Résumé

Les dettes publiques ont été une caractéristique essentielle de la construction des États modernes, un moteur de l’histoire du capitalisme, et un enjeu géopolitique puissant. Des crises révolutionnaires aux empires, dans l’essor puis la chute de l’ordre mondial d’après-guerre, la question des dettes publiques n’a ainsi jamais été du seul ressort des cercles économiques. Adoptant une perspective politique et historique, attentif à ses dimensions globales, ce livre propose des clés pour comprendre la centralité, toujours aujourd’hui, des dettes publiques, et pourquoi il est nécessaire de les prendre comme une question politique qui nécessite des réponses tout aussi politiques.

La tendance souvent exprimée de nos jours de considérer la dette publique comme une source de fragilité ou d’inefficacité économique, en effet, manque le fait essentiel que, depuis le dix-huitième siècle, les dettes publiques ont souvent été des leviers pour les États pour affermir leur souveraineté et construire leurs institutions, notamment mais pas seulement en temps de guerre. Il est frappant de constater que certaines solutions utilisées dans le passé pour répondre à des crises de dettes publiques sont aujourd’hui tenues hors de toute considération – symptôme des changements des rapports de force entre créanciers, contribuables, retraités et salariés depuis quarante ans.

Alors que la pandémie du Covid-19 relance une crise économique de grande ampleur, reconnecter l’histoire du capitalisme et l’histoire de la démocratie semble plus urgent que jamais. Cette histoire politique globale des dettes publiques est une contribution à ce débat.

L’introduction, et les chapitres 13 et 19 sont disponibles en open-access.


Abstract

This book analyzes public debt from a political, historical, and global perspective. It demonstrates that public debt has been a defining feature in the construction of modern states, a main driver in the history of capitalism, and a potent geopolitical force. From revolutionary crisis to empire and the rise and fall of a post-war world order, the problem of debt has never been the sole purview of closed economic circles. This book offers a key to understanding the centrality of public debt today by revealing that political problems of public debt have and will continue to need a political response.

Today’s tendency to consider public debt as a source of fragility or economic inefficiency misses the fact that, since the eighteenth century, public debts and capital markets have on many occasions been used by states to enforce their sovereignty and build their institutions, especially in times of war. It is nonetheless striking to observe that certain solutions that were used in the past to smooth out public debt crises (inflation, default, cancellation, or capital controls) were left out of the political framing of the recent crisis, therefore revealing how the balance of power between bondholders, taxpayers, pensioners, and wage-earners has evolved over the past 40 years.

Today, as the Covid-19 pandemic opens up a dramatic new crisis, reconnecting the history of capitalism and that of democracy seems one of the most urgent intellectual and political tasks of our time. This global political history of public debt is a contribution to this debate and will be of interest to financial, economic, and political historians and researchers.

Chapters 13 and 19 are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

Table des matières

Introduction (Nicolas Barreyre, Nicolas Delalande)

Part I: Political Crises and the Legitimacy of Public Debts (1770s–1860s)

1. An Empire of Debts? Spain and Its Colonial Realm (Regina Grafe)

2. Publicity, Debt, and Politics: The Old Regime and the French Revolution (Rebecca L. Spang)

3. Politics of Credit: Government Borrowing and Political Regimes in Sweden (Patrik Winton)

4. Public Debt and Democratic Statecraft in Nineteenth-Century France (David Todd, Alexia Yates)

Part II: Global Capital, Imperial Expansions, and Changing Sovereignties (1860s–1914)

5. The Entanglements of Domestic Polities: Public Debt and European Interventions in Latin America (Juan H. Flores Zendejas)

6. Leveraging Foreign Control: Reform in the Ottoman Empire (Ali Coşkun Tunçer)

7. The Unforeseen Path of Debt Imperialism: Local Struggles, Transnational Knowledge, and Colonialism in Egypt (Malak Labib)

8. Trading Sovereignty for Capital? Public Debt in West Africa, 1871–1914 (Leigh Gardner)

9. The Domestic Effects of Foreign Capital: Public Debt and Regional Inequalities in Late Qing China (Dong Yan)

10. Fiscal Federalism: Local Debt and the Construction of the Modern State in the United States and France (Noam Maggor, Stephen W. Sawyer)

Part III: The Great Transformation of Public Debts (1914–1970s)

11. The Financial Challenges of Total War: Britain, France, and Their Empires in the First World War (Nicolas Delalande)

12. Beyond Democracy or Dictatorship: Structuring Sovereign Debt in Germany from Weimar to the Postwar Period (Stefanie Middendorf)

13. The Communist World of Public Debt (1917–1991): The Failure of a Countermodel? (Étienne Forestier-Peyrat, Kristy Ironside)

14. Debt Without Taxation: Iraq, Syria, and the Crisis of Empires from the Mandates to the Cold War Era (Matthieu Rey)

Part IV: The Political Roads to Financial Markets and Global Debt Crisis (1970s–)

15. From Debt Dirigisme to Debt Markets in France and India (Anush Kapadia, Benjamin Lemoine)

16. The Political Economy of Debt Crisis: State, Banks and the Financialization of Public Debt in Italy since the 1970s (Alexander Nützenadel)

17. From a Multilateral Broker to the National Judge: The Law and Governance of Sovereign Debt Restructuring, 1980–2015 (Jérôme Sgard)

18. Of Bond Vigilantes, Central Bankers and the Crisis of 2008 (Adam Tooze)

Conclusion: On the Historical Uses of Numbers and Words

19. The History and Politics of Public Debt Accounting (Éric Monnet, Blaise Truong-Loï)

20. The Words of Public Debts: A Political Repertoire (Nicolas Barreyre, Nicolas Delalande)


♦ See the Table of Contents

♦ See the Introduction