University Libraries

The Making of the Modern World is a digital collection of primary sources covering the history of Western trade. 

This collection focuses on economics interpreted in the widest sense, including political science, history, sociology, and special collections on banking, finance, transportation and manufacturing, and offers comprehensive witness to the theories, practices, and consequences of economic and business activity in the West. It includes more than 65,000 titles from the period 1460-1914, and 466 pre-1906 serials, encompassing the coal, iron, and steel industries, the railway industry, the cotton industry, banking and finance, and the emergence of the modern corporation. It is also strong in the rise of the modern labor movement, the evolving status of slavery, the condition and making of the working class, colonization, the Atlantic world, Latin American/Caribbean studies, social history, gender, and the economic theories that championed and challenged capitalism in the nineteenth century.

The four parts of this series derive from two pre-eminent collections—the Goldsmiths' Library of Economic Literature at the University of London Library and the Kress Library of Business and Economics at the Harvard University Graduate School of Business Administration—along with supplementary materials from the Seligman Collection in the Butler Library at Columbia University and from the libraries of Yale University.