These unique papers were originally read at a conference on the new economic history of Britain at Harvard in 1970, and each is accompanied by a summary of the discussion that followed it. The participants of the conference represented a broad range of scholars from both sides of the Atlantic. The first eleven papers deal with a variety of topics covering a period from 1840 to the 1920s. They focus on the performance of the British economy, and especially its businessmen, during the time of Britain's industrial maturity and relative decline. The papers and discussions reached a novel conclusion tha, contrary to commonly held opinion, the British economy performed well and that British businessmen were not lacking in entrepreneurial vigour compared with their German or American counterparts. But even more important for British historiography than this finding was the demonstration that economic and statistical methods can be applied successfully to the study of economic history. The papers in the concluding section discuss the origins and development of the new economic history and show that, as a substantial supplement to work along more traditional lines, its methods and application are both desirable and possible. This collection serves as an interesting report of research into a key period in British history, and also as a useful introductory account of the new economic history in the United Kingdom. This book was first published in 1971.

First published in 1962, The Theory of Economic Integration provides an excellent exposition of a complex and far-reaching topic. Professor Balassa has been remarkably successful in covering so much ground with such care and balance, in a treatment which is neither in any way abstruse nor unnecessarily technical. His book will interest economists in Europe by reason of its subject and treatment, but it is also a valuable and reliable textbook for students tackling integration as part of a course of International Economics and for those studying Public Finance. He distinguishes between the various forms of integration (free trade area, customs union, common market, economics union, and total integration). In addition, he applies the theoretical principles to current projects such as the European Common Market and Free Trade Area, and to Latin American integration projects. In offering this theoretical study, the author builds on the conclusions of other writers, but goes beyond this in providing a unifying framework for previous contributions and in exploring questions that in the past received little attention – in particular, the relationship between economic integration and growth (especially the interrelationship between market size and growth, and the implications of various factors for economic growth in an integrated area).

In this 1998 book, experts in British industrial history analyse the causes of nationalisation in the 1940s.

This book is a sequal to Britain's Economic Prospects, the report issued in 1968 by the Brookings Institution and universally accepted as the most thorough and comprehensive study of the British Economy to have ever appeared. Two years later, just after the British General election, six fo the American economists who prepared the Brookings Report met with a number of other leading economists from Britain and the United States, at a weekend conference at Ditchley Park, to review the findings of the report. Papers submitted to the conference by four of the British Economists (R.C.C. Matthews, G.D.N. Worswick, E.H. Phelps Brown and M.V. Posner) covered the same ground as the Brookings Report - the role of demand management, trade and balance-of-payments problems, labour policies, and industrial policies. The conference also had before it a fifth paper, on fiscal policy and stabilization, which took issue with some of the views expressed in the Brookings report. These papers form the core of this book, which also contains an account of the conference discussions and concluding reflections by its Chairman, Sir Alec Cairncross, formerly Chief Economic Adviser to H.M. Government. Britain's Economic Prospects Reconsidered is neither a detailed critique of the Brookings Report nor a rejoinder to it, but rather an attempt to reassess British performance and policies in the light of experience since devaluation. Its central concern is the question of why economic growth in Britain since the war has been slower than in other countries. This book was first published in 1971.

Bernard Alford reviews the changing role, and diminishing influence, of Britain within the international economy across the century that saw the apogee and loss of Britain's empire, and her transformation from globe-straddling superpower to off-shore and indecisive member of the European Community. He explores the relationship between empire and economy; looks at economic performance against economic policy; and compares Britain - through and beyond the Thatcher years - with her European partners, America and Japan. In assessing whether Britain's economic decline has been absolute or merely relative, he also illuminates the broader history of the world economy itself.

This study offers a distinctive new account of British economic life since the Second World War, focussing upon the ways in which successive governments, in seeking to manage the economy, have sought simultaneously to 'manage the people': to try and manage popular understanding of economic issues. In doing so, governments have sought not only to shape expectations for electoral purposes but to construct broader narratives about how 'the economy' should be understood. The starting point of this work is to ask why these goals have been focussed upon (and differentially over time), how they have been constructed to appeal to the population, and, insofar as this can be assessed, how far the population has accepted these narratives. The first half of the book analyses the development of the major narratives from the 1940s onwards, addressing the notion of 'austerity' and its particular meaning in the 1940s; the rise of a narrative of 'economic decline from the late 1950s, and the subsequent attempts to 'modernize' the economy; the attempts to 'roll back the state' from the 1970s; the impact of ideas of 'globalization' in the 1900s; and, finally, the way the crisis of 2008/9 onwards was constructed as a problem of 'debts and deficits'. The second part of the book focuses on four key issues in attempts to 'manage the people': productivity, the balance of payments, inflation, and unemployment. It shows how, in each case, governments sought to get the populace to understand these issues in a particular light, and shaped strategies to that end.

Forrest Capie is an eminent economic historian who has published extensively on a wide range of topics, with an emphasis on banking and monetary history, particularly in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but also in other areas such as tariffs and the interwar economy. He is a former editor of the Economic History Review, one of the leading academic journals in this discipline. Under the steely editorship of Geoffrey Wood, this book brings together a stellar line of of contributors - including Charles Goodhart, Harold James, Michael Bordo, Barry Eichengreen, Charles Calomiris, and Anna Schwartz. The book analyzes many of the mainstream themes in economic and financial history - monetary policy, international financial regulation, economic performance, exchange rate systems, international trade, banking and financial markets - where historical perspectives are considered important. The current wave of globalisation has stimulated interest in many of these areas as ‘lessons of history’ are sought. These themes also reflect the breadth of Capie’s work in terms of time periods and topics.

First published in 1956, The Post-War Condition of Britain measures the extent of changes in Britain since the thirties. It contains more than two hundred tables on such matters as the national income, employment, production and productivity, investment and consumption; health, education, housing, and the insurance, assistance and similar services; on Trade Unions and industrial relations; class structure, political attitudes and party organizations; and the problems of local government and town and country planning. It is simply written, demanding from the reader the minimum of technical knowledge of economics or other specialized studies, and it should serve as an invaluable reference book for all who need exact information.