New Books in Economic and Business History

Coll Thrush, "Wrecked: Unsettling Histories from the Graveyard of the Pacific" (University of Washington Press, 2025)

03 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The Northwest Coast of North America is a treacherous place. Unforgiving coastlines, powerful currents, unpredictable weather, and features such as th...

Anthony C. Infanti, "The Human Toll: Taxation and Slavery in Colonial America" (NYU Press, 2025)

03 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The Human Toll: Taxation and Slavery in Colonial America (NYU Press, 2025) by Anthony C. Infanti documents how the American colonies used tax law to ...

Joshua K. Wright, "The NBA's Global Empire: How the League Became an International Powerhouse" (McFarland, 2025)

01 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Joshua K. Wright, The NBA's Global Empire: How the League Became an International Powerhouse (McFarland, 2025)  During the 1992 Summer Olym...

Amit Ron and Abraham A. Singer, "Everyone's Business: What Companies Owe Society" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

01 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The ethics of the company in a highly politicized time. Businesses are increasingly social actors. They fund political campaigns, take stances on soci...

John Horn, "Inside the Competitor's Mindset: How to Predict Their Next Move and Position Yourself for Success" (MIT Press, 2023)

31 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Inside the Competitor's Mindset: How to Predict Their Next Move and Position Yourself for Success (MIT Press, 2023) offers a roadmap to help leaders...

Gennifer Weisenfeld, "The Fine Art of Persuasion: Corporate Advertising Design, Nation, and Empire in Modern Japan" (Duke UP, 2025)

31 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Commercial art is more than just mass-produced publicity; it constructs social and political ideologies that impact the public’s everyday life. In ...

Xing Hang, "The Port: Hà Tiên and the Mo Clan in Early Modern Asia" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

30 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The Port (present-day Hà Tiên), situated in the Mekong River Delta and Gulf of Siam littoral, was founded and governed by the Chinese creole Mo clan...

Julia McClure, "Empire of Poverty: The Moral-Political Economy of the Spanish Empire" (Oxford UP, 2025)

30 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Empire of Poverty: The Moral-Political Economy of the Spanish Empire (Oxford University Press, 2024) by Dr. Julia McClure examines how changing conce...

Chris Aslan, "Unravelling the Silk Road: Travels and Textiles in Central Asia" (Icon Books, 2024)

29 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The Silk Road may be the most famous trade network in history. But the flow of silk from China to the Middle East and Europe isn’t the only textile ...

Charles Hecker, "Zero Sum: The Arc of International Business in Russia" (Oxford UP, 2025)

29 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Today I interviewed Charles Hecker about Zero Sum. The Arc of International Business in Russia (Oxford UP, 2025). Hecker, a journalist and busine...

Lucia Soriano, "Embodying Normalcy: Women's Work in Neoliberal Times" (Lexington Books, 2024)

28 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Embodying Normalcy: Women’s Work in Neoliberal Times (Lexington Books, 2024) calls attention to how women in the United States do a type of unpaid ...

Alex Davies, "Driven: The Race to Create the Autonomous Car" (Simon & Schuster, 2022)

27 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In Driven: The Race to Create the Autonomous Car (Simon & Schuster, 2022), Alex Davies tells the enlightening and significant story of the effort ...

Dionne Koller, "More Than Play: How Law, Policy, and Politics Shape American Youth Sport" (U California Press, 2025)

26 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Tens of millions of children in the United States participate in youth sport, a pastime widely believed to be part of a good childhood. Yet most child...

Nicholas Borst, "The Bird and the Cage: China’s Economic Contradictions" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2025)

25 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The Chinese Communist Party’s complex and contradictory embrace of capitalism has played a pivotal role in shaping China’s economic reforms since ...

Tim Minshall, "How Things Are Made: A Journey Through the Hidden World of Manufacturing" (Ecco, 2025)

25 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

This book from Cambridge University Professor Tim Minshall provides an enlightening view of how the world of manufacturing world has an immense influe...

Richard D. Oram, "A Land Won from Waste: Scotland AD 400-1400" (Birlinn, 2025)

24 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Drawing together the evidence of archaeology, palaeoecology, climate history and the historical record, this first environmental history of Scotland e...

