New Books in Economic and Business History
Episodes
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...
Joshua D. Rothman, "The Ledger and the Chain: How Domestic Slave Traders Shaped America" (Basic Book, 2021)
04 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Joshua Rothman’s The Ledger and the Chain: How Domestic Slave Traders Shaped America was published by Basic Books in 2021, and tells a sprawling h...
Jean Burgess and Nancy K. Baym, "Twitter: A Biography" (NYU Press, 2020)
04 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
As Twitter enters its own adolescence, both the users and the creators of this famous social media platform find themselves engaging with a tool tha...
Benjamin T. Smith, "The Dope: The Real History of the Mexican Drug Trade" (W. W. Norton, 2021)
03 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
For over a century Mexico has been embroiled in a drug war dictated by the demands of their neighbor to the north. In The Dope: The Real History of t...
Shannan Clark, "The Making of the American Creative Class: New York's Culture Workers and 20th-Century Consumer Capitalism" (Oxford UP, 2020)
02 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
During the middle decades of the twentieth century, the production of America’s consumer culture was centralized in New York to an extent unparallel...
Randy M. Browne, "The Driver’s Story: Labor and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024)
31 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The story of the driver is the story of Atlantic slavery. Starting in the seventeenth-century Caribbean, enslavers developed the driving system to sol...
Robert Darnton, "Pirating and Publishing: The Book Trade in the Age of Enlightenment" (Oxford UP, 2021)
29 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In the late-18th century, a group of publishers in what historian Robert Darnton calls the "Fertile Crescent" — countries located along the French b...
John Eglin, "The Gambling Century: Commercial Gaming in Britain from Restoration to Regency" (Oxford UP, 2023)
27 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
John Eglin talks with Jana Byars about The Gambling Century: Commercial Gaming in Britain from Restoration to Regency (Oxford UP, 2023). Gambling ...
Juan José Rivas Moreno, "The Capital Market of Manila and the Pacific Trade, 1668-1838" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024)
26 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Many authors have written about the Manila Galleons, the massive ships that took goods back and forth between Acapulco and Manila, ferrying silver one...
Rebecca Ball, "A Hundred English Working-Class Lives, 1900-1945" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2024)
26 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
How do ordinary people write the stories of their lives? In A Hundred English Working-Class Lives, 1900-1945 (Palgrave MacMillan, 2024), Rebecca Ba...
Marianne Kamp, "Collectivization Generation: Oral Histories of a Social Revolution in Uzbekistan" (Cornell UP, 2024)
26 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, Alisa interviews Dr. Marianne Kamp to celebrate the release of her new book, Collectivization Generation: Oral Histories of a Social...
Lisa Sheryl Jacobson. "Intoxicating Pleasures: The Reinvention of Wine, Beer, and Whiskey After Prohibition" (U California Press, 2024)
25 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In popular memory the repeal of US Prohibition in 1933 signaled alcohol’s decisive triumph in a decades-long culture war. But as Dr. Lisa Jacobson r...
Leah Downey, "Our Money: Monetary Policy as If Democracy Matters" (Princeton UP, 2024)
25 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
How the creation of money and monetary policy can be more democratic. The power to create money is foundational to the state. In the United States, th...
Christine M. Larson, "Love in the Time of Self-Publishing: How Romance Writers Changed the Rules of Writing and Success" (Princeton UP, 2024)
24 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
As writers, musicians, online content creators, and other independent workers fight for better labor terms, romance authors offer a powerful example—...
Pinelopi Koujianou Goldberg, "The Unequal Effects of Globalization" (MIT, 2023)
22 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The recent retreat from globalization has been triggered by a perception that increased competition from global trade is not fair and leads to increas...
Theresa Flanigan, "The Ponte Vecchio: Architecture, Politics, and Civic Identity in Late Medieval Florence" (Brepols, 2024)
21 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Famous today for the shops lining its sloped street, the Ponte Vecchio is the last premodern bridge spanning the Arno River at Florence and one of the...
Bob Kuska, "Balls of Confusion: Pro Baskelball Goes to War (1965-1970)" (From Way Downtown, 2024)
17 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Balls of Confusion: Pro Basketball Goes to War(1965-70) is the first of a two-part story about one of the most transformative events inpro basketball...
Sara Cantillon et al., "Feminist Political Economy: A Global Perspective" (Agenda, 2023)
16 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Challenging mainstream narratives in political economy, the new book Feminist Political Economy: A Global Perspective (Agenda Publishing, 2023) serv...
Alissa Klots, "Domestic Service in the Soviet Union; Women's Emancipation and the Gendered Hierarchy of Labor" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
15 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Domestic Service in the Soviet Union: Women's Emancipation and the Gendered Hierarchy of Labor (Cambridge University Press, 2024) by Dr. Alissa Klots...
