William Morgan


Book Description

This book will be the first full length biography of William Morgan, a founding figure in the development of actuarial science and the insurance business in the UK. This biography explains William Morgan’s role in developing the mathematics that underpin the money management of pension funds. It focuses also on the experiment in which Morgan created an X-ray tube, and examines his outspoken political views and turbulent private life. As well as exploring his public life, this biography uses unpublished family letters to open a window on Morgan’s private life.




Credit and Power


Book Description

This book reveals the surprising role that credit, money created ex nihilo by financiers, played in raising the British government’s war loans between 1793 and 1815. Using often overlooked contemporary objections to the National Debt a startling paradox is revealed as it is shown how the government’s ostensible creditors had, in fact, very little "real" money to lend and were instead often reliant for their own solvency upon the very government they were lending to. By following the careers of unsuccessful loan-contractors, who went bankrupt lending to the government, to the triumphant career of the House of Rothschild; who successfully "exported" the British system of war-financing abroad with the coming of peace, the symbiotic relationship that existed between the British government and their ostensible creditors is revealed. Also highlighted is the power granted to the (technically bankrupt) Bank of England over credit and the money supply, an unprecedented and highly influential development that filled many contemporaries with horror. This is a tale of bankruptcy, stock market manipulation, bribery and institutional corruption that continues to exert its influence today and will be of interest to anyone interested in government financing, debt and the origins of modern finance.




The Political Economy of British Historical Experience, 1688-1914


Book Description

How did Britain emerge as a world power and later as the world's first industrial society? What policies, cultural practices, and institutions were responsible for this outcome? How were the inevitable disruptions to social and political life coped with? This innovative volume illustrates the contribution of economic thinking (scientific, official and popular) to the public understanding of British economic experience over the period 1688-1914. Political economy has frequently served as the favourite mode of public discourse when analysing or justifying British economic policies, performance and institutions. These sixteen essays, centering on the peculiarities of the British experience, are grouped under five main themes: foreign assessments of that experience; land tenure; empire and free trade; fiscal and monetary regimes; and the poor law and welfare. This is a collaborative endeavour by historians with established reputations in their field, which will appeal to all those interested in the current development of these branches of historical scholarship.










The Friends of Peace


Book Description

A study of the war-opposition in England during what has usually been presented as the great patriotic struggle against Revolutionary and Napoleonic France.




Bibliotheca Lindesiana ...


Book Description




Eighteen Hundred and Eleven


Book Description

A wide-ranging analysis of the economic crisis of 1811 through the lens of a controversial poem.