New Books in Economic and Business History
Episodes
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...
Rebecca Haw Allensworth, "The Licensing Racket: How We Decide Who Is Allowed to Work, and Why It Goes Wrong" (Harvard UP, 2025)
12 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
When we think about "red tape" and the cost of regulation it's hard to overstate the impact of professional licensing. According to Professor Rebecca...
Michael Albertus, "Land Power: Who Has It, Who Doesn't, and How That Determines the Fate of Societies" (Basic Books, 2025)
11 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
For millennia, land has been a symbol of wealth and privilege. But the true power of land ownership is even greater than we might think. In Land Powe...
Katie Beisel Hollenbach, "The Business of Bobbysoxers: Cultural Production in 1940s Frank Sinatra Fandom" (Oxford UP, 2024)
09 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The Business of Bobbysoxers: Cultural Production in 1940s Frank Sinatra Fandom (Oxford University Press, 2024) by Dr. Katie Beisel Hollenbach reconsi...
Arvid J. Lukauskas and Yumiko Shimabukuro, "Misery Beneath the Miracle in East Asia" (Cornell UP, 2024)
07 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Misery beneath the Miracle in East Asia (Cornell University Press, 2024) challenges prevailing views of the East Asian economic miracle. Existing sch...
Zai Liang. "From Chinatown to Every Town: How Chinese Immigrants Have Expanded the Restaurant Business in the United States" (U California Press, 2023)
07 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
From Chinatown to Every Town: How Chinese Immigrants Have Expanded the Restaurant Business in the United States (University of California Press, 2024...
Rosemary Wakeman, "The Worlds of Victor Sassoon: Bombay, London, Shanghai, 1918–1941" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
06 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The 1920s and 1930s were a period of cosmopolitan globalization–and no one, perhaps, exemplified it more than Victor Sassoon, business tycoon, trade...
Sophia Rosenfeld, "The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in Modern Life" (Princeton UP, 2025)
05 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Choice touches virtually every aspect of our lives, from what to buy and where to live to whom to love, what profession to practice, and even what to ...
Sarah E. Bond, "Strike: Labor, Unions, and Resistance in the Roman Empire" (Yale UP, 2024)
04 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Historian Sarah E. Bond retells the traditional story of Ancient Rome, revealing how groups of ancient workers unified, connected, and protested as th...
Lionel Barber, "Gambling Man: The Wild Ride of Japan’s Masayoshi Son" (Atria, 2024)
01 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
As Wall Street swooned and boomed through the last decade, our livelihoods have—now more than ever—come to rely upon the good sense and risk appet...
Joel Z. Garrod, "Royal Histories: The Transformation of the Royal Bank of Canada, 1864-2022" (U Toronto Press, 2025)
01 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In this engaging interview, young scholar Dr, Joel Z. Garrod explains his book's main argument, with a personal touch. In Royal Histories: The Trans...
Enrico Ciappi, "Building Europe in New York: From the Munich Conference to the European Coal and Steel Community (1938-1952)" (Routledge, 2025)
31 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Today’s European Union grew out of functional communities set up in the wake of world war in the 1950s. It would shock the new White House intake...
Richard Vague, "The Paradox of Debt: A New Path to Prosperity Without Crisis" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2023)
31 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
When we talk about debt and its impact on our economy, we almost always mean “government debt.” However, this is only a small part of the picture:...
Kim Pernell, "Visions of Financial Order: National Institutions and the Development of Banking Regulation" (Princeton UP, 2024)
31 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The global financial crisis of the late 2000s was marked by the failure of regulators to rein in risk-taking by banks. And yet regulatory issues varie...
Adam Franklin-Lyons, "Shortage and Famine in the Late Medieval Crown of Aragon" (Penn State Press, 2022)
30 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Adam Franklin-Lyons joins Jana Byars to talk about Shortage and Famine in the Late Medieval Crown of Aragon (Penn State Press, 2022). In the late f...
A. G. Hopkins, "Capitalism in the Colonies: African Merchants in Lagos, 1851–1931" (Princeton UP, 2024)
30 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In Capitalism in the Colonies: African Merchants in Lagos, 1851–1931 (Princeton UP, 2024), A. G. Hopkins provides the first substantial assessment...
Lennard J. Davis, "Poor Things: How Those with Money Depict Those Without It" (Duke UP, 2024)
29 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
For generations most of the canonical works that detail the lives of poor people have been created by rich or middle-class writers like Charles Dicken...
