1. Mammon's cradle; Part I. Individuals: 2. Contracts, debts and debtors; 3. Coercion, custom and contract at work; Part II. Institutions: 4. The incorporation of business; 5. The limitation of liability; 6. Corporate performance; Part III. Information: 7. Shareholders, directors and promoters; 8. Mammon's conceit; Bibliography.
This innovative study reveals how and why capitalist institutions were created and the moral, economic and legal assumptions behind them.
Paul Johnson is Vice-Chancellor and President of La Trobe University, Melbourne. His previous publications include the three-volume Cambridge Economic History of Modern Britain (edited with Roderick Floud, 2004), Old Age: From Antiquity to Postmodernity (edited with Pat Thane, 1998) and Twentieth-Century Britain: Economic, Social and Cultural Change (1994).
'Paul Johnson brings a novelist's eye for character and incident in
the tradition of Dickens and Trollope to Victorian commercial life.
His acute observations of human foible is complemented by the
analytical precision of a social scientist to produce a major study
of the market in Victorian Britain. Far from the abstraction or
neutrality of neo-classical economics, he shows how the market was
permeated with differences of status between rich and poor, between
capital and labour. It involved social choices about the
desirability or acceptability of various modes of economic conduct,
which are as relevant now in the age of Bernie Madoff as of
Melmotte.' Martin Daunton, Master of Trinity Hall, Cambridge and
author of Trusting Leviathan
'Paul Johnson brings his precise analytical skills and acerbic wit
to bear on the prime question of our time – how can personal
responsibility be brought into the operation of impersonal
capitalism now dominated by global corporations? Blending tales of
outrageous frauds perpetrated at the commanding heights of
Victorian England with sorry examples of the harsh penalties that
the lower classes continued to suffer for their infractions,
Johnson argues that each stage of the creation of corporate
capitalism went astray by increasingly leaving personal
responsibility behind for corporate managers and promoters. Sadly,
the unintended consequences of those missteps are with us today.'
Larry Neal, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
'Fascinating.' The Times Higher Education Supplement
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