Financial History

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Financial history is a relatively new but burgeoning field of study. Inherently interdisciplinary, it is traditionally defined as a subfield of economic history encompassing the study of past financial institutions, markets and theories. However, at its best, as in the work of Niall Ferguson and Richard Sylla, financial history represents a new way to approach crucial questions of broad import to scholars and policymakers. Scholars are becoming increasingly aware that application of financial theories and concepts – from relatively simple ones like present value to more advanced ones like portfolio choice, agency theory and the economics of asymmetric information – can elucidate the past (and the present) in ways numerous and deep. Financial history therefore increasingly stands as an independent method of inquiry into some of our most intractable problems: economic growth, financial concentration, health care, long-term care, monetary policy, political development, social welfare programs, even, as Ferguson shows, foreign policy and the very nature of democracy itself.

This series expands the scope of financial history research by providing scholars with a new outlet for their work and by providing readers and libraries with a steady source of high-quality titles. Send your proposals to: Robert E Wright, Clinical Associate Professor, Department of Economics, Stern School of Business, New York University, 44 West 4th Street, New York, NY 10012-1126 or email rwright@stern.nyu.edu. If the proposal is considered promising then the Series Editor will invite you to submit a sample chapter for full evaluation.

Readership

Economists who specialize in finance or economic growth, economic historians, and historians of banking, business, corporations, economic growth, economic thought, finance and insurance will constitute the core audience, but all historians, economists, public policymakers and political scientists should find the books in this series of general interest.

Editorial board

Robert E Wright is clinical associate professor of economics at the Stern School of Business, New York University. Wright has authored or co-authored various books, including most recently One Nation Under Debt: Hamilton, Jefferson, and the History of What We Owe (2008). He is also the editor of Pickering & Chatto’s The History of Corporate Finance (2003), The History of Corporate Governance (2004) and The US National Debt (2005). Though an historian by training, Wright has published numerous articles for economic and business journals like the American Economic Review, Barron's and FT Banker.

Published titles

• Baring Brothers and the Birth of Modern Finance
• Gambling on the American Dream : Atlantic City and the Casino Era
• Government Debts and Financial Markets in Europe
• The Political Economy of Sentiment : Paper Credit and the Scottish Enlightenment in Early Republic Boston, 1780–1820
• Slave Agriculture and Financial Markets in Antebellum America : The Bank of the United States in Mississippi, 1831–1852
• Virginia and the Panic of 1819 : The First Great Depression and the Commonwealth

Forthcoming titles

• Argentina's Parallel Currency: The Economy of the Poor

  Georgina M Gómez

  (April 2009)
• Guilty Money: The City of London in Victorian and Edwardian Culture, 1815–1914

  Ranald C Michie

  (March 2009)
• The Revenue Imperative: The Union's Financial Policies during the American Civil War

  Jane Flaherty

  (December 2008)
• The Rise and Fall of the American System: Nationalism and the Development of the American Economy, 1800–1837

  Songho Ha

  (September 2009)
• Towards Modern Public Finance: The American War with Mexico, 1846-1848

  James W Cummings

  (November 2008)

Download leaflet pdfs

• Financial History: leaflet pdf

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