Forging Capitalism

Forging Capitalism PDF Author: Ian Klaus
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300188331
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
Vice is endemic to Western capitalism, according to this fascinating, wildly entertaining, often startling history of modern finance. Ian Klaus’s Forging Capitalism demonstrates how international financial affairs in the nineteenth century were conducted not only by gentlemen as a noble pursuit but also by connivers, thieves, swindlers, and frauds who believed that no risk was too great and no scheme too outrageous if the monetary reward was substantial enough. Taken together, the grand deceptions of the ambitious schemers and the determined efforts to guard against them have been instrumental in creating the financial establishments of today. In a story teeming with playboys and scoundrels and rich in colorful and amazing events, Klaus chronicles the evolution of trust through three distinct epochs: the age of values, the age of networks and reputations, and, ultimately, in a world of increased technology and wealth, the age of skepticism and verification. In today’s world, where the questionable dealings of large international financial institutions are continually in the spotlight, this extraordinary history has great relevance, offering essential lessons in both the importance and the limitations of trust.

Forging Capitalism

Forging Capitalism PDF Author: Ian Klaus
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300188331
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 296

Get Book

Book Description
Vice is endemic to Western capitalism, according to this fascinating, wildly entertaining, often startling history of modern finance. Ian Klaus’s Forging Capitalism demonstrates how international financial affairs in the nineteenth century were conducted not only by gentlemen as a noble pursuit but also by connivers, thieves, swindlers, and frauds who believed that no risk was too great and no scheme too outrageous if the monetary reward was substantial enough. Taken together, the grand deceptions of the ambitious schemers and the determined efforts to guard against them have been instrumental in creating the financial establishments of today. In a story teeming with playboys and scoundrels and rich in colorful and amazing events, Klaus chronicles the evolution of trust through three distinct epochs: the age of values, the age of networks and reputations, and, ultimately, in a world of increased technology and wealth, the age of skepticism and verification. In today’s world, where the questionable dealings of large international financial institutions are continually in the spotlight, this extraordinary history has great relevance, offering essential lessons in both the importance and the limitations of trust.

Forging Capitalism

Forging Capitalism PDF Author: Ian Klaus
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300181949
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 296

Get Book

Book Description
Vice is endemic to Western capitalism, according to this fascinating, wildly entertaining, often startling history of modern finance. Ian Klaus’s Forging Capitalism demonstrates how international financial affairs in the nineteenth century were conducted not only by gentlemen as a noble pursuit but also by connivers, thieves, swindlers, and frauds who believed that no risk was too great and no scheme too outrageous if the monetary reward was substantial enough. Taken together, the grand deceptions of the ambitious schemers and the determined efforts to guard against them have been instrumental in creating the financial establishments of today. In a story teeming with playboys and scoundrels and rich in colorful and amazing events, Klaus chronicles the evolution of trust through three distinct epochs: the age of values, the age of networks and reputations, and, ultimately, in a world of increased technology and wealth, the age of skepticism and verification. In today’s world, where the questionable dealings of large international financial institutions are continually in the spotlight, this extraordinary history has great relevance, offering essential lessons in both the importance and the limitations of trust.

Capitalism and Christianity, American Style

Capitalism and Christianity, American Style PDF Author: William E. Connolly
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822381230
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
Capitalism and Christianity, American Style is William E. Connolly’s stirring call for the democratic left to counter the conservative stranglehold over American religious and economic culture in order to put egalitarianism and ecological integrity on the political agenda. An eminent political theorist known for his work on identity, secularism, and pluralism, Connolly charts the path of the “evangelical-capitalist resonance machine,” source of a bellicose ethos reverberating through contemporary institutional life. He argues that the vengeful vision of the Second Coming motivating a segment of the evangelical right resonates with the ethos of greed animating the cowboy sector of American capitalism. The resulting evangelical-capitalist ethos finds expression in church pulpits, Fox News reports, the best-selling Left Behind novels, consumption practices, investment priorities, and state policies. These practices resonate together to diminish diversity, forestall responsibility to future generations, ignore urban poverty, and support a system of extensive economic inequality. Connolly describes how the evangelical-capitalist machine works, how its themes resound across class lines, and how it infiltrates numerous aspects of American life. Proposing changes in sensibility and strategy to challenge this machine, Connolly contends that the liberal distinction between secular public and religious private life must be reworked. Traditional notions of unity or solidarity must be translated into drives to forge provisional assemblages comprised of multiple constituencies and creeds. The left must also learn from the political right how power is infused into everyday institutions such as the media, schools, churches, consumption practices, corporations, and neighborhoods. Connolly explores the potential of a “tragic vision” to contest the current politics of existential resentment and political hubris, explores potential lines of connection between it and theistic faiths that break with the evangelical right, and charts the possibility of forging an “eco-egalitarian” economy. Capitalism and Christianity, American Style is William E. Connolly’s most urgent work to date.

