Pepys kept his diary for more than nine years, covering a variety of topics that is unrivalled among seventeenth-century diarists. This chapter explores why and how he did so, drawing on recent work which has expanded our sense of early modern life-writing. Pepys turned the methods seen in religious diaries and financial recording to his own ends. His diary’s purposes developed to include assessing his social status and his health; storing useful anecdotes; and relishing illicit pleasures. To illustrate Pepys’s techniques his account of Charles II’s coronation is examined, alongside his friend John Evelyn’s account of the same event. Pepys’s diary was a dynamic text: it evolved in response to Pepys’s changing needs and was intended to act upon him, stimulating favourable change in him and for him.

This chapter explores broader cultural European trends following the First World War, including the consequences of currency dynamics and market speculation. These postwar changes culminated in a heightened financialisation of the culture of the art market, reflecting broader shifts in capitalist economies towards financial forms of revenue and profit. The saturation of financial language that accompanies financialisation processes was also a characteristic of this period: the aftermath of the war saw debates revolving around themes of profit, money-making, and an inflation of art production. This chapter parallels previous chapters by examining how cultural and artistic changes were linked to socio-economic developments. The war had acted as a catalyst and accelerator, inflaming cultural tensions within the art markets. It continued to shape market discourses, embedding wartime mentalities into post-war cultural landscapes.

This chapter analyses the auction milieu’s cultural responses to war-induced developments. Within societies deeply entrenched in the mentality of mobilisation and sacrifice, the commercialisation of art stirred moral apprehensions, feelings of possession, and envy, both among the general public and within the art industry. Debates on nouveaux riches and profiteers underscored the construction of antagonist figures during the war, highlighting threats to the market from both external and internal forces. The widespread destruction of heritage also catalysed nationalist feelings, deepening the cultural fragmentation of a formerly integrated trade sphere. By scrutinising the biographies of dealers, examining art’s vulnerability in wartime upheaval, and exploring the interplay between art and finance, this chapter also outlines how the war acted on the tensions characteristic of each market and brought them to a conflagration.

Between 500 and 1500, the economy of Europe changed considerably. The papal court saw an equally radical change in the nature of their income, their expenditure, their administration, and their financial expectations. The papal court became the jurisdictional apex of the medieval Church and a major power in European secular politics. Consequently, the income of the Roman Curia increased radically, as did their expenditure. The papacy was a religious power first and foremost. Therefore, the accounting, income, and expenditure of the popes had to correspond to a model medieval Christianity thought good; the pope should look after his flock and spend appropriately on their welfare. There were times, however, when it was not clear to the Christian world that the pope was acting in an acceptable manner, as regards finance and wealth. Bitter satires followed, and the papacy gained a reputation for extravagance. It has never fully thrown off that reputation.

Chapter 5 addresses undercover investigations of street begging, a topic that illustrates the new genre’s prioritizing of journalistic considerations over humanitarian aims. Beggary’s conflation with fraud in the public imagination made the practice a unique object for incognito investigating. Undercover journalists sought to reveal not the sufferings of those driven to public humiliation but the exploitation of charity by a cadre of swindlers. Despite failing in this ambition, such would-be exposés were perennially popular with newspaper audiences, who saw in them a simulation of their own hypothetical shipwreck but also a low-life equivalent to the specialist expertise and terminology characteristic of all professions. Undercover investigators thereby forged the troubling connection between respectability and criminality that informs the portrayal of beggars in fictional works such as Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘The Man with the Twisted Lip’ (1891), a Sherlock Holmes story in which a respected businessman is exposed as a professional beggar.

How did an English state torn apart by sectarian conflict, civil war and a revolution in the late seventeenth century become the most powerful in the world by 1819?

This essay draws upon recent developments in histories of finance and Black studies to argue for an expanded consideration of late nineteenth-century speculative fiction. In recent decades, speculation has emerged as a foundational methodology, critical framework, and literary genre in African American literary studies and Black studies. Yet, within this body of scholarship, speculative fiction is most often associated with anti-realist modes that imagine alternate futures while speculative reading and research methods double as a critique of our political and disciplinary limits. Through a close reading of Charles Chesnutt’s 1901 novel The Marrow of Tradition, this essay considers how speculation’s late nineteenth-century instruments and logics determine the novel’s political horizons and narrative structure. By attending to the financial workings of late nineteenth-century novels that might seem to strain against the bounds of either genre fiction or speculative research methods, this essay argues that we can begin to see how a work like Chesnutt’s interrogates a particularly postbellum outlook on the future, one in which the terms of financial speculation can only imagine a future that is an intensification of the past.

