Search results for ""Author Philip T. Hoffman""

Between 1492 and 1914, Europeans conquered 84 percent of the globe. But why did Europe establish global dominance, when for centuries the Chinese, Japanese, Ottomans, and South Asians were far more advanced? In Why Did Europe Conquer the World?, Philip Hoffman demonstrates that conventional explanations--such as geography, epidemic disease, and the Industrial Revolution--fail to provide answers. Arguing instead for the pivotal role of economic and political history, Hoffman shows that if certain variables had been different, Europe would have been eclipsed, and another power could have become master of the world. Hoffman sheds light on the two millennia of economic, political, and historical changes that set European states on a distinctive path of development, military rivalry, and war. This resulted in astonishingly rapid growth in Europe's military sector, and produced an insurmountable lead in gunpowder technology. The consequences determined which states established colonial empires or ran the slave trade, and even which economies were the first to industrialize. Debunking traditional arguments, Why Did Europe Conquer the World? reveals the startling reasons behind Europe's historic global supremacy.

Read more less

This volume, one of the books in the "Making of Modern Freedom" series, is a collection of essays by eminent historians who explore the relationship between state finance and political development in fifteenth and sixteenth century Europe. They analyze how during this period European states were engaged in nearly continuous warfare and how those warfares produced fiscal crises. As a result, rulers were forced to enter into novel fiscal agreements with their subjects, often providing their subjects more political power, in exchange. The volume begins with two essays on England. David Harris Sacks traces the politics of government finance from the fifteenth century to the eve of the Civil War, and J. R. Jones carries the story forward into the eighteenth century, when representative government was jeopardized by new and powerful financial interests. The third essay, by Augustus J. Veenendaal, Jr., explains why the Netherlands' exceptional ability to raise money by taxes and loans allowed them to wage war without the severe financial difficultes experiencd by other European powers. Two essays on Spain by I. A. A. Thompson follow the changing fortunes of the Cortes of Castile, relating its role to the desperate manipulation of Spanish fiscal policy as it came into conflict with the dearly held liberties of Castilian citizens. The two final essays deal with the consequences of absolutism in France. Philip T. Hoffman details the fiscal effect of noble privileges and explores the political ramifications of the country's repeated financial crises, and Kathryn Norberg explains why the fiscal crisis of 1789 finally brought down the monarchy.

Read more less

How a vast network of shadow credit financed European growth long before the advent of bankingPrevailing wisdom dictates that, without banks, countries would be mired in poverty. Yet somehow much of Europe managed to grow rich long before the diffusion of banks. Dark Matter Credit draws on centuries of cleverly collected loan data from France to reveal how credit abounded well before banks opened their doors. This incisive book shows how a vast system of shadow credit enabled nearly a third of French families to borrow in 1740, and by 1840 funded as much mortgage debt as the American banking system of the 1950s.Dark Matter Credit traces how this extensive private network outcompeted banks and thrived prior to World War I—not just in France but in Britain, Germany, and the United States—until killed off by government intervention after 1918. Overturning common assumptions about banks and economic growth, the book paints a revealing picture of an until-now hidden market of thousands of peer-to-peer loans made possible by a network of brokers who matched lenders with borrowers and certified the borrowers’ creditworthiness.A major work of scholarship, Dark Matter Credit challenges widespread misperceptions about French economic history, such as the notion that banks proliferated slowly, and the idea that financial innovation was hobbled by French law. By documenting how intermediaries in the shadow credit market devised effective financial instruments, this compelling book provides new insights into how countries can develop and thrive today.

Read more less