Forging Capitalism in Nehru's India

Forging Capitalism in Nehru's India PDF Author: Nasir Tyabji
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780199457595
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
The prospects for industrial development in the early years of independent India were plagued by a number of interrelated issues. Indian industrialists of the post-Independence era had either evolved from the ranks of merchants and moneylenders of the colonial period or from wartime speculators and hoarders. In general, their interests lay in short-term speculative gains rather than in sustained industrial growth. In addition, the impoverished condition of the peasantry resulted in the prospects of attractive returns through the diversion of urban resources to the rural moneylending market. Let alone preventing fresh industrial investment, this diversion bled the industrial sector of funds to cover even the replacement costs of plant and machinery. Finally, because of the nexus long established between some sections of the owners of capital and the Congress party, decisive corrective intervention by the government after Independence became a problematic political task. This volume examines the processes by which these problems, exacerbated by colonial nonchalance, were comprehended by the political executive in independent India, and shows how measures of social engineering were attempted in order to reform the more extreme cases of capitalist cupidity.

Capitalism on Edge

Capitalism on Edge PDF Author: Albena Azmanova
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231530609
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 130

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Book Description
The wake of the financial crisis has inspired hopes for dramatic change and stirred visions of capitalism’s terminal collapse. Yet capitalism is not on its deathbed, utopia is not in our future, and revolution is not in the cards. In Capitalism on Edge, Albena Azmanova demonstrates that radical progressive change is still attainable, but it must come from an unexpected direction. Azmanova’s new critique of capitalism focuses on the competitive pursuit of profit rather than on forms of ownership and patterns of wealth distribution. She contends that neoliberal capitalism has mutated into a new form—precarity capitalism—marked by the emergence of a precarious multitude. Widespread economic insecurity ails the 99 percent across differences in income, education, and professional occupation; it is the underlying cause of such diverse hardships as work-related stress and chronic unemployment. In response, Azmanova calls for forging a broad alliance of strange bedfellows whose discontent would challenge not only capitalism’s unfair outcomes but also the drive for profit at its core. To achieve this synthesis, progressive forces need to go beyond the old ideological certitudes of, on the left, fighting inequality and, on the right, increasing competition. Azmanova details reforms that would enable a dramatic transformation of the current system without a revolutionary break. An iconoclastic critique of left orthodoxy, Capitalism on Edge confronts the intellectual and political impasses of our time to discern a new path of emancipation.

Capital and Capitalism

Capital and Capitalism PDF Author: Rogene A. Buchholz
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000434265
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 239

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Book Description
Capitalist societies need to undergo major change to provide for the material needs of all the people who work within the system, not just the 1 percent. They have become dysfunctional and need a different kind of orientation to continue in existence. Instead of creating wealth, which is what they are supposed to accomplish, they have created nothing but debt for the past several decades and are now in serious trouble with regard to finding the wherewithal to keep on functioning as viable societies that can provide job opportunities for their workers and the promise of a better life in the future for their citizens. The coronavirus pandemic has exposed just how many people live paycheck to paycheck and have not been able to accumulate any kind of savings. The 1 percent, meanwhile, have benefited greatly and have vastly increased their wealth over the past several decades. This book does not advocate the need to turn to a form of socialism, however, to give most workers a chance at a decent life for themselves. What is needed is a redefinition of capitalism to make it work for everyone. Capital and Capitalism seeks to uncover various myths about capitalism that hinder our ability to change the system and discuss the task of redefining capitalism by examining where neo-liberalism went wrong and what role restructuring the corporation along stakeholder lines can play in making capitalism more responsive to the entire society. It will be of interest to researchers, academics, and students in the fields of business and society, leadership, and business ethics.