Jody Benjamin, "The Texture of Change: Dress, Self-Fashioning, and History in Western Africa, 1700-1850" (Ohio UP, 2024)

24 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The Texture of Change: Dress, Self-Fashioning, and History in Western Africa, 1700 – 1850 (Ohio UP, 2024) examines historical change across a broa...

Aviva Briefel, "Ghosts and Things: The Material Culture of Nineteenth-Century Spiritualism" (Cornell UP, 2025)

23 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Ghosts and Things: The Material Culture of Nineteenth-Century Spiritualism (Cornell University Press, 2025) by Dr. Aviva Briefel argues that Victoria...

Rot: An Imperial History of the Irish Famine

22 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In 1845, European potato fields from Spain to Scandinavia were attacked by a novel pathogen. But it was only in Ireland, then part of the United Kingd...

Selda Altan, "Chinese Workers of the World: Colonialism, Chinese Labor, and the Yunnan-Indochina Railway" (Stanford UP, 2024)

21 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Chinese workers helped build the modern world. They labored on New World plantations, worked in South African mines, and toiled through the constructi...

Ben Jackson, "Material Masculinities: Men and Goods in Eighteenth-Century England" (Manchester UP, 2025)

20 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Material Masculinities: Men and Goods in Eighteenth-Century England (Manchester University Press, 2025) by Dr. Ben Jackson examines the material and ...

Júlia Király, "Hungary and Other Emerging EU Countries in the Financial Storm: From Minor Troubles to Global Hurricane" (Springer, 2020)

19 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Donald Trump is putting liberal democracy through its greatest test in 80 years.  None of it is original. His style of rule is straight from the de...

False Dawn: A Conversation with George Selgin on Recovering from the Great Depression

18 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Join us on Madison's Notes as we sit down with George Selgin, senior fellow and director emeritus of the Cato Institute’s Center for Monetary and ...

Myka Tucker-Abramson, "Cartographies of Empire: The Road Novel and American Hegemony" (Stanford UP, 2025)

17 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The road novel is often dismissed as a mundane, nostalgic genre: Jack, Sal, and other tedious white men on the road trying to recapture an authentic y...

Stuart Ward, "Untied Kingdom: A Global History of the End of Britain" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

16 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

How did Britain cease to be global? In Untied Kingdom: A Global History of the End of Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2023), Professor Stuart War...

Jennifer Holt, "Cloud Policy: A History of Regulating Pipelines, Platforms, and Data" (MIT Press, 2024)

16 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

How the United States' regulation of broadband pipelines, digital platforms, and data—together understood as “the cloud”—has eroded civil libe...

Brendan Haug, "Garden of Egypt: Irrigation, Society, and the State in the Premodern Fayyūm" (U Michigan Press, 2024)

15 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Garden of Egypt: Irrigation, Society, and the State in the Premodern Fayyūm (University of Michigan Press, 2024) is the first environmental history ...

Globalization's Backlash: Echoes of the Interwar Era in Today’s World

14 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

This week on International Horizons, RBI Director John Torpey interviews historian Tara Zahra, author of Against the World: Anti-Globalism and Mass ...

William Jennings, "Dibia's World: Life on an Early Sugar Plantation" (Liverpool UP, 2023)

13 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In the latest episode of Unlocking Academia, Tarin Ahmed, the host, is joined by guest, William Jennings, a senior lecturer in French at the Universi...

Tupur Chatterjee, "Projecting Desire: Media Architectures and Moviegoing in Urban India" (NYU Press, 2025)

12 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Since the late 1990s, the multiplex in India has emerged as a dominant site of media exhibition, almost always embedded within the shopping mall. This...

David de Jong, "Nazi Billionaires: The Dark History of Germany's Wealthiest Dynasties" (Mariner Books, 2022)

11 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In Nazi Billionnaires: The Dark History of Germany's Wealthiest Dynasties (Mariner Books, 2022), journalist David de Jong presents a groundbreaking ...

Maïa Pal, "Jurisdictional Accumulation: An Early Modern History of Law, Empires, and Capital" (Cambridge UP, 2020)

10 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

With rigorous attention to history and empire, Maïa Pal's Jurisdictional Accumulation: An Early Modern History of Law, Empires, and Capital (Cambr...