This contribution surveys the essays in political economy that Hume began to publish in 1752, with particular attention to his thinking about money. The essays are presented as, in part, extensions of the natural history of property and government that Hume began to sketch in A Treatise of Human Nature. But they were also carefully calibrated interventions in the political discourse of trade and finance prominent in British politics since the seventeenth century. Hume’s political economy can be situated in a range of British and European intellectual and political contexts. This chapter pays particular attention to his recurrent engagement with John Locke’s extensive writings on money, trade and taxation, which served Hume as a foil in developing his own positions. There is, it will be suggested, a deep connection between Hume’s celebrated critique of Locke’s account of the original contract and his rejection of Locke’s search for an invariable monetary standard.

The Cochin Harbor Project (1920–1936) forms the subject of Chapter 4. Through a close reading of the official correspondence relating to the development project, this chapter will trace the differing visions of development articulated by those involved with the project and analyze how these changed over time. Conceived as a solution for the political and environmental issues confronting multiple state authorities in the first quarter of the twentieth century, the Cochin Harbor Project would be dogged by uncertainties from the time of its inception. These uncertainties stemmed not only from the participation of princely states in the modernization of a port in British India but also from the technological choices made during the project’s execution to reconcile divergent interests. Through a close analysis of the technological choices made over the course of the project’s execution, this chapter will examine the reasons why the harbour’s development took the form that it did. It will discuss these decisions not only in the context of the economic aims of the colonial state but also equally of the political aspirations of the region’s princely states.

This chapter provides an account of different sources of finance for urban nature, the actors involved in providing these sources of finance, and various financial mechanisms through which the sources and the actors are mobilised. It focuses on the four principal models of investing in urban nature, which include funding solicited through public funds, private capital, community/not-for profit funding, and hybrid and collaborative approaches. The chapter discusses the current situation, barriers, and opportunities for investing in urban nature, along with relevant examples. It concludes with insights on how to facilitate more investments in urban nature and support its mainstreaming in cities. The chapter engages with two case studies to illustrate its key messages: Parc Marianne Ecodistrict: investment by real estate developers stipulated by municipality in Montpellier, France, and Mexico City Water Fund: hybrid investing in urban nature in Mexico City, Mexico.

Geopolitical competition between the world’s major powers does not make cooperation on climate change impossible; neither does industrial competition in clean technologies make it unnecessary. In the power, road transport, and steel sectors, there are ways that the United States, China and Europe can work together to accelerate the low carbon transitions – not by avoiding competition, but by shaping it to achieve better outcomes.

Challenging the myth of non-return, this chapter shows that, by the 1970s, many guest workers did want to return to Turkey. But instead of support, they encountered opposition from the Turkish government. In the 1970s, the link between return migration and financial investments dominated bilateral discussions between Turkey and West Germany. After the Oil Crisis, West Germany devised bilateral policies to promote remigration. Turkey, then mired in unemployment, hyperinflation, and debt, actively resisted those efforts. The Turkish government realized that guest workers played a significant role in mitigating the country’s economic crisis. To repay its foreign debt, Turkey needed guest workers’ remittance payments in high-performing Deutschmarks. If guest workers returned to Turkey, then that stream would dry up. Turkish officials thus strove to prevent mass return migration at all costs – even when it contradicted guest workers’ interests. These tensions also manifested in Turkey’s charging of exorbitant fees for citizens abroad who sought exemptions from mandatory military service, prompting young migrants to create an activist organization that critiqued this policy. The knowledge that they were unwanted in both countries widened the rift between the migrants and their home country, which disparaged them as “Germanized” yet relied on them as “remittance machines.”

This chapter presents a fleeting history of key changes in global trade and finance in the post-war period, organised around the themes of crisis and cooperation. The first section of the chapter discusses the key themes. The second section considers the emergence of the post-World War II Bretton Woods regime. The third section outlines the rise of private capital in the 1970s through to the debt crisis of the 1980s. The fourth section considers discussions of global financial architecture in the 1990s to the 2000s. The fifth section discusses changes in the last fifteen years, focusing on how the trade regime has stalled and the financial regime has been partially rolled back. Finally, the concluding section reflects on the ever-present need to foster cooperation in the global financial and trade architecture.