A new era began in 1578. Under the effective leadership of a new commander, Alexander Farnese, the war in Flanders consisted of retaking city after city through resource-intensive sieges. Farnese had more freedom than his predecessors to sign financial contracts in Flanders that were then validated in Madrid. One example is discussed here.

This chapter examines the culmination of the militarisation of economic interdependence through Franco-Russian relations between 1912 and 1914. From summer 1913, French diplomats, for the first time, made a loan conditional on Russian military commitments. The Russian military was already working to accelerate mobilisation, but required finance to build railway infrastructure. French politicians also responded to the German threat by adding a third year of military service. These measures tested the fiscal capacity of the French state and governments became mired in crises over tax reform and loans in 1913 and 1914. An increasing willingness to countenance the use of military force was evident in Russian discussions to seize the Straits from the Ottoman empire in a future crisis, reflecting a lack of alternative economic instruments for Russia. The shift in Russian policy was encapsulated by the sacking of Vladimir Kokovtsov, a long-time advocate of foreign policy restraint, as Premier and Finance Minister.

Financial diplomacy played a critical role in the remaking of diplomatic alignments during the ‘great turning point’ of European and international politics between the Russo-Japanese War and the formation of the Triple Entente. French governments used access to the Paris capital markets to secure the alliance with Russia, loosen Italy’s place in the Triple Alliance, and shape the outcome of the First Moroccan Crisis. British ministers supported Barings’ participation in the 1906 loan to Russia as a way to stabilise the Tsarist Empire and prepare for the Anglo-Russian Entente. German financial diplomacy was hampered by smaller capital markets and government borrowing, in part, to fund naval expansion. In 1910, German banks lent large sums to Hungary and to the Ottoman empire, to consolidate its alliance and influence in Constantinople. But Hungarian and Ottoman governments had first looked to Paris, which blocked access for political reasons. Examining Russian loans, the Italian debt conversion of 1906, and the Hungarian and Ottoman loans casts new light on how financial diplomacy recast power politics in the early twentieth century.

Crown finance in late medieval England had a lot of moving parts, not all of which fitted together. This chapter looks initially at income and expenditure, before examining the ways in which the financial system was managed, massaged and manipulated. The many moving parts which ultimately contributed to the evolution of a public financial system, forged in an often charged but fundamentally stable partnership with parliament through a period of protracted war, were one of the keystones of the expanding political society – king, nobility, gentry, merchants – which lay at the heart of the late medieval and early modern English state. The formative century in this process was circa 1260 to 1360 but, despite the political upheavals, ever more frequent financial crises and declining taxation revenues of the century which followed, it proved strong enough to withstand the challenges.

This chapter concerns a 2005 Malaysian court case in which the plaintiff defaulted on home-purchasing loan and then claimed he could obtain favourable repayment terms if he switched his borrower from Affin (Islamic) Bank to a regular commercial bank. According to the local regulatory framework, all commercial transactions, including those of Islamic banks, fall under the jurisdiction of the civil courts. The government issued a specific law - namely the Islamic Banking Act 1983, later enhanced as the Islamic Financial Services Act 2013 - to regulate the Islamic banking and financial industry. As Malaysia practises a dual banking system, whereby Islamic banking products are offered side by side with the conventional ones, the case presents interesting comparison between the two banking products.

This chapter investigates how Napoleon funded his war effort during the fifteen years that he was in power. Coming to power in the wake of the French monarchy’s financial insolvency and the profound turmoil of the French Revolution, Napoleon chose to become personally involved in financial affairs of the nation, opting for radical but effective solutions. This aspect of his accomplishments is usual forgotten. This is all the more unfair as his successes were real and stark. By rationalizing old principles, the winner of Austerlitz gave himself the means to embody the “God of war” but failed to win the battle for credit due in large part to the disastrous legacy he received from regimes that had preceded him.

The formulas show us property transactions among laypeople that are fundamentally similar to those between laypeople and ecclesiastical institutions that we see in the extant charters. Laypeople sold or gave property to each other, or exchanged it with each other, and they used documents to do it. However, the formulas broaden our view of the sorts of transactions laypeople engaged in and who engaged in them. For example, different kinds of property changed hands: not simply arable but also vineyards, plots of land within cities, and even townhouses. People used property as security for loans. Laypeople also arranged to hold property as benefices, or as so-called precarial grants, not only from churches/monasteries or kings but also from each other. One person used a benefice arrangement with a king to pass property to a chosen heir, in much the same way as others did with monasteries. The evidence in the formulas for these sorts of arrangements suggests that the property arrangements between lay families and ecclesiastical institutions or kings that dominate the charter record reflect only part of a larger culture, in which a variety of people in the Carolingian world used property to create and maintain ties with each other.