Emerging Capitalism in Central Europe and Southeast Asia

Emerging Capitalism in Central Europe and Southeast Asia PDF Author: F. Bafoil
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137383062
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
This book examines the emergence of different forms of capitalism in Central-Eastern states in Europe and Mekong states within the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). All of them (but Thailand) have historically disappeared from the regional maps for long periods of time due to colonial or imperial rule. Most of them were previously members of a soviet-type economy, and they all joined ASEAN or the European Union in the 1990s or in the 2000s. These states are characterized by a strong urge toward feelings of national sovereignty due to their experiences with colonialism and imperialism. But, due to the regional economic pressures and the globalization dynamic, these states cannot articulate protectionist policies. They are forced to open their economies in order to attract Foreign Direct Investments. This results in less regulated and more political forms of capitalism than in some more developed capitalist countries. This book analyzes forms of capitalism as the arising from a combination of three conditions: the legacy of the foreign occupations, the national construction process of the sovereign state, and lastly, the dynamics of regional integration. These states' claims to national sovereignty and the manner in which they developed suggests a causative link between the forms of political domination that have presided over these transformations and the forms of capitalism that have resulted.

Political Economy, Literature & the Formation of Knowledge, 1720-1850

Political Economy, Literature & the Formation of Knowledge, 1720-1850 PDF Author: Richard Adelman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351009508
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
This edited collection, Political Economy, Literature & the Formation of Knowledge, aims to address the genealogy and formation of political economy as a knowledge project from 1720 to 1850. Through individual essays on both literary and political economic writers, this volume defines and analyses the formative moves, both epistemological and representational, which proved foundational to the emergence of political economy as a dominant discourse of modernity. The collection also explores political economy’s relation to other discourses and knowledge practices in this period; representation in and of political economy; abstraction and political economy; fictional mediations and interrogations of political economy; and political economy and its ‘others’, including political economy and affect, and political economy and the aesthetic. Essays presented in this text are at once historical and conceptual in focus, and manifest literary critical disciplinary expertise whilst being of genuinely broad and interdisciplinary interest. Amongst the writers whose work is addressed are: Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, David Hume, Thomas Malthus, Jane Marcet, J. S. Mill, David Ricardo, and Adam Smith. The introduction, by the editors, sets up the conceptual, theoretical and analytical framework explored by each of the essays. The final essay and response bring the concerns of the volume up to date by engaging with current economic and financial realities, by, respectively, showing how an informed and critical history of political economy could transform current economic practices, and by exploring the abundance of recent conceptual art addressing representation and the unpresentable in economic practice.

Nehru's India

Nehru's India PDF Author: Taylor C. Sherman
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691227225
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
An iconoclastic history of the first two decades after independence in India Nehru’s India brings a provocative but nuanced set of new interpretations to the history of early independent India. Drawing from her extensive research over the past two decades, Taylor Sherman reevaluates the role of Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, in shaping the nation. She argues that the notion of Nehru as the architect of independent India, as well as the ideas, policies, and institutions most strongly associated with his premiership—nonalignment, secularism, socialism, democracy, the strong state, and high modernism—have lost their explanatory power. They have become myths. Sherman examines seminal projects from the time and also introduces readers to little-known personalities and fresh case studies, including India’s continued engagement with overseas Indians, the importance of Buddhism in secular India, the transformations in industry and social life brought about by bicycles, a riotous and ultimately doomed attempt to prohibit the consumption of alcohol in Bombay, the early history of election campaign finance, and the first state-sponsored art exhibitions. The author also shines a light on underappreciated individuals, such as Apa Pant, the charismatic diplomat who influenced foreign policy from Kenya to Tibet, and Urmila Eulie Chowdhury, the rebellious architect who helped oversee the building of Chandigarh. Tracing and critiquing developments in this formative period in Indian history, Nehru’s India offers a fresh and definitive exploration of the nation’s early postcolonial era.

Making a New World

Making a New World PDF Author: John Tutino
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822349892
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 710

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Book Description
This history of the political economy, social relations, and cultural debates that animated Spanish North America from 1500 until 1800 illuminates its centuries of capitalist dynamism and subsequent collapse into revolution.