Darryl Campbell, "Fatal Abstraction: Why the Managerial Class Loses Control of Software" (W. W. Norton, 2025)

09 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

A tech insider explains how capitalism and software development make for such a dangerous mix. Software was supposed to radically improve society. Ou...

Odd Arne Westad and Chen Jian, "The Great Transformation: China's Road from Revolution to Reform" (Yale UP, 2024)

08 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In 1968, Mao Zedong launched the Cultural Revolution, asserting his control of China 15 years later, Deng Xiaoping launched the reform and opening up ...

Jack Copley, "Governing Financialization: The Tangled Politics of Financial Liberalization in Britain" (Oxford UP, 2022)

07 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

One of the most distinctive aspects of global capitalism in the last half century or so has been the increased role of the financial sector in the glo...

Chloe Ahmann, "Futures After Progress: Hope and Doubt in Late Industrial Baltimore" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

06 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Factory fires, chemical explosions, and aerial pollutants have inexorably shaped South Baltimore into one of the most polluted places in the country. ...

Laleh Khalili, "Extractive Capitalism: How Commodities and Cronyism Drive the Global Economy" (Profile Books, 2025)

05 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Whether it's pumping oil, mining resources or shipping commodities across oceans, the global economy runs on extraction. Promises of frictionless trad...

Jerome Powell: “We don't think you're a straight shooter"

04 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

More than any one institution, the US Federal Reserve drives global capital markets with its decisions and communications. While its interest rates ar...

Janet Yellen: “She had a view that the world was on fire”

03 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

More than any other single institution, the US Federal Reserve drives global capital markets with its decisions and communications. While its interest...

Ben Bernanke: “Like being a paleontologist”

02 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

More than any other single institution, the US Federal Reserve drives global capital markets with its decisions and communications. While its interest...

Alan Greenspan: “The man who knew”

01 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

More than any other single institution, the US Federal Reserve drives global capital markets with its decisions and communications. While its interest...

Christy Cobb and Katherine A. Shaner, "Ancient Slavery and Its New Testament Contexts" (Eerdmans, 2025)

30 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The institution of slavery permeated the ancient world, such that the realities of slavery and its long shadows pervade the New Testament and other ea...

Nat Dyer, "Ricardo’s Dream: How Economists Forgot the Real World and Led Us Astray" (Bristol UP, 2024)

29 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

From the workings of financial markets to our response to the ecological crisis, economic theory shapes the world. But where do these ideas come from?...

Fernando Collantes, "Milk in Spain and the History of Diet Change: The Political Economy of Dairy Consumption Since 1950" (Bloomsbury, 2024)

28 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In barely three generations the Spanish diet has changed beyond recognition. The traditional concerns around nutritional health and scarcity have been...

Annalisa Marzano, "Plants, Politics and Empire in Ancient Rome" (Cambridge UP. 2022)

27 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Plants, Politics and Empire in Ancient Rome (Cambridge University Press, 2022) by Dr. Annalisa Marzano investigates the cultural and political dimens...

Melissa Villa-Nicholas, "Data Borders: How Silicon Valley Is Building an Industry Around Immigrants" (U California Press, 2023)

26 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Uncle Sam is watching, whether you like it or not. And the surveillance program the United States is building has as its foundation immigrants who hav...

Philip J. Stern, "Empire, Incorporated: The Corporations That Built British Colonialism" (Harvard UP, 2023)

24 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Welcome to the Global Corporations Special Series on the Law Channel on the New Books Network. This Special Series is dedicated to interviews with s...

Bianca Murillo, "Market Encounters: Consumer Cultures in Twentieth-Century Ghana" (Ohio UP, 2017)

23 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In Market Encounters: Consumer Cultures in Twentieth-Century Ghana (Ohio UP, 2017), Bianca Murillo explores the shifting social terrains that made t...

Katie Rose Hejtmanek, "The Cult of CrossFit: Christianity and the American Exercise Phenomenon" (NYU Press, 2025)

22 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

CrossFit in the United States has become increasingly popular, around which a fascinating culture has developed which shapes everyday life for the peo...

Margherita Zanasi, "Economic Thought in Modern China: Market and Consumption, c.1500–1937" (Cambridge UP, 2020)

21 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In Economic Thought in Modern China: Market and Consumption, c.1500–1937 (Cambridge University Press, 2020), Margherita Zanasi argues that basic...

