Money and Empire | Session 1

This is the first of two sessions to discuss "Money and empire: The international gold standard, 1890-1914" by Marcello De Cecco. We will cover chapters 1-4 this session.

From a published review: "The author, a Professor of International Economics at the University of Siena, Italy, finds highly abstract theoretical explanations of the international gold standard to be deficient. He thinks that these treatments do not adequately explain how the standard worked during its heyday from 1890 until 1914, in part because they fail to identify how it came to be and how it came apart. So the idea that moves this book along is that to understand an economic system, in this case a financial and monetary system, one must study it within its place and time-within history. De Cecco's theoretical theme is that the international gold standard was in fact a sterling standard; to the extent that it functioned well, this was because of Britain's dominance of international financial flows. The seeds of the gold standard's demise, de Cecco argues, are found in Britain's decline as an industrial and financial power".