Suchergebnisse

Main description: Taking French participation in the Seven Years War as a case study, this book examines the effects of war on the economy and on government finance, finding that the economic toll has usually been exaggerated and the financial toll seriously underestimated.Originally published in 1987.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

During the eighteenth century European governments began systematically using an international credit structure whose centre was the Amsterdam capital market. This book reconstructs that system and surveys its principal effects on the European and especially the Dutch economies. Eighteenth-century states borrowed chiefly to finance wars and, increasingly toward the century's end, debts from earlier wars. Military and naval spending and debt service together consumed up to eighty percent of peacetime revenues and more in war. Borrowing on international markets stabilised previously disruptive deficit financing techniques and moderated the economic consequences of sharply irregular war spending. This development however, eased the problems of war-making more than it developed national economies or enhanced prosperity. The Dutch, heretofore seen as having squandered the advantage of cheap credit, actually faced the difficult problem of finding productive uses for their savings at satisfactory returns

Historians and demographers have gone to considerable trouble to reconstruct life expectancy in the past in individual countries. This overview collects information from a large body of that work and links estimates for historical populations to those provided by the United Nations, the World Bank, and other sources for 1950–2001. The result is a picture of regional and global life expectancy at birth for selected years from 1800 to 2001. The bibliography of more than 700 sources is published separately on the web.

For some forty years the seventeenth-century clergyman and farmer Ralph Josselin kept a diary. Among the events that he recorded regularly were the occasions when one or another of his ten children fell ill. Combining the experience of the ten children—136 disease and injury episodes within 148.3 years at risk—shows a distinctive pattern of morbidity risk from birth to age twenty. Josselin's diary allows consideration of some other issues in childhood health, including maladies linked to immune system damage and the weanling crisis. The health experience of the Josselins' children is also compared on some points to that of children living in Third-World areas in recent decades.