Recently, the World Financial History:From Its Origin to the Formation of Modern System by Professor He Liping of our School was published by China Financial Publishing House. The book describesthe "World History of Financial Development" rather than the "financial history of countries around the world". It aims to present a global panorama of the development of finance, telling how financial institutions and financial markets have grown from immature seedlings to towering trees and dense forests over the course of human history. In the book, "finance" is the main clue, and "world" mainly refers to the countries and regions with special and typical significance in the financial development of each major historical era. The book is divided into three parts. The first explores the origins of finance and its "precocity" in the ancient world.The second part examines the distortion and transformation of finance in the Middle Ages, and the third part elaborates on the founding era of modern financial system, in which the development process, characteristics and functions of Finance in major industrialized countries since the Industrial Revolution was analyzed.

Professor He Lipingreveived his Master’s degree in World Economic History from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in 1987 and his PhD in Economics from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London in 1996. He is a visiting scholar of Columbia Business School as a Fulbright Scholar in 2002-2003. Professor He Liping has published many high quality papers and books which were well received by readers. For example, Hyperinflation: A World Historywas published by Routledge in 2017.

Provided by Discipline Research Office

Edited by Sun Yue

Reviewed by Cai Hongbo