Economic History

From isolation to Great Power status: Richard Perren explains how a mania for Westernisation led to Japan's transformation at the turn of the century.

Money makes the world go round - in Lyndon Johnson's case the Yankee dollar was seen as a means of buttressing Britain's new mid-60s Labour government as an ally of the US east of Suez and relieving pressure on its other commitments. Diane Kunz looks at how the connections were made.

Dorothy Thompson looks at the impact of revisionism and triumphalism on tales of solidarity and struggle from the society of the Industrial Revolution.

Maurice Keen describes how, in the years around the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 Robin Hood emerged as the legendary hero of the common people of England.

Milton Goldin compares American philanthropy past and present.

The Hudson's Bay Company was one of the central forces moulding the development of the vast tracts of land that today are Canada - but as Barry Gough explains here, the circumstances of its launch in 1670 also reveal much about the commercial forces, personalities and rivalries of Restoration England.

Bruce Nelson traces how the magic of FDR and his practical social programmes welded American labour to the Democratic Party, and discusses the tensions that eventually weakened that union.

William Bird looks at how American business and commerce turned to the techniques of advertising and Hollywood to extol the merits of capitalism and free enterprise in response to the anti-corporate liberalism of the New Deal.