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Premodern financial systems: A historical comparative study
JOURNAL
OF COMPARATIVE
ECONOMICS
13, 147 (1989)
W. GOLDSMITH, Premodern Financial Systems: A Historical Comparative Study. New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1987. pp. xxi + 348.
RAYMOND
The financial system includes the banking system, the system of public finance, money, various financial instruments, and interest rates. The societies covered include Periclean Athens, Augustan Rome, the early Abbasid caliphate, the Ottoman Empire at the death of Suleiman I, Mughal India at the death of Akbar, early Tokugawa Japan, Medici Florence, Elizabethan England, and the United Provinces around Amsterdam at the Peace of Miinster. This book is a continuation of the author’s work on financial systems which were presented in his books Financial Structure and Development ( 1969) and Comparative National Balance Sheets (1985), as well as in many articles. It is a study based on monumental scholarship and courage since he also makes some estimates of wealth and income distributions, gross national product, and national balance sheets. The author is especially interested in trying to describe qualitatively the overall financial system and then to determine quantitatively certain important ratios, e.g., of wealth to income, of financial wealth to real wealth (the financial interrelations ratio), and the ratio of financial instruments issued by financial institutions to total financial assets (the financial interrelations ratio). Since each case study is for a society at a single point in time, Goldsmith is not able to generalize about the role of the financial system in economic growth or decline. Few people have the expertise to criticize his estimates of one society, not to mention all ten; so we must rest on the fact that Goldsmith has a welldeserved reputation of careful empirical work. The accuracy of the estimates aside, the greatest merit of the book is that it will provide invaluable reference materials for any comparative economist working on large-scale, pre-capitalist societies. FREDERIC
L. PRYOR
Swarthmore College Swarthmore, Pennsylvania 19081
0147-5967189 147
$3.00
Copyright 0 1989 by Academic Press, Inc. AI1 rights of reproduction in any form reserved.
OF COMPARATIVE
ECONOMICS
13, 147 (1989)
W. GOLDSMITH, Premodern Financial Systems: A Historical Comparative Study. New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1987. pp. xxi + 348.
RAYMOND
The financial system includes the banking system, the system of public finance, money, various financial instruments, and interest rates. The societies covered include Periclean Athens, Augustan Rome, the early Abbasid caliphate, the Ottoman Empire at the death of Suleiman I, Mughal India at the death of Akbar, early Tokugawa Japan, Medici Florence, Elizabethan England, and the United Provinces around Amsterdam at the Peace of Miinster. This book is a continuation of the author’s work on financial systems which were presented in his books Financial Structure and Development ( 1969) and Comparative National Balance Sheets (1985), as well as in many articles. It is a study based on monumental scholarship and courage since he also makes some estimates of wealth and income distributions, gross national product, and national balance sheets. The author is especially interested in trying to describe qualitatively the overall financial system and then to determine quantitatively certain important ratios, e.g., of wealth to income, of financial wealth to real wealth (the financial interrelations ratio), and the ratio of financial instruments issued by financial institutions to total financial assets (the financial interrelations ratio). Since each case study is for a society at a single point in time, Goldsmith is not able to generalize about the role of the financial system in economic growth or decline. Few people have the expertise to criticize his estimates of one society, not to mention all ten; so we must rest on the fact that Goldsmith has a welldeserved reputation of careful empirical work. The accuracy of the estimates aside, the greatest merit of the book is that it will provide invaluable reference materials for any comparative economist working on large-scale, pre-capitalist societies. FREDERIC
L. PRYOR
Swarthmore College Swarthmore, Pennsylvania 19081
0147-5967189 147
$3.00
Copyright 0 1989 by Academic Press, Inc. AI1 rights of reproduction in any form reserved.