Impunity and Capitalism
The Afterlives of European Financial Crises, 1690–1830

Analyses how and why financial crises stopped being treated as crimes and started being thought of as natural disasters.

Trevor Jackson (Author)

9781316516287, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 15 September 2022

320 pages, 3 maps
23.5 x 15.9 x 2.3 cm, 0.61 kg

'Jackson's account is well worth reading because of the power and continuing resonance of his central insight - impunity facilitated capitalism.' Robert Kuttner, The New York Review of Books

Whose fault are financial crises, and who is responsible for stopping them, or repairing the damage? Impunity and Capitalism develops a new approach to the history of capitalism and inequality by using the concept of impunity to show how financial crises stopped being crimes and became natural disasters. Trevor Jackson examines the legal regulation of capital markets in a period of unprecedented expansion in the complexity of finance ranging from the bankruptcy of Europe's richest man in 1709, to the world's first stock market crash in 1720, to the first Latin American debt crisis in 1825. He shows how, after each crisis, popular anger and improvised policy responses resulted in efforts to create a more just financial capitalism but succeeded only in changing who could act with impunity, and how. Henceforth financial crises came to seem normal and legitimate, caused by impersonal international markets, with the costs borne by domestic populations and nobody in particular at fault.

Introduction
Part I: Preface: Impunity at the Origins of Financial Capitalism: 1. Professionalizing impunity: from the failures of 1709 to the crisis of 1720
2. The crisis of 1720 and the invention of discredit
3. Between independence and impunity: the legitimacy of central banking after the crisis of 1720
Part II: Preface: Revolutionary Impunity: 4. The end of the old financial regime, 1781–1793
5. Recasting financial capitalism, 1796–1821
Part III: Preface: The Gold Standard and a Stable Impunity, 1815–1830: 6. The panic of 1825 and the systematization of impunity
Conclusion: monetary policy as conscience management.

Subject Areas: Economic history [KCZ], Modern history to 20th century: c 1700 to c 1900 [HBLL], European history [HBJD]