Enrique C. Ochoa, "México Between Feast and Famine: Food, Corporate Power, and Inequality" (U Arizona Press, 2025)

20 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

As the birthplace of maize and a celebrated culinary destination, Mexico stands at the crossroads of gastronomic richness and stark social disparities...

Jennifer Clapp, "Titans of Industrial Agriculture: How a Few Giant Corporations Came to Dominate the Farm Sector and Why It Matters" (MIT Press, 2025)

19 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Every year, hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of farm machinery, fertilizer, seeds, and pesticides are sold to farmers around the world. Although...

Titas Chakraborty, "Empire of Labor: How the East India Company Colonized Hired Work" (U California Press, 2025)

15 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

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Colleen A. Dunlavy, "Small, Medium, Large: How Government Made the U.S.into a Manufacturing Powerhouse" (Polity Press, 2024)

13 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Small, Medium, Large: How Government Made the U.S. into a Manufacturing Powerhouse, published by Polity Books in 2024, offers a bold reinterpretation ...

Ståle Holgersen, "Against the Crisis: Economy and Ecology in a Burning World" (Verso, 2024)

11 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In Against the Crisis: Economy and Ecology in a Burning World (Verso, 2024), Ståle Holgersen develops a conceptualization of 'crisis' that moves b...

John Kay, "The Corporation in the 21st Century: Why (Almost) Everything We Are Told about Business Is Wrong" (Yale UP, 2025)

10 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

John Kay's The Corporation in the 21st Century: Why (Almost) Everything We Are Told about Business Is Wrong (Yale UP, 2025) is an accessible and e...

Andrew Leigh, "How Economics Explains the World: A Short History of Humanity" (Mariner Books, 2024)

09 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

How Economics Explains the World: A Short History of Humanity (Mariner Books, 2024) is a book for anyone interested in understanding the economic ...

Kathleen Thelen, "Attention, Shoppers!: American Retail Capitalism and the Origins of the Amazon Economy" (Princeton UP, 2025)

08 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The United States is widely recognized as the quintessential consumer society, one where huge companies like Walmart and Amazon are famous for enticin...

Patrick Wallis, "The Market for Skill: Apprenticeship and Economic Growth in Early Modern England" (Princeton UP, 2025)

05 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Apprenticeship dominated training and skill formation in early modern Europe. Years spent learning from a skilled master were a nearly universal exper...

Angus Lockyer, "Exhibitionist Japan: The Spectacle of Modern Development" (Cambridge UP, 2025)

04 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

From the second half of the nineteenth century, Japan has been a particularly enthusiastic user of exhibitions. Large-scale international exhibitions,...

Nathalie Cooke, "Tastes and Traditions: A Journey Through Menu History" (Reaktion, 2025)

03 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Menus are invaluable snapshots of the food consumed at specific moments in time and place. Tastes and Traditions: A Journey through Menu History (Re...

Stacie A. Kent, "Coercive Commerce: Global Capital and Imperial Governance at the End of the Qing Empire" (Hong Kong UP, 2024)

02 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In 1842, the Qing Empire signed a watershed commercial treaty with Great Britain, beginning a century-long period in which geopolitical and global eco...

Tana Li, "A Maritime Vietnam: From Earliest Times to the Nineteenth Century" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

01 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

When we think of Vietnamese history, we tend to think of plucky peasant guerillas fighting for their independence against French colonial rule or Amer...

Philip Harling, "Managing Mobility: The British Imperial State and Global Migration, 1840-1860" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

31 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Between 1840 and 1860 the British Empire expanded rapidly in scale, with rampant annexation of territory and ruthless suppression of rebellion. These ...

Jason L. Newton, "Cutover Capitalism: The Industrialization of the Northern Forest" (West Virginia UP, 2024)

29 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

What happened to the loggers of America’s past when lumbermen moved west and south in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? How did the...

Bin Yang, "Discovered But Forgotten: The Maldives in Chinese History, C. 1100-1620" (Columbia UP, 2024)

28 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Discovered but Forgotten: The Maldives in Chinese History, c.1100-1620 (Columbia UP, 2024) examines China's maritime activities in the Indian Ocean,...

