Across four centuries from Ireland to India, the Americas to Africa, and Australia, British colonialism was above all the business of corporations, conceived promoted, financed, and governed overseas expansion, making claims over territory and peoples while ensuring that British and colonial society were invested, quite literally, in their ventures. Colonial companies were also relentlessly controversial, frequently in debt, and prone to failure. The corporation was well-suited to overseas expansion not because it was an inevitable juggernaut but because, like the empire itself, it was an elusive contradiction: public and private; person and society: subordinate and autonomous, centralized and diffuse; immortal … Continue reading Joint-Stock corporation shaped British Colonialism

Scott Patterson, a veteran Wall Street Journal reporter, explains vividly the world of billion-dollar traders and high-stakes crisis predictors who strive to turn extreme events into financial windfalls. After the Pandemics, climate change, superpower rivalries, cyberattacks, political radicalization virtually everywhere we look there is mayhem bearing down on us, putting trillions of assets at risk. In Chaos Kings, Scott Patterson depicts how one faction led by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, bestselling author of The Black Swan, believes humans can never see the big disaster coming. Extreme events – so-called Black Swans while inevitable, will always catch us by surprise. In 2007, … Continue reading Thrive in a crisis

Professional economist, Russel Jones’s The Tyranny of Nostalgia provides detailed ironic observation, with a catalogue of misapprehensions, missteps, wasted opportunities, crises and humiliations, with all too-familiar problems arising time and again and yet never being satisfactorily addressed. All nations and their economic policymakers are to a certain extent prisoners of their history, and this applies more to the UK than to other countries. Nostalgia for the great days of the past has become tyrannical and is in some sense embodied in the form of the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s famous “budget box”, made for William Gladstone in the 1850s and … Continue reading Shakespearean tragedy: Economic decline

Martin Daunton scrutinises the swings of the pendulum over ninety years of democracy, national self-determination and globalization. He examines the epic history of money, trade and development and how the shifting political balance in the US is changing the agenda of global economic policy over the last ninety years between economic nationalism and globalization, explaining in detail why one economic order breaks down and how another one is built, in a. wide ranging history of institutions and individuals who have managed the global economy. Biden administration is unpicking globalization as we have known it in the Trump era. This multilateral … Continue reading Europeans keen to constrain US’s unilateral tendencies