Recovering from large government debt without currency devaluation Current, Greece has a debt of roughly 175% of GDP.  The new government has announced it wishes to negotiate a write-off, something Eurozone leaders have so far refused.  From prior knowledge and this post, I understand that governments may want to stimulate consumption when the economy is doing poorly, and have budget surpluses / pay off debt when the economy is doing well.  Since the beginning of austerity, the Greek economy has shrunk by 25%, and unemployment is now 27%.  I have mainly read economical opinions arguing that austerity is harmful and needs to stop, but I the sources I read are probably not representative.

Is there any historical precedent of a country that recovered from a 175% debt, without either having substantial debt write-off, or a currency devaluation?  By recovering I mean: returning to substantial economic growth, increasing standards of living compared to crisis conditions, and a public debt shrinking to become substantially less than 100%.  If so, how did they do it?
By one estimate (here is another) , as a result of WWII, the United Kingdom saw a debt of more than 200 percent of GDP. They never defaulted on their debt after reaching that level. I believe they never did anything radical, just systematically growing government spending more slowly than national income, thus gradually eroding the debt as a fraction of GDP. 

The paper Sustainability of High Public Debt: What the Historical Record Shows may also be of interest.


  The paper looks into the debt histories of three European countries,
  Britain, France, and Germany, to study three questions. First, are
  there historical parallels to the accumulation of high debt in
  peacetime that has taken place in the past decades? The answer to this
  is mostly in the negative. National debt was high during long periods
  but usually related to wars or their financial aftermath. Second, how
  were large debts reduced, and that were the factors determining
  decision-making? Recent research has emphasized the role of social
  conflict in this context. We find that although this may play a role,
  the dominant effect may have come from international financial
  relations. Third, what are the macroeconomic effects of budget
  stabilization, and does it pay off for a country to repudiate or
  inflate away its debt? The short-run evidence is mixed, as the success
  of debt default has varied considerably. In the long run, however,
  stabilizing the budget pays off, as there seem to be no lasting
  adverse effects of fiscal austerity on a nation's growth performance.