Sovereign Debt Diplomacies

Rethinking sovereign debt from colonial empires to hegemony

Edited by Pierre Pénet and Juan Flores Zendejas

Informations techniques

Éditeur : Oxford University Press
Lieu : Oxford
ISBN: 9780198866350
Date de parution : 12 mars 2021
384 p.

Description

Sovereign Debt Diplomacies aims to revisit the meaning of sovereign debt in relation to colonial history and postcolonial developments. It offers three main contributions. The first contribution is historical. The volume historicises a research field that has so far focused primarily on the post-1980 years. A focus on colonial debt from the 19th century building of colonial empires to the decolonisation era in the 1960s-70s fills an important gap in recent debt historiographies. Economic historians have engaged with colonialism only reluctantly or en passant, giving credence to the idea that colonialism is not a development that deserves to be treated on its own. This has led to suboptimal developments in recent scholarship.

The second contribution adds a ‘law and society’ dimension to studies of debt. The analytical payoff of the exercise is to capture the current developments and functional limits of debt contracting and adjudication in relation to the long-term political and sociological dynamics of sovereignty. Finally, Sovereign Debt Diplomacies imports insights from, and contributes to the body of research currently developed in the Humanities under the label ‘colonial and postcolonial studies’. The emphasis on ‘history from below’ and focus on ‘subaltern agency’ usefully complement the traditional elite-perspective on financial imperialism favoured by the British school of empire history.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.

La direction de l’ouvrage

Edited by Pierre Pénet, Researcher, École Normale Supérieure Paris-Saclay, CNRS-IDHES, and Juan Flores Zendejas, Associate Professor, Paul Bairoch Institute of Economic History, University of Geneva.

Table des matières

Introduction: Sovereign Debt Diplomacies
Pierre Pénet and Juan Flores Zendejas

1. Rethinking Sovereign Debt from Colonial Empires to Hegemony
Pierre Pénet And Juan Flores Zendejas

Section 1.
Imperial Solutions to Sovereign Debt Crises (1820-1933)

2. Sovereignty and Debt in 19th Century Latin America
Juan Flores Zendejas And Felipe Ford Cole

3. Foreign Debt and Colonisation in Egypt and Tunisia (1840-1882)
Ali Coskun Tunçer

4. Independence and the Effect of Empire: The Case of ‘Sovereign Debts’ issued by British Colonies
Nicolas Degive And Kim Oosterlinck

Section 2.
Debt Disputes in The Age Of Financial Repression:
When Repayment Takes A Backseat (1933-1970s)

5. The Fortune of Geopolitical Conditions in Debt Diplomacy: Mexico’s Long Road to the 1942 Foreign Debt Settlement
Gustavo Del Angel And Lorena Perez

6. The Multilateral Principle-Based Approach to the Restructuring of German Debts in 1953
Laura De La Villa

7. The Revenge of Defaulters: Sovereign Defaults and Interstate Negotiations in the Post-War Financial Order
Juan Flores Zendejas, Pierre Pénet, and Christian Suter

Section 3.
Postcolonial Transitions and the Hopes for a New International Economic Order (1960s-1980s)

8. We Owe You Nothing: Decolonization and Sovereign Debt Obligations in International Public Law
Grégoire Mallard

9:Decolonization and Sovereign Debt: A Quagmire
Michael Waibel

10. Third World Project and the Battles of Debt: Macro Financial Agenda versus Technical Assistance at UNCTAD
Quentin Deforge And Benjamin Lemoine

Section 4.
The Legalisation of Sovereign Debt Disputes Between Wish and Reality (1990s-Present)

11. Placing Contemporary Sovereign Debt: The Fragmented Landscape of Legal Precedent and Legislative Preemption
Giselle Datz

12. Maduro Bonds
Mitu Gulati And Ugo Panizza

13. Contract Provisions, Default Risk, and Bond Prices: Evidence from Puerto Rico
Anusha Chari And Ryan Leary

Concluding Remarks: (Neo)Colonialism, (Neo)Imperialism, and Hegemony
Odette Lienau