Tom Boellstorff and Braxton Soderman, "Intellivision: How a Videogame System Battled Atari and Almost Bankrupted Barbie®" (MIT Press, 2024)
14 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The engaging story of Intellivision, an overlooked videogame system from the late 1970s and early 1980s whose fate was shaped by Mattel, Atari, and co...
Carrie M. Lane, "More Than Pretty Boxes: How the Rise of Professional Organizing Shows Us the Way We Work Isn't Working" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
14 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
This study of organizing and decluttering professionals helps us understand—and perhaps alleviate—the overwhelming demands society places on our t...
Ana Lucia Araujo, "Humans in Shackles: An Atlantic History of Slavery" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
12 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
During the era of the Atlantic slave trade, more than twelve million enslaved Africans were forcibly transported to the Americas in cramped, inhumane ...
Reem Hilu, "Digitizing Domesticity in the 1980s: The Intimate Life of Computers" (U Minnesota Press, 2024)
10 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Digitizing Domesticity in the 1980s: The Intimate Life of Computers (U Minnesota Press, 2024) shows how the widespread introduction of home computer...
Meredith McKittrick, "Green Lands for White Men: Desert Dystopias and the Environmental Origins of Apartheid" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
10 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In 1918, South Africa’s climate seemed to be drying up. White farmers claimed that rainfall was dwindling, while nineteenth-century missionaries and...
Benjamin J. Shestakofsky on How Venture Capital Shapes Work, Innovation, and Inequality
09 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks to Benjamin Shestakofsky about his book, Behind the Startup: How Venture Capital Shapes Work, Innovation, an...
Susan Gaunt Stearns. "Empire of Commerce: The Closing of the Mississippi and the Opening of Atlantic Trade" (U Virginia Press, 2024)
09 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Shortly after the ratification of the US Constitution in 1789, twenty-two-year-old Andrew Jackson pledged his allegiance to the king of Spain. Prior t...
Jeffrey M. Pilcher, "Hopped Up: How Travel, Trade, and Taste Made Beer a Global Commodity" (Oxford UP, 2024)
06 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Today I’m speaking with Jeffrey Pilcher, Professor of Food History at the University of Toronto. We are discussing his new book, Hopped Up: How Tra...
Toby Bennett, "Corporate Life in the Digital Music Industry: Remaking the Major Record Label from the Inside Out" (Bloomsbury, 2024)
05 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
How does the music industry actually work? In Corporate Life in the Digital Music Industry: Remaking the Major Record Label from the Inside Out Toby...
Adrian Tinniswood, "The Power and the Glory: Life in the English Country House Before the Great War" (Basic Books, 2024)
02 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In the decades before the First World War, the owners of the nation’s stately homes revelled in a golden age of glory and glamour. Nothing lay beyon...
Steven King et al., "In Their Own Write: Contesting the New Poor Law, 1834–1900" (McGill-Queen's Press, 2022)
02 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Few subjects in European welfare history attract as much attention as the nineteenth-century English and Welsh New Poor Law. Its founding statute was ...
Sidney A. Shapiro and Joseph P. Tomain, "How Government Built America" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
01 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
How Government Built America (Cambridge UP, 2024) challenges growing, anti-government rhetoric by highlighting the role government has played in par...
James T. White and John Punter, "Condoland: The Planning, Design, and Development of Toronto's CityPlace" (UBC Press, 2023)
01 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Casting an eye toward the frantic vertical urbanization of Toronto, Condoland: The Planning, Design, and Development of Toronto’s CityPlace (UBC, ...
Ken Wilcox, "The China Business Conundrum: Ensure That "Win-Win" Doesn't Mean Western Companies Lose Twice" (John Wiley & Sons, 2024)
01 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The China Business Conundrum: Ensure That "Win-Win" Doesn't Mean Western Companies Lose Twice (Wiley, 2024) describes former CEO of Silicon Valley Ba...
Karen Lystra, "Love and the Working Class: The Inner Worlds of Nineteenth Century Americans" (Oxford UP, 2024)
30 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Love and the Working Class: The Inner Worlds of Nineteenth Century Americans (Oxford University Press, 2024) by Dr. Karen Lystra is a unique look at ...
Maria Adamopoulou, "The Greek Gastarbeiter in the Federal Republic of Germany (1960–1974)" (de Gruyter, 2024)
30 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Was migration to Germany a blessing or a curse? The main argument of this book is that the Greek state conceived labor migration as a traineeship into...
Ryan Moran, "Selling the Future: Community, Hope, and Crisis in the Early History of Japanese Life Insurance" (Cornell UP, 2024)
29 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Ryan Moran’s Selling the Future: Community, Hope, and Crisis in the Early History of Japanese Life Insurance (Cornell UP, 2023) is a history of th...
