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It doesn't make the world go round
In 1840 Thomas Carlyle wrote that "cash payment is the sole nexus between man and man . . . but there are so many things which cash will not pay!"
In 1840 Thomas Carlyle wrote that "cash payment is the sole nexus between man and man . . . but there are so many things which cash will not pay!"
By Andrew Capon
May 2001
亚博赞助欧冠机构投资者杂志
In 1840 Thomas Carlyle wrote that "cash payment is the sole nexus between man and man . . . but there are so many things which cash will not pay!"
Borrowing the title of his new book, The Cash Nexus: Money and Power in the Modern World, 1700-2000, from the 19th-century man of letters, Niall Ferguson, Oxford professor of political and financial history, has produced a prodigiously researched series of essays that examines the role economics has played in history. Though the book meanders through 426 pages of text and 56 pages of footnotes, at its core The Cash Nexus is a spirited attack on economic determinism.
Economics does not drive politics or war, writes Ferguson, author of The Pity of War, a widely read revisionist treatise on the causes and conduct of World War I. Rather, he says, "political events and institutions have often dominated economic development." Or, as he puts it in another passage, "Every day, men and women subordinate their economic self-interest to some other motive, be it the urge to play, to idle, to copulate, or to wreck."
Economic determinism suggests that France, not Britain, should have prevailed in the wars of the 18th century, because France was the far greater economic power. In fact, just the opposite happened.
Britain dominated France, Ferguson writes, because of what he calls the "square of power." Here Ferguson refers to the four institutions that define a strong state: a tax-gathering bureaucracy, a legislature that gives representation to taxpayers, a national debt to fund wars and a central bank to control that debt. All four were created by Britain in the 18th century.
相比之下,法国没有系统的公共债务anagement, a significant problem for a country that ran a deficit for all but nine years between 1610 and 1800. France in the 18th century also had a much weaker tax collection system than Britain, with one "fiscal bureaucrat" for every 4,100 Frenchmen, compared with one bureaucrat for every 1,300 Britons. So Britain had the square of power while France did not, and it was Napoleon, not the Duke of Wellington, who surrendered at Waterloo. Having defeated its principal enemy in Europe, Britain went on to plant the Union Jack over much of the globe.
One by-product of Britain's square of power: the rise of the great merchant banking dynasties, Baring and Roths-child, which prospered in the period following the Napoleonic Wars. Once Britain developed a central bank and a nascent bond market, it could become an exporter of capital. Baring and Rothschild took on that role and amassed extraordinary fortunes in the process. Between 1818 and 1832, for example, 36 loans with a nominal value of £55.8 million (in 1832 currency) were floated in London on behalf of foreign governments - one sign among many that the City of London had become the financial center of the world.
In the final chapters of his book, Ferguson sets forth his most contentious argument.
Britain, he writes, may well have retained its status as a world power had it fully committed to mobilizing a large standing army to confront German aggression in the run-up to the two world wars. Instead, Britain failed to harness its considerable resources, and the results were as tragic as they were avoidable. Other historians argue that the British Empire faded because its resources were becoming depleted - that Britain was, in the words of Yale University historian Paul Kennedy, the author of the influential The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, "overstretched." Ferguson says that Britain's real problem was that it was "understretched."
Similarly, he says, the great danger facing the U.S. today is that it will not exercise its considerable power. Americans should not be squeamish about using their strength to impose democracy and economic freedom, he writes. Ferguson bemoans the fact that "the leaders of the one state with the economic resources to make the world a better place lack the guts to do it."
The author makes a passionate plea for a more interventionist U.S. Its proper role should be deposing tyrants and spreading capitalism and democracy. Instead, Ferguson sees only "pusillanimity." In his view, in the wake of the Vietnam War the U.S. has retreated "like some giant snail behind an electronic shell," lacking the political will to face military casualties. U.S. leaders, he writes, "have an exaggerated fear of what China and Russia would do in response" to American action.
He may be right. One could also point out that America's status as a superpower has been tempered for decades by an isolationist strain.
