Economic History

Forty years of opening and reform persuaded a lot of people that the Chinese are not really communists. But modern China was modelled on the USSR, and its leaders want to revert to their Leninist roots.

The term ‘money laundering’ is often associated with mobsters, drug lords and morally dubious executives. But the expression’s first use was far less lawless. 

Eli and the Octopus: The CEO Who Tried to Reform One of the World’s Most Notorious Corporations by Matt García is a human story amid mergers, sales, profits and losses.

Privatisation of Chile’s natural resources was a pillar of Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship.

‘A day in the life’ of the 18th-century Bank of England.

London used to ring with the cries of street sellers. Changes for the city brought changes to their way of life.

Britain has been a high inequality, high poverty nation for most of the last 200 years. 

Women and the birth of England’s stock market.

The introduction of decimal coinage to the UK was a long while coming. But the transition was surprisingly smooth.