Alan Bollard, "Economists in the Cold War: How a Handful of Economists Fought the Battle of Ideas" (Oxford UP, 2023)
25 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Economists in the Cold War: How a Handful of Economists Fought the Battle of Ideas (Oxford UP, 2023) is an account of the economic drivers and outco...
Ellen Hartigan-O'Connor, "America Under the Hammer: Auctions and the Emergence of Market Values" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024)
24 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
As the first book-length study of auctions in early America, America Under the Hammer: Auctions and the Emergence of Market Values (U Pennsylvania P...
Michael Tondre, "Oil" (Bloomsbury, 2024)
23 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Black gold. Liquid sunlight. Texas tea. Oil remains the ur-commodity of our global era, having been distilled from ancient algae and marine life to tu...
Andy Wightman, "The Poor Had No Lawyers: Who Owns Scotland and How They Got it" (Birlinn, 2025)
22 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Who owns Scotland? How did they get it? What happened to all the common land in Scotland? Has the Scottish Parliament made any difference? Can we get ...
Brigid Schulte, "Over Work: Transforming the Daily Grind in the Quest for a Better Life" (Henry Holt, 2024)
20 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Following Overwhelmed, Brigid Schulte's groundbreaking examination of time management and stress, the prizewinning journalist now turns her attention...
Steven King, "Fraudulent Lives: Imagining Welfare Cheats from the Poor Law to the Present" (McGill Queen's UP, 2024)
19 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The Western welfare state model is beset with structural, financial, and moral crises. So-called scroungers, cheats, and disability fakers persistentl...
Duncan Mavin, "Meltdown: Scandal, Sleaze and the Collapse of Credit Suisse" (Pegasus Books, 2024)
19 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Meltdown: Scandal, Sleaze and the Collapse of Credit Suisse (Pegasus Books, 2024) is a great business history book. It meticulously chronicles the s...
James Michael Buckley, "City of Wood: San Francisco and the Architecture of the Redwood Lumber Industry" (U Texas Press, 2024)
18 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
California’s 1849 gold rush triggered creation of the “instant city” of San Francisco as a to base exploit the rich natural resources of the Ame...
Elizabeth L. Block, "Beyond Vanity: The History and Power of Hairdressing" (MIT Press, 2024)
17 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In the nineteenth century, the complex cultural meaning of hair was not only significant—it could affect one’s place in society. After the Civil W...
Jesper Juul, "Too Much Fun: The Five Lives of the Commodore 64 Computer" (MIT Press, 2024)
14 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The surprising history of the Commodore 64, the best-selling home computer of the 1980s—the machine that taught the world that computing should be ...
Brett Bannor, "American Sheep: A Cultural History" (U Georgia Press, 2024)
14 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Why did Thomas Jefferson write that he would be happy if all dogs went extinct? What economic opportunity did attorney John Lord Hayes envision for th...
Patrick Dixon, "Nuggets of Gold: Further Processed Chicken and the Making of the American Diet" (U Georgia Press, 2024)
13 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
For McDonald’s, the Chicken McNugget, the flagship product of further processed chicken, represented a once-in-a-generation innovation, a snack item...
Edward Jones Corredera, "Odious Debt: Bankruptcy, International Law, and the Making of Latin America" (Oxford UP, 2024)
10 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
What are fallen tyrants owed? What makes debt illegitimate? And when is bankruptcy moral? Drawing on new archival sources, this book shows how Latin A...
Dayne C. Riley, "Consuming Anxieties: Alcohol, Tobacco, and Trade in British Satire, 1660-1751" (Bucknell UP, 2024)
09 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Writers of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries—a period of vast economic change—recognized that the global trade in alcohol and to...
Alex Cuadros, "When We Sold God's Eye: Diamonds, Murder, and a Clash of Worlds in the Amazon" (Grand Central Publishing, 2024)
08 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Growing up in a remote corner of the world’s largest rainforest, Pio, Maria, and Oita learned to hunt wild pigs and tapirs, and gathered Brazil nuts...
Joshua Brinkman on American Farming Culture and the History of Technology
06 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Joshua Brinkman, Assistant Teaching Professor of Science, Technology, and Society at North Carolina Stat...
Devin Fergus, “Land of the Fee: Hidden Costs and the Decline of the American Middle Class” (Oxford UP, 2018)
05 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Politicians, economists, and the media have put forth no shortage of explanations for the mounting problem of wealth inequality – a loss of working ...
Austin Dean, "China and the End of Global Silver, 1873–1937" (Cornell UP, 2020)
05 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In the late nineteenth century, as much of the world adopted some variant of the gold standard, China remained the most populous country still using s...