by Isabelle Headrick In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Cuba was profoundly shaped by its proximity to and multi-layered relationship with Haiti, or Saint-Domingue as it was called before the 1803 Haitian Revolution. In the decades leading up to Saint-Domingue’s 1791 slave revolt, Cuban planters looked with envy on the booming sugar economy […]
“Debt: A Natural History,” by Daniel Lord Smail, Harvard University
Debt is a human constant. The social implications of systems of credit and debt, however, are not; they can vary significantly over time and space. Traveling freely across the human past, this paper explores the paradoxical nature of the borrowing and lending and provides signposts for writing the natural history of debt. Daniel Lord Smail is […]
White Women and the Economy of Slavery
by Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers Harrington Fellow at The University of Texas at Austin, 2018-2019 In 1849, sixty-five “ladies of Fayette County” Tennessee wanted their State legislature to know that a central dimension of patriarchy was failing. In a collective petition, they highlighted the ways that this failure was unfolding and how it impacted the lives […]
IHS Roundtable – Loving v. Virginia After 50 Years
On March 23, 2017, the Institute for Historical Studies sponsored a roundtable on the landmark Supreme Court decision that struck down laws banning inter-racial marriage. Director of HIS, Seth Garfield, introduced the three panelists, who included Jacqueline Jones, Chair of the UT Austin History Department and well known to readers of Not Even Past, Kevin […]
Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics: Entrepreneurship and the State (2008) by Yasheng Huang
China’s two-digit annual economic growth since 1980 has been seen as a modern economic miracle. But the China story does not seem to conform to standard academic theories of economic development, which emphasize the importance of secure property rights, free market, and economic and political institutions.
Mark Metzler on Post-War Japan
In the fifteen years after World War II, Japan made an astounding transition from wartime devastation to the boom known as the “Era of High-Speed Growth.” Japan’s High-Speed Growth system was an epoch-making innovation, that opened the current Asian age of world industrialization.
The Founders and Finance by Thomas K. McGraw (2012)
Thomas McGraw argues that there was something in the background of immigrants to the United States that distinguished them from native born Americans and contributed to their suitability to become Secretaries ofof the Treasury. Including those born in Africa, less than 8% of the population was not native born and yet four of the first 6 Treasury Secretaries were immigrants.
Lords of Finance by Liaquat Ahamed (2009)
For those watching the financial markets, events in Europe are front and center. Market participants await announcements by government leaders, finance ministers, central bankers, and economists with anticipation.
Trading Roles: Gender, Ethnicity, and the Urban Economy in Colonial Potosí by Jane Mangan (2005)
In only a few decades during the seventeenth century, the Spanish American colonial city of Potosí, in modern-day Bolivia, grew from a small settlement to a metropolis of almost 200,000. With twice the total population of all of Britain’s North American colonies, Potosí became one of the largest cities in the Americas despite being at an elevation of over 13,000 feet.