Financial Failure and Confederate Defeat - Hardcover

Ball, Douglas B.

 
9780252017551: Financial Failure and Confederate Defeat
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0252017552 ISBN 13: 9780252017551
Publisher: University of Illinois Press, 1991

Reviews

Economics specialist Ball argues that the Confederacy's unwillingness to stand up to pressure groups and to implement unpopular fiscal measures bankrupted the government and lost the war. Although he goes too far in blaming defeat on an empty treasury and shortsighted fiscal policy, he ably navigates the intricacies and intrigues of blockade running, foreign loans, debt and currency management, taxation, and more in order to indict Jefferson Davis for incompetence. Scholars will recoil from Ball's unabashed economic determinism (where are the hard blows of Sherman and Grant in explaining Confederate defeat?), but all students of the war and of fiscal management will profit by Ball's revisionist perspective and his reminder that fiscal disorder derives from political cowardice and ends in national collapse. This book also has contemporary relevance as the United States reels from debt. Sure to be argued with and about. For university libraries.
- Randall Miller, St. Joseph's Univ., Philadelphia
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.

Publisher
University of Illinois Press
Publication date
1991
Language
English
ISBN 10 
0252017552
ISBN 13 
9780252017551
Binding
Hardcover
Edition number
1
Number of pages
340