⚔️ Roman expansion depended on enormous military spending.

Maintaining legions and supplying campaigns strained the imperial economy, while currency debasement and supply pressures contributed to inflation across Roman markets.

#RomanHistory #AncientHistory #EconomicHistory #Brewminate

https://brewminate.com/roman-war-inflation-economy/

⚔️ Medieval warfare often triggered rising prices as agriculture, trade, and supply networks were disrupted.

Military spending and resource shortages pushed inflation across entire regions, affecting everyday goods like grain and labor.

#MedievalHistory #EconomicHistory #InflationHistory #Brewminate

https://brewminate.com/medieval-warfare-inflation-prices/

The tariff escalations of the early 1930s illustrate how protectionist policy can compound crisis.

Retaliation spread quickly, global trade volumes fell sharply, and economic fragmentation intensified.

Historical patterns matter when trade tensions rise again. 📉🌐

#EconomicHistory #TradePolicy #Brewminate

https://brewminate.com/tariff-escalation-and-the-collapse-of-global-trade-after-the-great-depression/

The Nixon Shock of 1971 restructured global monetary order by ending gold convertibility.

Rather than immediate collapse, the long-term effect was institutional hedging and the gradual construction of alternatives.

Monetary dominance invites diversification. 🏦🌐

#EconomicHistory #Geopolitics #Brewminate

https://brewminate.com/closing-the-gold-window-the-nixon-shock-and-the-architecture-of-alternatives/

"Q: How would you describe what the Trump administration’s vision of American power is?

A: It’s much more modest, at some level. They don’t believe in Manifest Destiny at a global level. They may have some vision of American greatness and certainly a blunt patriotism.
(...)
They don’t do golf clubs as well as he’d like, and their palaces aren’t as good as the ones in the Emirates. Really, it’s a bit of an embarrassment.

To get to a more serious kind of vein, I think they think of America as embattled. They also have this extraordinary narrative of the United States as the loser in globalization.

You can break that down — Sullivan will tell a story about the American working class as having been victimized. The Trump people will talk, but it’s not very plausible because that’s not who he in any reasonable sense represents.

I had the dubious pleasure of chairing a panel with the C.E.O. of Bank of America and C.E.O. of E.Y. and Rachel Reeves of the British government and Howard Lutnick, the U.S. Commerce secretary, the key guy behind the tariffs. He, in fact referred to himself as the hammer gleefully — the enforcer of the Trump administration.

And journalists had the temerity to ask the chairman of the Bank of America, the C.E.O. of Bank of America: Can you really agree with the commerce secretary’s characterizations of globalization having been bad for America?

The obvious answer is: Who are you kidding?

They genuinely seem to believe that the American state — because they’re very confused about budgets and who earns what money for where and what tariffs do and the relationship between the private sector and the public sector is quite blurred in their mind — in some general sense, the vital bodily juices of America were sapped by entering into an openness to the world that extends from trade to globalized universities to large-scale migration."
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/30/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-adam-tooze.html

#USA #Globalization #PoliticalEconomy #EconomicHistory #Trump #Imperialism #WhiteNationalism

"We know that capitalism manifests in different ways, but how did these differences arise? This paper draws on the Varieties of Capitalism (VoC) framework to understand how market economies differ across regions of the world today. In this paper, I argue that international trade during the first wave of globalization was fundamental in creating economic divergence across regions. Specifically, I contend that the international division of labor in the nineteenth century influenced regions in distinct ways. In North America, this trade system fostered an economy focused on agricultural products for the export market, which led to the development of a Liberal Market Economy (LME) model. In Continental Europe, the trade system promoted an economy centered on industrial goods for export, leading to the emergence of a Coordinated Market Economy (CME) model. In Latin America, the trade system encouraged an economy based on raw materials for export, resulting in the formation of a Hierarchical Market Economy (HME) model. Through three historical case studies, I provide a detailed account of these mechanisms and show that adopting an international perspective yields a deeper understanding of the emergence of national economic systems."

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09692290.2025.2605122#abstract

#Capitalism #EconomicHistory #VarietiesOfCapitalism #PoliticalEconomy