The Great Reforms undertaken during the reign of Alexander II represented a unique attempt by the tsarist government to restructure virtually every aspect of Russian life, beginning with the emancipation of the serfs and continuing through reforms of local government, the judiciary, the military, education, the financial system, censorship, and other domains. This volume, the work of an international group of scholars that includes historians from Russia, maps out the major landmarks in the conceptualization and implementation of the Great Reforms during the reign of Alexander II and proposes a variety of perspectives from which to view them. -- From publisher's description.

A World History of Tax Rebellions is an exhaustive reference source for over 4,300 years of riots, rebellions, protests, and war triggered by abusive taxation and tax collecting systems around the world. Each of the chronologically arranged entries focuses on a specific historical event, analyzing its roots, and socio-economic context.

How religious barriers stalled capitalism in the Middle East In the year 1000, the economy of the Middle East was at least as advanced as that of Europe. But by 1800, the region had fallen dramatically behind—in living standards, technology, and economic institutions. In short, the Middle East had failed to modernize economically as the West surged ahead. What caused this long divergence? And why does the Middle East remain drastically underdeveloped compared to the West? In The Long Divergence, one of the world's leading experts on Islamic economic institutions and the economy of the Middle East provides a new answer to these long-debated questions. Timur Kuran argues that what slowed the economic development of the Middle East was not colonialism or geography, still less Muslim attitudes or some incompatibility between Islam and capitalism. Rather, starting around the tenth century, Islamic legal institutions, which had benefitted the Middle Eastern economy in the early centuries of Islam, began to act as a drag on development by slowing or blocking the emergence of central features of modern economic life—including private capital accumulation, corporations, large-scale production, and impersonal exchange. By the nineteenth century, modern economic institutions began to be transplanted to the Middle East, but its economy has not caught up. And there is no quick fix today. Low trust, rampant corruption, and weak civil societies—all characteristic of the region's economies today and all legacies of its economic history—will take generations to overcome. The Long Divergence opens up a frank and honest debate on a crucial issue that even some of the most ardent secularists in the Muslim world have hesitated to discuss.

A major contribution to Ottoman history, now published in paperback in two volumes.

Wongsurawat looks at the history of Thailand since the mid-nineteenth century and uses events to elucidate basic economic models and concepts. He selects defining moments in Thailand’s history to convey key economic ideas worthy of classroom discussion. Written without excessive jargon, the chapters connect complex historical phenomena with broader, transportable economic concepts. The cases range from the signing of the Bowring Treaty in 1855, opening Siam to the forces of globalization, to the Asian Financial Crisis that wreaked havoc on the economy in 1997. Key economic terms are also explained. Reconnecting the increasingly distant fields of history and economics, this is an appealing text to researchers with an interest in Thailand’s economic history, as well as undergraduates undergoing an introductory economics course or overseas program in Thailand.

This study examines for the first time the finance procedures and documents of the post-classical Ottoman Empire. It provides an overview of institutional and monetary history and a detailed description of assessment and collection processes for Cizye, Avariz and Iltizam-collected taxes, the documents produced by these processes, and the information they contain. The finance department's detailed record-keeping, procedural continuity, and provision of economic justice made it a bulwark of stability in a period of turmoil. For specialists, this book introduces a multitude of sources on the economic and social history of the post-classical age, while for comparativists it places the empire in its seventeenth-century context. It links Ottoman administrative change with early modern state formation and reformulates the seventeenth century as a period of consolidation, not decline.

Rome's wars delivered great wealth to the conquerors, but how did this affect politics and society on the home front? In Power and Public Finance at Rome, James Tan offers the first examination of the Roman Republic from the perspective of fiscal sociology and makes the case that no understanding of Roman history is complete without an appreciation of the role of economics in defining political interactions. Examining how imperial profits were distributed, Tan explores how imperial riches turned Roman public life on its head. Rome's lofty aristocrats had traditionally been constrained by their dependence on taxpayer money. They relied on the state to fund wars, and the state in turn relied on citizens' taxes to fuel the war machine. This fiscal chain bound the elite to taxpayer consent, but as the spoils of Empire flooded into Rome, leaders found that they could fund any policy they chose without relying on the support of the citizens who funded them. The influx of wealth meant that taxation at home was ended and citizens promptly lost what bargaining power they had enjoyed as a result of the state's reliance on their fiscal contributions. With their dependence on the taxpayers loosened, Rome's aristocratic leaders were free to craft a fiscal system which prioritized the enrichment of their own private estates and which devoted precious few resources to the provision of public goods. In six chapters on the nature of Rome's imperialist enrichment, on politics during the Punic Wars and on the all-important tribunates of the Gracchi, Tan offers new conceptions of Roman state creation, fiscal history, civic participation, aristocratic pre-eminence, and the eventual transition to autocracy.

With American leadership facing increased competition from China and India, the question of how hegemons emerge—and are able to create conditions for lasting stability—is of utmost importance in international relations. The generally accepted wisdom is that liberal superpowers, with economies based on capitalist principles, are best able to develop systems conducive to the health of the global economy. In Birth of Hegemony, Andrew C. Sobel draws attention to the critical role played by finance in the emergence of these liberal hegemons. He argues that a hegemon must have both the capacity and the willingness to bear a disproportionate share of the cost of providing key collective goods that are the basis of international cooperation and exchange. Through this, the hegemon helps maintain stability and limits the risk to productive international interactions. However, prudent planning can account for only part of a hegemon’s ability to provide public goods, while some of the necessary conditions must be developed simply through the processes of economic growth and political development. Sobel supports these claims by examining the economic trajectories that led to the successive leadership of the Netherlands, Britain, and the United States. Stability in international affairs has long been a topic of great interest to our understanding of global politics, and Sobel’s nuanced and theoretically sophisticated account sets the stage for a consideration of recent developments affecting the United States.

War, Power and the Economy contains a comparative history of Great Britain, France and Spain, the three rival empires of the 1700s. It explores how the states prepared for war, what kind of economic means they had, what institutional changes they implemented, and how efficient this was. As such, the book presents the first comparative synthesis aiming to understand the outcome of the global confrontation in the eighteenth century. Faced with the challenge of paying for new and more costly wars, some countries found flexible ways to get more money and better supplies, whereas others did not. The development of freer colonial markets, the increase of consumption and its taxation, the problems of venal administration or the different systems of patronage with contractors, are some of the factors explaining the divergences that were made clear by 1815. This book explores political and economic dimensions of the eighteenth-century European state in order to explain why and how changes in power as an outcome of war depended upon the available means and the way they were obtained and used. The book takes the idea that making war or preparing for it obliged governments to make important changes in their institutions, so that during the eighteenth century the state in many ways formed itself through war efforts. Ultimately, this study aims to show how closely political and military success was entwined with economic interests. This volume is of great interest to those who study economic history, political economy and European history.