Charles Kindleberger's World Economic Primacy: 1500-1990 is a work of rare ambition and scope from one of our most respected economic historians. Extending over broad ranges of both history and geography, the work considers what it is that enables countries to achieve, at some period in their history, economic superiority over other countries, and what it is that makes them decline.
Kindleberger begins with the Italian city-states in the fourteenth century, and traces the changing evolution of world economic primacy as it moves to Portugal and Spain, to the Low countries, to Great...

This book is essentially an exercise in methodology, addressed to economists and economic historians alike. Too many economists discover a relationship or a uniformity in economic behavior, develop a model, and use it to explain more than it is capable of, including on occasion all economic behavior. In Economic Laws and Economic History Charles Kindleberger makes a powerful case against the idea that any one model or law could be used to unlock the basic secrets of economic history.

This study of international capital movements looks at their historical role in the financing of trade.