This article encourages critical discussion about the economic and social consequences of the war in Ukraine. This war has global effects in various dimensions of social life: energy policy, the environmental dimension, the economic sphere, and also the political atmosphere. In each of these dimensions, it poses a threat to sustainable development and the interests of the labour class in Europe. It attempts to change the balance of power in global geopolitics and also proves to be a useful cover for attempts to change the model of relations between employees and the state and business in many European countries. Due to the conflict in Ukraine and the ensuing calls for increased efforts to ‘ensure security’, Europe has turned towards a war economy in which the interests of the arms industry are more important than the interests of the working classes. The war in Ukraine has proved to be an excellent justification for governments to lower social standards and get rid of the remnants of the welfare state. From this perspective, the atmosphere of the New Cold War becomes a challenge for the labour movement, the global left and all progressive social circles.

This paper assesses how to quantitatively classify countries as conforming to the ideal of an ‘open access order’ in the spirit of Douglass North, John Joseph Wallis, and Barry Weingast's Violence and Social Orders. It does so by taking the harmonic mean of already existing measures of economic freedom, liberal democracy, and state capacity. Thirty-five countries out of 161 in 2020 were assessed to be open access orders. A main dataset is constructed for the years 1950 to present, and a supplementary dataset for select countries is constructed for years back to 1850. Switzerland has the highest index score for open access orders in 2020, is classified to be an open access order continuously since 1950, and is the first country to be classified as an open access order (in 1875).

This paper uses economic history to probe the relationship between state capacity and economic growth during the Great and Little Divergences (c.1500–c.1850). It identifies flaws in the dominant measure of state capacity, fiscal capacity, and advocates instead analysing state expenditures. It investigates five key activities on which states historically spent resources: waging war; providing law and administration; building infrastructure; pursuing industrial policy; and fostering a national culture. The lesson of history, it concludes, is not to build a capacious state. Rather, we need a state that uses its capacity to help (or at least not hinder) market activity.

This article is Part II of a survey of Russia's position as one of the great powers and how it has evolved from 1815 to the present day. Part 1 ended on the eve of the Great Patriotic War (1941‒1945), and Part II begins where Part 1 left off, with some data on the Great Patriotic War and its influence on the USSR's position as a great power. It deals with post-war reconstruction and then considers the Cold War and post-Soviet Russia (1992‒2022). Attention is paid to Soviet economic policies, the reasons for the long-run decline in Soviet economic growth, and the state collapse of 1991. Explanatory theories used include List's economic recommendations for medium-developed countries, Wintrobe's political economy of dictatorship, and Tilly's analysis of the war–state relationship. It is concluded that a relatively poor country can become a great power and maintain that position for long periods if it has institutions that enable it to squeeze its population for military purposes.

This article is Part 1 of a survey of Russia's position as one of the great powers and how it has evolved from 1815 to the present day. It begins with the situation in 1815 and the path to it, and devotes attention to important Russian institutions then, soldiers' cooperatives, autocracy and serfdom. The subsequent wars and their consequences are discussed. The end of the Empire, the creation of the USSR and Soviet institutions are considered. Consideration is also given to the relative economic position of Russia/USSR and its changes over time. Attention is paid to the economic policies of Witte and Stalin. Explanatory theories used include List's economic recommendations for medium-developed countries, the institutional theories of Acemoglu, North and others, Modelski's evolutionary analysis of global politics and Tilly's analysis of the war–state relationship. Part 1 ends on the eve of the Great Patriotic War (1941).

Property institutions should ideally provide economic actors with certainty that their local choices about investment will not be unsettled by shifting political economic equilibria. We argue that for this to occur, political autonomy, administrative and enforcement capacity, political constraints, and accessible legal institutions are each necessary. A comparison of the evolution of property rights for settlers and American Indians in the United States shows how political and legal forces shape the evolution of property institutions. American Indians, who had property institutions before Europeans arrived, could not defend their land from Europeans and later Americans due to lacking military capacity. Settlers' property rights were relatively secure because the government had sufficient autonomy and capacity to broadly define and enforce their rights, political institutions constrained the government from expropriating settlers' property, and legal institutions provided a forum for settlers to adjudicate and defend their rights in court. Native Americans, in contrast, had systematically inconsistent and often expropriative policy treatment by the government. Although tribes have technically been sovereign since the 1970s, tribal governments continue to lack sufficient political and legal autonomy and capacity to define and enforce property institutions in response to evolving local conditions.

From the 1970s to the 1990s there was a revolution in international financial markets, which combined the processes of financialisation and globalisation. Deregulation and financial innovation were the two underlying forces that facilitated this transformation. At the same time, distinctive national characteristics of banking structures and cultures influenced the way that financial globalisation affected the geographic distribution of financial activity. This article addresses these seismic shifts through three perspectives: changes in regulation and the geographic pattern of international banking activity, reform of the main stock markets in New York and London and the rise of financial conglomerates. It identifies complementarity as well as competition among international financial centres.