Still, one can reject Ferguson's politics and appreciate The Cash Nexus as pugnacious scholarship, erudite and thoroughly original.
By Andrew Capon
May 2001
亚博赞助欧冠机构投资者杂志
In 1840 Thomas Carlyle wrote that "cash payment is the sole nexus between man and man . . . but there are so many things which cash will not pay!"
Borrowing the title of his new book, The Cash Nexus: Money and Power in the Modern World, 1700-2000, from the 19th-century man of letters, Niall Ferguson, Oxford professor of political and financial history, has produced a prodigiously researched series of essays that examines the role economics has played in history. Though the book meanders through 426 pages of text and 56 pages of footnotes, at its core The Cash Nexus is a spirited attack on economic determinism.
Economics does not drive politics or war, writes Ferguson, author of The Pity of War, a widely read revisionist treatise on the causes and conduct of World War I. Rather, he says, "political events and institutions have often dominated economic development." Or, as he puts it in another passage, "Every day, men and women subordinate their economic self-interest to some other motive, be it the urge to play, to idle, to copulate, or to wreck."
Economic determinism suggests that France, not Britain, should have prevailed in the wars of the 18th century, because France was the far greater economic power. In fact, just the opposite happened.
Britain dominated France, Ferguson writes, because of what he calls the "square of power." Here Ferguson refers to the four institutions that define a strong state: a tax-gathering bureaucracy, a legislature that gives representation to taxpayers, a national debt to fund wars and a central bank to control that debt. All four were created by Britain in the 18th century.
相比之下,法国没有系统的公共债务anagement, a significant problem for a country that ran a deficit for all but nine years between 1610 and 1800. France in the 18th century also had a much weaker tax collection system than Britain, with one "fiscal bureaucrat" for every 4,100 Frenchmen, compared with one bureaucrat for every 1,300 Britons. So Britain had the square of power while France did not, and it was Napoleon, not the Duke of Wellington, who surrendered at Waterloo. Having defeated its principal enemy in Europe, Britain went on to plant the Union Jack over much of the globe.
One by-product of Britain's square of power: the rise of the great merchant banking dynasties, Baring and Roths-child, which prospered in the period following the Napoleonic Wars. Once Britain developed a central bank and a nascent bond market, it could become an exporter of capital. Baring and Rothschild took on that role and amassed extraordinary fortunes in the process. Between 1818 and 1832, for example, 36 loans with a nominal value of £55.8 million (in 1832 currency) were floated in London on behalf of foreign governments - one sign among many that the City of London had become the financial center of the world.
In the final chapters of his book, Ferguson sets forth his most contentious argument.
Britain, he writes, may well have retained its status as a world power had it fully committed to mobilizing a large standing army to confront German aggression in the run-up to the two world wars. Instead, Britain failed to harness its considerable resources, and the results were as tragic as they were avoidable. Other historians argue that the British Empire faded because its resources were becoming depleted - that Britain was, in the words of Yale University historian Paul Kennedy, the author of the influential The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, "overstretched." Ferguson says that Britain's real problem was that it was "understretched."
Similarly, he says, the great danger facing the U.S. today is that it will not exercise its considerable power. Americans should not be squeamish about using their strength to impose democracy and economic freedom, he writes. Ferguson bemoans the fact that "the leaders of the one state with the economic resources to make the world a better place lack the guts to do it."
The author makes a passionate plea for a more interventionist U.S. Its proper role should be deposing tyrants and spreading capitalism and democracy. Instead, Ferguson sees only "pusillanimity." In his view, in the wake of the Vietnam War the U.S. has retreated "like some giant snail behind an electronic shell," lacking the political will to face military casualties. U.S. leaders, he writes, "have an exaggerated fear of what China and Russia would do in response" to American action.
He may be right. One could also point out that America's status as a superpower has been tempered for decades by an isolationist strain.
Still, one can reject Ferguson's politics and appreciate The Cash Nexus as pugnacious scholarship, erudite and thoroughly original.