Robert J. Antony, "Outlaws of the Sea: Maritime Piracy in Modern China" (Hong Kong UP, 2024)

27 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Did you know Hong Kong used to be a hub for pirates? That factoid has long been part of the popular history for Hong Kong—and for Southern China bro...

Jeremy Black, "A History of Britain's Transport" (Pen and Sword, 2025)

26 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

An accessible book to draw on popular interest in transport history, routes, vehicles and experiences. Transport history is social and industrial nati...

Jeffrey Lee Funk on Unicorns, Hype, and Bubbles

25 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with retired professor, consultant, Discovery Institute fellow, and a winner of the NTT DoCoMo Mobile Science...

Joshua Ehrlich, "The East India Company and the Politics of Knowledge" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

24 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Welcome to the Global Corporations Special Series on the Law Channel on the New Books Network. This Special Series is dedicated to interviews with s...

Sureshkumar Muthukumaran, "The Tropical Turn: Agricultural Innovation in the Ancient Middle East and the Mediterranean" (U California Press, 2023)

23 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The Tropical Turn: Agricultural Innovation in the Ancient Middle East and the Mediterranean (University of California Press, 2023) chronicles the ea...

James Tejani, "A Machine to Move Ocean and Earth: The Making of the Port of Los Angeles and America" (Norton, 2024)

21 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The Port of Los Angeles is all around us. Objects we use on a daily basis pass through it: furniture, apparel, electronics, automobiles, and much more...

Managerial Bishops Rule! Peter Brown on Wealth in Early Christianity (JP)

20 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Peter Brown's fascinating Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD (Princeton U...

William Blakemore Lyon, "Forged in Genocide: Migrant Workers Shaping Colonial Capitalism in Namibia, 1890-1925" (de Gruyter, 2024)

17 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Forged in Genocide traces the early history of colonial capitalism in Namibia with a central focus on migrants who came to be key to the economy duri...

Lydia Pelot-Hobbs, "Prison Capital: Mass Incarceration and Struggles for Abolition Democracy in Louisiana" (UNC Press, 2023)

16 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Every year between 1998 to 2020 except one, Louisiana had the highest per capita rate of incarceration in the nation and thus the world. Prison Capit...

Maggie M. Cao, "Painting US Empire: Nineteenth-Century Art and Its Legacies" (U Chicago Press, 2025)

15 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Painting US Empire: Nineteenth-Century Art and Its Legacies (University of Chicago Press, 2025) by Dr. Maggie Cao is the first book to offer a synthe...

Andrea Wright, "Unruly Labor: A History of Oil in the Arabian Sea" (Stanford UP, 2024)

14 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Unruly Labor: A History of Oil in the Arabian Sea (Stanford UP, 2024) by Andrea Wright offers a critical and nuanced examination of the labor regime...

Chiara Faggella, "Becoming Couture: The Italian Fashion Industry after the Second World War" (Manchester UP, 2024)

13 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Becoming couture: The Italian fashion industry after the Second World War (Manchester University Press, 2024) by Dr. Chiara Faggella is the first boo...

Jamie Jelinski, "Needle Work: A History of Commercial Tattooing in Canada" (McGill-Queen’s UP, 2024)

10 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In 1891 J. Murakami travelled from Japan, via San Francisco, to Vancouver Island and began working in and around Victoria. His occupation: creating pe...

Cotton, Central Asia and the New Great Game

10 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

On this episode, rural sociologist Dr. Irna Hofman explores how Tajikistan’s cotton fields illuminate shifting power dynamics in Central Asia, histo...

The Library of Mistakes: A Conversation with Russell Napier

10 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The Library of Mistakes is a library located in Edinburgh, Scotland dedicated to financial and economic history. Russell Napier, the founder and kee...

Abby Innes, "Late Soviet Britain: Why Materialist Utopias Fail" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

09 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Why has the United Kingdom, historically one of the strongest democracies in the world, become so unstable? What changed? Late Soviet Britain: Why Ma...

Kimberly Clausing, "Open: The Progressive Case for Free Trade, Immigration, and Global Capital" (Harvard UP, 2019)

08 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Critics on the Left have long attacked open markets and free trade agreements for exploiting the poor and undermining labor, while those on the Right ...

Jeremy Black, "A History of the Railroad in 100 Maps" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

08 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Since their origins in eighteenth-century England, railroads have spread across the globe, changing everything in their path, from where and how peopl...

