Martha Prevezer

This book explores the impact of the Board of Trade upon the British state from the early seventeenth century to the early twentieth century. The study argues that for too long historians have overlooked the Board, yet it was a critical force in shaping the British state and in developing its capacity both for economic regulation and for economic development. Focusing on the slave trade and on the textiles, shipping, and infrastructural industries, the authors examine the Board of Trade’s role in shaping, promoting, and protecting these industries and thereby in defining the British state’s economic interests. The book adds the notion of an imperial-corporate state to widely used concepts of fiscal-military and mercantilist state-building. Challenging the adequacy of the many theories which emphasise taxation and currency in state-building, this study stresses the importance of micro-economic interventions. It unpacks the distinctive character of the British state’s system of micro-economic governance by tracing one central department’s evolution and its relations with other departments, British businesses and infrastructure, and with the governance structures operating between state, company-states, colonies, and domestic business. Three sub-periods of the Board of Trade’s history are distinguished, each marked by a distinctive relationship with the domestic and imperial economies and by characteristic approaches to regulatory oversight. The book will be of interest to academics and students in business, economic, and political history, and all those interested in the structure of the British state, its legacies of running empires, its relationship with industrial policies and industrialisation, and how it developed its regulatory shape.

Economics tends to teach that developed countries have good institutions while developing countries do not, and that this is the factor that constrains the latter's growth. However, the picture is far messier than this explanation suggests. Building on the varieties of capitalism framework, this book brings together the tools of institutional economics with historical analyses of institutional evolution of different kinds of property rights and legal systems, protected by different kinds of state, giving rise to distinct corporate governance structures. It constructs institutional development histories across leading liberal capitalisms in Britain and the United States, compared with continental capitalisms in France and Germany, and contemporary transitional capitalisms in China and Tanzania. This volume is innovative in combining both historical and economic insights, and in combining developed country with developing country institutional emergence, dispelling the prevailing sense of complacency about the inevitability of the path of institutional development for the developed areas of the world and the paths that developing countries are likely to follow. This volume will be of great importance to those who study international economics, development economics and international business.

Economics tends to teach that developed countries have good institutions while developing countries do not, and that this is the factor that constrains the latter's growth. However, the picture is far messier than this explanation suggests. Building on the varieties of capitalism framework, this book brings together the tools of institutional economics with historical analyses of institutional evolution of different kinds of property rights and legal systems, protected by different kinds of state, giving rise to distinct corporate governance structures. It constructs institutional development histories across leading liberal capitalisms in Britain and the United States, compared with continental capitalisms in France and Germany, and contemporary transitional capitalisms in China and Tanzania. This volume is innovative in combining both historical and economic insights, and in combining developed country with developing country institutional emergence, dispelling the prevailing sense of complacency about the inevitability of the path of institutional development for the developed areas of the world and the paths that developing countries are likely to follow. This volume will be of great importance to those who study international economics, development economics and international business.