Transferring Wealth and Power from the Old to the New World

This collection explores monetary institutions linking Europe and the Americas in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries.

These articles by eminent economic historians from the five European colonial powers and from six New World countries focus on the legacy of the Old World fiscal institutions (taxes and expenditures) and monetary institutions (currency and banking) for the New World from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries.This book contains a collection of essays comparing the evolution of the fiscal and monetary regimes of the Old World colonial powers - England, France, Spain, Portugal and the Netherlands - from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries with the experiences of several of their former colonies in the New World of the Americas: the United States, Canada, Mexico, Colombia, Brazil and Argentina. The objective is to see how such fiscal and monetary institutions were modified or replaced by new ones. The case studies in the collection consider the experience of the colonies after they became independent countries; they examine the factors that allowed efficient fiscal institutions to develop in some countries, while in others such development turned out to be unsuccessful; and they consider why some governments were able to live within their means and provide public goods, while for others expenditures frequently exceeded revenue, often leading to fiscal crises.