We analyze how Hollywood films from 1928 to 2016 represented business within a broad historical and business context. We argue that the films actively contributed to audiences’ sensemaking processes and to how different groups perceived the role of business in society. We advance the idea that films provided cultural blueprints to be used by viewers for their own understanding, identification, and practices in relation to business in its historical context, particularly during periods of uncertainty, crisis, and instability when many films addressed deeper societal concerns about the role of business.

Taxation is accepted as a fact of modern life, despite recurring political conflict over the nature and direction of fiscal policies. Most financiers regard obligations issued by the state as a safe investment option. Neither taxation nor state obligations were taken for granted during much of the history of public finance, however, at least not before the early 1800s. The ‘tax state’ developed in fits and starts, driven by the exigencies of warfare, which provided the main rationale for raising state income. Although wartime fiscal innovations eventually facilitated the rise of an efficient military state, the options available for implementing such improvements and preferences for specific fiscal or financial instruments varied greatly across early modern states. Focusing on the ‘long’ eighteenth century, this introduction presents a framework for assessing these differences and introduces the other articles in this special issue.

Based on an extensive survey of French primary sources and a discussion of the recent literature on fiscal policy in France and Europe during Louis XIV's wars, this article revisits the rationale behind the first experiment with paper money undertaken by finance minister Michel Chamillart, comparing it to other belligerents’ strategies, in particular England's, to adjust their monetary regime to the challenges of funding long wars of attrition. The article shows how concerns about economic activity, coinage and the need to finance the war deficit led to a series of debasements of the French currency, the establishment of a bank in the form of a Caisse des emprunts and the introduction of mint bills, which became legal tender and caused the first experience of fiat money inflation in history. Whereas Chamillart's personal shortcomings have been recently suggested as the cause of Louis XIV's humbling in the War of the Spanish Succession, I argue on the contrary that the introduction of paper money in 1704 was key to the capacity of France to sustain its military effort, but that a succession of military defeats against a more powerful coalition led to inflation. I also argue that the introduction of paper money saved the Caisse des emprunts and its bonds which helped sustain the war effort up until the peace. By situating the use of paper money within the broader question of the exercise of power in the absolute monarchy, this article examines the formation of fiscal policy, paying attention to the ways in which government sought advice from experts. It concludes by calling for further studies on policy- and decision-making under Louis XIV.

The literature on the financial revolution and the rise of the English fiscal-military state frequently gives the impression that a singular set of reforms emanating from the Glorious Revolution of 1688 changed the entire landscape of English army finances, allowing a fundamental shift from patchwork solutions based on short-term credit and managed through a system of wholesale venality to a solid system of long-term funded loans raised on an impersonal market. This article focuses on the crucial role that merchant networks and the personal connections of financial intermediaries continued to play in international troop payments arranged by the English state through the Dutch Republic. Even when the English or Dutch treasuries could find the necessary money to pay and provision the troops in time, getting the money to the military commanders in the field or to their distant suppliers often depended on long and complex credit lines. Short-term loans acquired in making military expenditure – consisting of unpaid bills to suppliers, payments advanced by officials and officers, and temporary loans contracted by financial intermediaries – as well as the widespread reliance on commercial credit in the form of bills of exchange as a way to transfer funds effectively formed the life thread of army finance. The ability to finance the military in times of exploding costs and permanent emergencies without defaulting rested not only on the capacity to draw on financial resources at home, but also on the strength of commercial and financial networks abroad. In doing so, closeness to the centres of emerging international financial capitalism seems to have been of greater importance than a specific set of institutional innovations.

This article offers an architectural blueprint for the study of economic connections between warfare in the early modern period and the long-term growth of Europe's competing national economies. It surveys and critically investigates the concepts derived mainly from economic theory and the statistical evidence accessible in primary and secondary sources for the investigation of this meta-problem for students of economic theory.

In Mexico during the protectionist economic regime a process of industrial modernization was carried out which led to the incorporation of different types of technologies into the structures and processes of production or consumption. The patent policy was implemented with the interest of encouraging the attraction of novel technologies, but their contribution was quite limited due to the nature, design and operation, with which it was conformed. Therefore, the patent policy did not drive patenting activity in a high and sustained manner. It was ineffective to contribute to the development of technologies generated by local actors, and marginally propitiated the productive exploitation of patents.

Qing China represents a counterfactual to the early modern European history of fiscal expansion in the wake of warfare. In response to the staggering costs of suppressing the White Lotus Rebellion (1796–1804), the Jiaqing Emperor sought to solve the empire's fiscal problems by tightening bureaucratic control over an overstretched system of treasury finance. However, Jiaqing's policy of austerity and retrenchment was not simply an expedient in times of fiscal strain, but deeply rooted in ideological struggles over taxation that began in the eighteenth century. It was an expression of hardline fiscal conservatism, which held fixed revenue quotas sacrosanct and which I call quota-ism. This policy had dire consequences for the ability of the Qing regime to respond to external shocks and to fulfill its sovereign tasks – war, river conservancy and famine relief. It contributed to the bankruptcy of Qing government finance by the time of the Opium War.