Larry Neal
American economic historian (1941–2024), professor emeritus at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Trained at Berkeley; long career as one of the principal voices in modern financial history of the early-modern and IR-era European economy.
Intellectual program
Section titled “Intellectual program”Neal’s signature work, The Rise of Financial Capitalism: International Capital Markets in the Age of Reason (1990), reconstructed the development of European sovereign-debt and corporate-bond markets from roughly 1660 to 1815, with the British case at the center. The book documents how the Amsterdam-London-Paris financial axis assembled the institutional machinery — funded sovereign debt, secondary markets in government securities, joint-stock company shares with active trading, marine insurance markets, brokerage and dealing infrastructure — that made early-modern European capital mobilization possible at scale. Neal’s archival work in Amsterdam, London, and elsewhere produced the price and volume series that subsequent finance-history work has used as benchmark data.
His later work covered the South Sea Bubble (1720) in unprecedented archival detail, the long-run integration of European capital markets, and the economic history of crisis (with the 2007–08 financial crisis bringing renewed attention to his earlier crisis-history work). A Concise History of International Finance (2015) is his late-career textbook synthesis.
Reception and contestation
Section titled “Reception and contestation”Neal’s framework is the standard reference for understanding pre-1815 European financial-market development. The principal contestation has been about interpretation rather than facts: was the financial machinery he documented a cause of subsequent industrial growth, or just the late-stage bookkeeping of a commercial economy already producing growth? Different positions in the IR debate take different views, but all use Neal’s empirical reconstructions.
Associated positions
Section titled “Associated positions”- Finance, credit & banking (IR) — foundational empirical reference for the position.
- Maritime & commercial revolution (GD) — connected through the financial machinery that supported the trans-oceanic trade complex.
Key works
Section titled “Key works”- The Rise of Financial Capitalism: International Capital Markets in the Age of Reason (1990).
- I Am Not Master of Events: The Speculations of John Law and Lord Londonderry in the Mississippi and South Sea Bubbles (2012).
- With Lawrence H. White (eds): Re-establishing the British Industrial Revolution (1990, an earlier collected volume).
- A Concise History of International Finance: From Babylon to Bernanke (2015).
- Numerous papers on European market integration, the South Sea Bubble, and financial-crisis history.