe that certain solutions that were used in the past to smooth out public debt crises (inflation, default, cancellation, or capital controls) were left out of the political framing of the recent crisis, therefore revealing how the balance of power between bondholders, taxpayers, pensioners, and wage-earners has evolved over the past 40 years.

Today, as the Covid-19 pandemic opens up a dramatic new crisis, reconnecting the history of capitalism and that of democracy seems one of the most urgent intellectual and political tasks of our time. This global political history of public debt is a contribution to this debate and will be of interest to financial, economic, and political historians and researchers.

Chapters 13 and 19 are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783030487966
Publisher:	Springer International Publishing
Publication date:	10/27/2020
Series:	Palgrave Studies in the History of Finance
Edition description:	1st ed. 2020
Pages:	564
Product dimensions:	5.83(w) x 8.27(h) x (d)

About the Author

Nicolas Barreyre is Associate Professor of American History at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), Paris.

Nicolas Delalande is Associate Professor of European History at Sciences Po, Paris.

Table of Contents

Part I Political Crises and the Legitimacy of Public Debts (1770s-1860s).- 1. An Empire of Debts? Spain and Its Colonial Realm.- 2. Publicity, Debt, and Politics: The Old Regime and the French Revolution.- 3. Politics of Credit: Government Borrowing and Political Regimes in Sweden.- 4. Public Debt and Democratic Statecraft in Nineteenth-Century France.- Part II Global Capital, Imperial Expansions, and Changing Sovereignties (1860s-1914).- 5. The Entanglements of Domestic Polities: Public Debt and European Interventions in Latin America.- 6. Leveraging Foreign Control: Reform in the Ottoman Empire.- 7. The Unforeseen Path of Debt Imperialism: Local Struggles, Transnational Knowledge, and Colonialism in Egypt.- 8. Trading Sovereignty for Capital? Public Debt in West Africa, 1871-1914.- 9. The Domestic Effects of Foreign Capital: Public Debt and Regional Inequalities in Late Qing China.- 10. Fiscal Federalism: Local Debt and the Construction of the Modern State in the United States and France.- Part III The Great Transformation of Public Debts (1914-1970s).- 11. The Financial Challenges of Total War: Britain, France, and Their Empires in the First World War.- 12. Beyond Democracy or Dictatorship: Structuring Sovereign Debt in Germany from Weimar to the Postwar Period.- 13. The Communist World of Public Debt (1917-1991): The Failure of a Countermodel?.- 14. Debt Without Taxation: Iraq, Syria, and the Crisis of Empires from the Mandates to the Cold War Era.- Part IV The Political Roads to Financial Markets and Global Debt Crisis (1970s).- 15. From Debt Dirigisme to Debt Markets in France and India.- 16. The Political Economy of Debt Crisis: State, Banks, and the Financialization of Public Debt in Italy since the 1970s.- 17. From a Multilateral Broker to the National Judge: The Law and Governance of Sovereign Debt Restructuring, 1980-2015.- 18. Of Bond Vigilantes, Central Bankers, and the Crisis of 2008.- Part V Conclusion: On the Historical Uses of Numbers and Words.- 19. The History and Politics of Public Debt Accounting.- 20. The Words of Public Debts: A Political Repertoire.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“A World of Public Debts is a fascinating and illuminating book. Barreyre and Delalande have put together 25 leading scholars on the history of public debt, from colonial empires to the present day. By doing so they have produced what will become a major reference book on the topic. In my view, this book sets the standards for what future historical research should look like: a fine mixture of political, ideological and socioeconomic history. Historians and other social scientists should not leave economic and financial issues and their technicalities to economists. Quite the contrary: they should confront them and demonstrate that they cannot be properly addressed without putting at the center of the analysis the issues of political legitimacy, knowledge and power. A must-read.” (Thomas Piketty, author of Capital in the Twenty-First Century and Capital and Ideology)“The essays in this volume reveal how public debt goes to the core of the entangled relationship between government and money. Spanning a wide range of countries over an extended period, the authors pose basic questions about the meaning of sovereignty, the co-dependence of private finance and public power, and the balance between taxpayers and creditors. This is a stunning collection.” (Jeremy Adelman, author of Republic of Capital and Worlds Together, Worlds Apart)

“Public debt is one of the largest dramas of our times. A World of Public Debts is a brilliant work of historical scholarship that explores the multiplicity of experiences of debt across space and time, raising profound and important questions about the ever-changing relationship between the market and the state.” (Emma Rothschild, author of Economic Sentiments and The Inner Life of Empires)