Maria Kaika and Luca Ruggiero, "Class Meets Land: The Embodied History of Land Financialization" (U California Press, 2024)

06 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Class Meets Land: The Embodied History of Land Financialization (University of California Press, 2024) by Dr. Maria Kaika & Dr. Luca Ruggiero reveals...

John Coakley ed et al., "The Problem of Piracy in the Early Modern World: Maritime Predation, Empire, and the Construction of Authority at Sea" (Amsterdam UP, 2024)

04 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In the early modern period, both legal and illegal maritime predation was a common occurrence, but the expansion of European maritime empires exacerba...

Kate Fortmueller and Luci Marzola, "Hollywood Unions" (Rutgers UP, 2024)

04 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Hollywood Unions (Rutgers UP, 2024) is a unique collection that tells the stories of the unions and guilds that have organized motion picture and te...

Erik Baker, "Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America" (Harvard UP, 2025)

02 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

How Americans think about work changed profoundly over the course of the twentieth century. Thrift and persistence came to seem old-fashioned. Success...

Big Box USA: The Environmental Impact of America's Biggest Retail Stores

27 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Our book is: Big Box USA: The Environmental Impact of America’s Biggest Retail Stores (UP of Colorado, 2024) which presents a new look at how th...

Giampaolo Conte, "A History of Capitalist Transformation: A Critique of Liberal-Capitalist Reforms" (Routledge, 2024)

25 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

A History of Capitalist Transformation: A Critique of Liberal-Capitalist Reforms highlights how, since the recent financial crises, the expression ‘...

David R. Saunders, "Chasing Archipelagic Dreams: The Expansion of Foreign Influence in Sabah amid the End of Empire, 1945–1965" (Cornell UP, 2024)

25 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In Chasing Archipelagic Dreams: The Expansion of Foreign Influence in Sabah amid the End of Empire, 1945–1965 (Cornell University Press, 2024), Dr...

Rhiannon Stephens, "Poverty and Wealth in East Africa: A Conceptual History" (Duke UP, 2022)

22 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In Poverty and Wealth in East Africa: A Conceptual History (Duke UP, 2022), Rhiannon Stephens offers a conceptual history of how people living in ea...

Asheesh Kapur Siddique, "The Archive of Empire: Knowledge, Conquest, and the Making of the Early Modern British World" (Yale UP, 2024)

19 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Over the span of two hundred years, Great Britain established, governed, lost, and reconstructed an empire that embraced three continents and two ocea...

Yoni Appelbaum, "Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of Prosperity" (Random House, 2025)

18 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

We take it for granted that good neighborhoods—with good schools and good housing—are inaccessible to all but the very wealthy. But, in America, t...

Melinda Cooper, "Counterrevolution: Extravagance and Austerity in Public Finance" (Zone Books, 2024)

18 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

At the close of the 1970s, government treasuries and central banks took a vow of perpetual self-restraint. To this day, fiscal authorities fret over s...

Kathryn Taylor, "Ordering Customs: Ethnographic Thought in Early Modern Venice" (U Delaware Press, 2023)

18 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Ordering Customs: Ethnographic Thought in Early Modern Venice (University of Delaware Press, 2023) explores how Renaissance Venetians sought to make ...

Lori A. Flores, "Awaiting Their Feast: Latinx Food Workers and Activism from World War II to Covid-19" (UNC Press, 2025)

18 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Though Latinx foodways are eagerly embraced and consumed by people across the United States, the nation exhibits a much more fraught relationship with...

Raphael Chijioke Njoku, "Queen Elizabeth II and the Africans: Narrating Decolonization, Postwar Commonwealth, and Africa’s Development, 1947-2022" (Leuven UP, 2024)

16 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The road to Queen Elizabeth II’s implementation of African reforms was rough, especially in the first two decades following her ascension to the thr...

Xiangli Ding, "Hydropower Nation: Dams, Energy, and Political Changes in Twentieth-Century China" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

15 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

As a rising infrastructure powerhouse, China has the largest electricity generation capacity in the world today. Its number of large dams is second to...

Philip Howell, "Pub" (Bloomsbury, 2025)

12 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The pub is an English institution. Yet its history has been obscured by myth and nostalgia. In Pub (Bloomsbury, 2025) a new addition to the Object L...