Crises in Economic and Social History

This book contains a collection of fifteen papers by scholars diverse in their specialisms and at varied stages of their careers, a number of whom presented papers at a conference entitled ‘Coping with Crisis’ held at the University of Durham in 2013. Seven papers are concerned with economic, financial and banking crises, as the organisers encouraged the contributors to connect their historical inquiries with the aftermath of the troubles of the world economy of 2007–08, but a number of papers deal with other varieties of crisis, including outbreaks of disease. In their useful introduction the editors, A.T. Brown, Andy Burn and Rob Doherty seek to explore the concept of ‘crisis’, and the contributors add their views, but no very precise consensus is achieved. The essays consider every variety of difficulty and disaster between the ancient world and the present century, including diseases (sheep scab, rinderpest, plague, smallpox and cholera), bad harvests, food and fuel shortages, natural disasters such as Hurricane Katrina, economic problems (cyclical depressions, trade embargoes, loss of confidence in banks), and man-made crises such as war and imposition of taxes. A crisis is often the product of a convergence of different factors, such as an epidemic and the withdrawal of credit, and Mark and Catherine Casson have compiled elaborate statistical tables with many variables to define moments of crisis not identified by more conventional methods. They note coincidences between economic problems and political troubles. The idea of a ‘general crisis’ advanced by an earlier generation of historians, and discussed by the editors, does not feature in these essays. Some authors do not subscribe to the view that a crisis should be quite sudden and short-lived, and they deal with long narratives of decline and troubles stretching over centuries. They face up to the dilemma that some crises are ‘real’, while others are imagined, and a crisis with a specific cause, such as a dip in the trade cycle, may set off panics and alarms which prolong and deepen the original problem

Ancient history · Economic history · Economics · Economy · Plague (disease · Political science · Politics · Historical Economic and Social Studies · History · Law · World Systems and Global Transformations