This chapter is concerned with divine mediation and resolution of interpersonal disputes in Roman Hieradoumia. Secular disputes could be submitted to divine jurisdiction by the performance of one or other of two rituals, the setting up of a sceptre and/or the deposition of a pittakion in the sanctuary. Several different categories of low-level dispute are discussed: disagreements over the ownership of livestock; theft of other people’s money or belongings; the non-repayment of loans of money or goods; and disputes between family members, which could be extraordinarily acrimonious. Familial disputes fall into various predictable patterns, reflecting the underlying fault lines within the Hieradoumian kinship system which arise from the ambiguous status of older women within the Hieradoumian village household.

Published in The New Republic in 1925, this essay challenges the standard question, “What is wrong with Liberia?” and the reflexive American view that Liberia must have failed to develop because of inferior abilities. An early account of what would come to be called neocolonialism, it analyzes the distinctive form of white domination suffered by vulnerable but formally independent Black states such as Liberia: economic exploitation on the part of white states and capitalists through foreign control of natural resources and markets, ruinous loans to the government, and the imposition of costly and ineffective outside experts.

In representing print in the context of the history of human knowledge more generally, the national libraries were at an advantage. However, while they could offer permanent exhibitions, whether of books or antiquities, they could not easily present them in the contexts of modern achievements. For this, the multitude of temporary exhibitions, presenting old and new objects side by side, offered another perspective. They also reached audiences unfamiliar with the fixed presentations whether in London or Paris.

The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development contains a broad set of goals requiring unprecedented global commitment and cooperation between countries (United Nations, 2015d, 2015e). From the human rights perspective, the agenda reflects elements of international human rights law and offers critical opportunities to further advance the realization of human rights for all people everywhere without discrimination (OHCHR, n.d.-c). The challenge posed is to ensure that strategies and policies to implement the 2030 Agenda are effectively based on the established human rights framework. Goal 17 of the Agenda refers to strengthening the means of implementation and “revitalizing the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development.” Several targets of Goal 17 aim at the full implementation of official development assistance by developed countries, reaching certain proportions of aid relative to gross national income.

Chapter 4 employs an originally constructed data set, the China Global Finance Index, to conduct cross-national tests spanning eighteen Latin American countries from 1990 to 2017. The index characterizes Chinese policy loans by their ?nancing channel (state-to-state vs. market-based) for each national-level investment project.The chapter ?nds that China’s state-to-state loans, as a share of a country’s external public debt, are positively correlated with budget de?cits, supporting the primary hypothesis that China’s patient capital expands governments’ ?scal policy space. In exchange for this lack of policy conditionality, however, policymakers tend to have more extensive commercial conditionality. Notably, when Chinese ?nancing is instead directly booked with corporate enterprises through private procurement in the marketplace, these commercial conditions are less extensive. China’s patient capital behaves more like long-term equity capital given the underlying private sector competition promoted by domestic procurement laws. National governments do not gain additional ?scal space and are more likely to comply with policy conditionality.

This chapter offers some empirical support to a main claim in the book, namely that the capacity of the English state was higher than that of France, by examining the typical indicator of capacity, taxation. It focuses particularly on the fiscal burden of the nobility, to show that it was relatively heavy, especially if debt is also considered. Once compelled to contribute to taxation, the English nobility had greater incentives to participate in the institution where it was negotiated, as well as to accept its extension over the broader population. By contrast, the fate of the French Estates-General moved in tandem with the taxation of the nobility; when noble fiscal privileges were consolidated, the institution declined. The chapter also provides comparative data of both fiscal and military extraction, to support the claim of greater infrastructural capacity of the English crown.

Chapter 7 assesses the cost and bene?ts of China’s commercial conditionality by employing extensive qualitative evidence, including more than 200 interviews with Chinese creditors and Latin American debtors, and in some cases, examining the original loan contracts. This chapter also evaluates the extent to which China can foster good governance and sustainable development without policy conditionality. For example, these loan provisions, which typically involve some combination of Chinese foreign content and commodity guarantees, are designed to improve the global competitiveness of Chinese ?rms. However, they may also impose costs on Latin American countries. Preferential treatment for Chinese capital inputs and machinery may undermine Latin America’s industrial competitiveness. At the same time, commodity guarantees embedded in loans-for-oil agreements risk eroding commodity proceeds that could otherwise be channeled toward domestic spending or reinvestment in state energy ?rms. Perhaps most important, China’s tendency to focus on commercial rather than policy terms may encourage governments to spend beyond their means, catalyzing future debt problems.