The City of London has long attracted much academic and popular attention. However, little research has been done on the relationship between the City and the European Economic Community in the 1970s and 1980s, despite the accession of the United Kingdom in 1973. Based on archival material from central and commercial banks in the UK and France, this article explores the relationship between the City and the EEC, from the accession of the UK to the EEC in 1973 to the Maastricht Treaty in 1992, which was meant to be the year of the completion of the single financial market. The article explores two areas: the influence of the City on EEC financial regulation, and how this influence was exerted. It pays particular attention to two committees chaired by the Bank of England, the City Liaison Committee and the City EEC Liaison Committee, and to British banks. The article argues that if the EEC played a part in the formalisation of British banking regulation, the City also played a key role in shaping EEC plans for financial regulation.

This paper investigates the organizational structure of the Xiang Army, one of the best-known regional armies in the late Qing dynasty. The army developed an organizational form to overcome problems that plagued the imperial army of the central government, namely, the poor recruitment and training of soldiers, the lack of incentives to fight in battles, and the coordination failure. This organizational structure, I argue, played a central role in the rise of the Xiang Army in the Qing dynasty.

While the International Debt Crisis of the early 1980s was the most severe financial crisis since World War II and while national and international banking supervision was developing at that time, little is known about the response of supervisors to the deteriorating financial environment in the years preceding the crisis. Complementing the political and business history of the international debt situation, this article aims to unravel the international banking supervision side of the question. Based on archival material from the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) and various central banks, the article examines how the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS), then emerging as the leading forum on international banking supervision, anticipated the International Debt Crisis through the prism of ‘country risk’. The article shows that the Committee refused to recommend strict regulations in this area. It argues that members adopted this position because of the lack of good information and the difficult position of banking supervision between macroeconomic issues and individual banks’ own responsibilities, but also because of somewhat excessive faith in market mechanisms. Their discussions on country risk shed light on critical challenges of banking supervision and, thereby, on the history of banking regulation and prudential thinking.

Innovations in the world of alternative finance such as online consumer lending, fund-raising platforms and cryptocurrencies are proceeding apace. In this article, we examine three historical case studies of newly emerged non-bank financial markets and discuss the possible implications for today's alternative finance markets. The first insight is that the private sector can generally be counted on to meet previously unmet needs. Moneylenders filled a gap unaddressed by the banking system of the day. Junior market IPOs provided access to funds for smaller companies that might otherwise have struggled to raise external finance. Private currencies replaced sovereign coins in transactions at various points in history. The second insight, however, is that new financial markets and instruments eventually attract the attention of regulators. Finally, these examples are a warning to industry not to take for granted that an initially laissez-faire regulatory regime precludes a stronger response at some point in the future. In all three cases, tougher regulation – in some cases even to the point of shutting down the products and markets concerned – arrived after long periods of observation and deliberation by the state.

Taxation is accepted as a fact of modern life, despite recurring political conflict over the nature and direction of fiscal policies. Most financiers regard obligations issued by the state as a safe investment option. Neither taxation nor state obligations were taken for granted during much of the history of public finance, however, at least not before the early 1800s. The ‘tax state’ developed in fits and starts, driven by the exigencies of warfare, which provided the main rationale for raising state income. Although wartime fiscal innovations eventually facilitated the rise of an efficient military state, the options available for implementing such improvements and preferences for specific fiscal or financial instruments varied greatly across early modern states. Focusing on the ‘long’ eighteenth century, this introduction presents a framework for assessing these differences and introduces the other articles in this special issue.

The essay examines Spain’s colonial legacy in the long-run development of Spanish America. It surveys the fiscal and constitutional outcomes of independence and assesses the relative burden imposed by colonialism. Constitutional asymmetries between revenue collecting and spending agents constrained de facto governments’ power to tax. Inherent disparities embedded in the colonial fiscal system worsened with vaguely defined representation for subjects and territories and vexed their aggregation into a modern representative polity. Governments with limited fiscal capacity failed to deliver public goods and to distribute the costs and benefits of independence equitably. Growing indirect taxes, debt and money creation allowed them to transfer the fiscal burden to other constituents or future generations. Taxpayers became aware of the asymmetry between private contributions and public goods and hence favoured a low but regressive taxation. Comparisons with trajectories in the metropolis and the United States are offered to qualify this legacy.

This paper analyses the influence of political regimes on the level and economic composition of military expenditure in Spain over the long run. In contrast with the widely accepted negative relation between democracy and military spending, the paper suggests that democratic governments established in the late 1970s and early 1980s after Franco’s dictatorship had a positive influence on the military burden owing to the efforts to reorient the army towards international threats and to involve the armed forces with the newly democratic institutions. In addition, the analysis of military expenditure allows us to conclude that the international orientation of democratic military policies took place along with financial efforts to obtain a capital-intensive army to confront international military threats.

This paper focuses on the analysis of weak states in the international trading system during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic crises, especially on Portugal's trade relations with the United States. We argue that the previous studies of the trade flows during these conflicts have not paid enough attention on smaller actors. Even though the Peninsular War caused severe disruption of agricultural production in Portugal, the United States, despite its strained relations with an ally of Portugal, Great Britain, became a key supplier for the Portuguese market. Clearly, the threatened position of the peninsula, and the need to supply the troops, awarded the Portuguese some room to manoeuvre in the international markets. Total war was not a constraint for all states — economic necessities trumped political and diplomatic concerns during the era of the first real-world wars. This situation was a temporary one, only to change after the conflict.