The Great Depression had a devastating effect on much of the world's developed economies. (For example, at its nadir, around one-quarter of the US workforce was unemployed. And, in Britain, exports virtually halved by 1933 as international trade collapsed.) The political and cultural consequences of the Great Depression were equally far-reaching.

The ongoing search fully to comprehend the worldwide economic collapse in the 1930s remains a dizzying intellectual challenge ('the Holy Grail of macroeconomics' according to Ben Bernanke). Moreover, the current global economic and financial tumult has prompted many economists-as well as scholars from related disciplines-to explore the Great Depression anew in the hope of gaining knowledge on how best to survive the latest desperately serious and sustained global economic slump.

As research in and around the Great Depression flourishes as never before this new addition to Routledge's Critical Concepts in Economics series meets the need for an authoritative reference work to make sense of the subject's vast literature and the continuing explosion in scholarly output. Edited by two leading scholars in the field, this new Routledge Major Work is a five-volume collection of classic and cutting-edge contributions.

With a comprehensive introduction, newly written by the editors, which places the collected material in its historical and intellectual context, The Great Depression is an essential work of reference and is destined to be valued as a vital research tool.