Mehrling Publishes New Book: “Money and Empire“
Perry Mehrling, Professor of International Political Economy at Boston University’s Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies, has published a new book titled Money and Empire: Charles P. Kindleberger and the Dollar System (Cambridge University Press, 2022).
Charles Kindleberger ranks as one of the twentieth century’s best-known and most influential international economists. In his latest book, Mehrling traces the evolution of Kindleberger’s thinking in the context of a ‘key-currency’ approach to the rise of the dollar system, here revealed as the indispensable framework for global economic development since World War II.
Unlike most of his colleagues, Kindleberger was deeply interested in history, and his economics brimmed with real people and institutional details. His research at the New York Fed and BIS during the Great Depression, his wartime intelligence work, and his role in administering the Marshall Plan gave him deep insight into how the international financial system really operated. A biography of both the dollar and a man, Mehriling’s Money and Empire is also the story of the development of ideas about how money works. It throws a revealing light on the underlying economic forces and political obstacles shaping our globalized world.
For more information on Money and Empire, visit Cambridge University Press’ website. To hear Mehrling discuss his latest book and its findings, listen to his appearance on the Hidden Forces podcast.
Perry Mehrling is a Professor of International Political Economy at the Pardee School and teaches courses on the economics of money and banking, the history of money and finance, and international money. He is the author of The New Lombard Street: How the Fed became the dealer of last resort (Princeton 2011), Fischer Black and the Revolutionary Idea of Finance (Wiley 2005), and The Money Interest and the Public Interest (Harvard 1997). For more about Professor Mehrling, visit his Pardee School faculty profile or his personal website.