history lessons

There are some who see a cycle of boom and bust as inevitable. But as Britain and much of the Western world faces up to a downturn, it's easy to look back into the past and find nasty decades, BBC offers historical perspectives on hard times. The article looks at three periods (England in the 1440s and 14450s, Britain in the 1840s and Rome in 270AD) and examines why the economy was faltering. The article misses out completely the colonial exploitation (resulted into famines to all possible adjectives of hard times in economic terms) the European has done to their respective colonies in the 18th, 19th and early 20th century.