Chapter 5 conducts a comparative case study analysis across ten presidential administrations in six countries (Argentina, Bolivia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Jamaica, and Venezuela) using national-level government policies as the unit of analysis. By varying exposure to Chinese state-to-state ?nancing over time, it compares periods of large-scale Chinese bilateral ?nancing to periods of extensive multilateral ?nancing (i.e. where countries have IMF and World Bank programs). Chapter 5 finds that governments that directly contract Chinese financing bilaterally are more likely to use these credit lines to cover budgetary shortfalls in exchange for future oil delivery or nontendered concessions to Chinese ?rms and machinery suppliers. Notably, it also finds that extensive Chinese state-to-state financing frameworks that replace public procurement laws, such as those used in Ecuador and Venezuela, are more likely to yield expansive fiscal expansions than project-level financing that is legally exempt fromexisting public procurement frameworks.

Chapter 6 conducts a comparative case study analysis across ?ve presidential administrations in two countries (Argentina and Brazil) using national-level government policies as the unit of analysis. By varying exposure to market-oriented ?nancing over time, it examines how Chinese state-backed ?nancing compares with private-market ?nancing when it is channeled to corporate enterprises through public tender.A robust private sector and strong constitutional commitment to public procurement tend to increase the resiliency and efficacy of public procurement laws . Under these conditions,public procurements laws compel Chinese policy banks to operate through government concessions rather than direct state-to-state lending, leaving national governments with little additional fiscal space. They instead pursue policy conditionality (i.e. fiscal discipline) to improve their sovereign credit standing and ultimately to lower their project financing costs.

Banks offered two essential sources of finance to trade and commerce. First, the merchant banks financed trade through the bill of exchange, which banks would discount for exporters so they received payment on shipping the goods. From the middle of the nineteenth century the bill of exchange might be drawn under a letter of credit issued by the importer’s bank and payable on presentation of the shipping documents, notable the bill of lading which gave title to the goods. Second, banks provided working capital to industry – not long-term finance - enabling it to pay wages and the cost of raw materials in anticipation of the sale of finished products in home and export markets. This was done by means of an overdraft on the customer’s account (who could draw up to that amount) or through a short-term loan. Typically, both were repayable on demand. They might be unsecured, or supported by a personal guarantee, but in some cases the customers had to provide collateral. Underpinning the banks’ performance in both areas were sophisticated institutional arrangements such as the bankers’ clearing house and the money markets. All these arrangements operated within a framework of generally supportive law.

This chapter examines the resulting trust. It is a type of implied trust and it arises by operation of laweither because of the presumed intention of the parties or because of the failure of an express trust. A presumed resulting trust arises where land is purchased in the name of one party but the purchase monies have been provided by another party. The presumption can be rebutted by evidence of a gift or advancement to a close family member of a loan. Evidence of an illegal motive was once inadmissible to use to rebut a presumption but today the court uses its discretion as to whether it will be admitted. Automatic resulting trusts usually arise where a purpose has failed. A new type of trust 'the Quistclose trust' was created when Quistclose successfully recovered money loaned to pay dividends to a company which went bankrupt. Sometimes a surplus remains after the purpose of the trust has been carried out this will result back to the settlor and where a trust fails to conform with key requirements of a trust then the property will usuallyrevert back to the settlor although in some cases the trust property has been found to be an absolute gift.

The author participated in the local implementation of Clinton Era legislatively created programs that a Congressional delegate once described as having the potential to lift the yolk of paternalism and allow Native Americans an opportunity to achieve the American Dream. Lofty language aside something seemed amiss. Therefore, he recounts – from a practitioner’s perspective – the history to increase access to capital for tribal community- and economic development through a Native Community Development Financial Institutions based in Arizona. The challenges are evident as he states: “Where English canon law was used as a weapon to dispossess Native people of their lands, languages and cultures; western style finance as a tool has been withheld since the colonial period and through current times for the rebuilding and resurgence of tribal Nations.” He ends by reflecting on the continuing effort to build the infrastructure and institutions necessary for a modern economy in a tribal context.