Brian Donahue, "Slow Wood: Greener Building from Local Forests" (Yale UP, 2024)
26 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In Slow Wood: Greener Building from Local Forests (Yale UP, 2024), environmental historian Brian Donahue advances a radical proposal for healing th...
Kerry Meakin, "The Professionalization of Window Display in Britain, 1919-1939" (Bloomsbury, 2024)
25 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In recent decades, the disciplines of retail history, business history, design and cultural history have contributed to the study of department stores...
Steve J. Shone, "Dangerous Anarchist Strikers" (Brill, 2023)
25 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Dangerous Anarchist Strikers (Brill, 2023) explores the ideas of three largely forgotten radical women who participated in labor union strikes in Arg...
Andrew Fleming, "The Gravity of Feathers: Fame, Fortune and the Story of St Kilda" (Birlinn, 2024)
24 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
When the last 36 inhabitants of St Kilda, 40 miles west of the Scottish Hebrides, were evacuated in 1930, the archipelago at ‘the edge of the world’...
Katherine C. Epstein, "Analog Superpowers: How Twentieth-Century Technology Theft Built the National Security State" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
24 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
At the beginning of the twentieth century, two British inventors, Arthur Pollen and Harold Isherwood, became fascinated by a major military question: ...
Travis A. Weisse, "Health Freaks: America's Diet Champions and the Specter of Chronic Illness" (UNC Press, 2024)
23 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In Health Freaks: America's Diet Champions and the Specter of Chronic Illness (University of North Carolina Press, 2024) Dr. Travis A. Weisse tells ...
An Existential Fight between Green and Carbon Assets (with Mark Blyth)
21 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome to What Just Happened, a Recall This Book experiment. In it you will hear three friends of RTB reacting to the 2024 election and discussin...
Nick Bernards, "Fictions of Financialization: Rethinking Speculation, Exploitation and Twenty-First Century Capitalism" (Pluto Press, 2024)
18 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Since the global financial crisis that began in 2008, the role of the financial sector in contemporary capitalism has come under increasing scrutiny. ...
D. Andrew Johnson, "Enslaved Native Americans and the Making of Colonial South Carolina" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2024)
18 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In 1708, the governor of South Carolina responded to a request from London to provide a detailed account of the colony's population. Among the groups ...
Laura F. Edwards, "Only the Clothes on Her Back: Clothing and the Hidden History of Power in the Nineteenth-Century United States" (Oxford UP, 2022)
18 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
What can dresses, bedlinens, waistcoats, pantaloons, shoes, and kerchiefs tell us about the legal status of the least powerful members of American soc...
Victor P. Petrov, "Balkan Cyberia: Cold War Computing, Bulgarian Modernization, and the Information Age Behind the Iron Curtain" (MIT Press, 2023)
18 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Balkan Cyberia: Cold War Computing, Bulgarian Modernisation, and the Information Age Behind the Iron Curtain (MIT Press, 2023) examines the history ...
Lizhi Liu, "From Click to Boom: The Political Economy of E-Commerce in China" (Princeton UP, 2024)
16 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
How do states build vital institutions for market development? Too often, governments confront technical or political barriers to providing the rule o...
The Disappearance and Return of Inequality Studies in Economics
13 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
This is episode three Cited Podcast’s new season, the Use & Abuse of Economic Expertise. This season tells stories of the political and scholarl...
Anne Berg, "Empire of Rags and Bones: Waste and War in Nazi Germany" (Oxford UP, 2024)
11 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Paper, bottles, metal scrap, kitchen garbage, rubber, hair, fat, rags, and bones--the Nazi empire demanded its population obsessively collect anything...
Seth E. Jenny et al., "Routledge Handbook of Esports" (Routledge, 2024)
09 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The Routledge Handbook of Esports (Routledge, 2024) offers the first fully comprehensive, interdisciplinary study of esports, one of the fastest gr...
Why Can’t the US Compete with China in Infrastructure?
07 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, Dr. Shahar Hameiri and Dr. Lee Jones discuss the political economy and financing behind global infrastructure development, with a foc...
Mara Kardas-Nelson, "We Are Not Able to Live in the Sky: The Seductive Promise of Microfinance" (Metropolitan Books, 2024)
05 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In this deeply researched and compelling narrative, journalist Mara Kardas-Nelson examines the complex history and impact of microfinance - the practi...
Melissa Teixeira, "A Third Path: Corporatism in Brazil and Portugal" (Princeton UP, 2024)
05 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Following the Great Depression, as the world searched for new economic models, Brazil and Portugal experimented with corporatism as a “third path”...
Salem Elzway and Jason Resnikoff on Automation
04 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Salem Elzway, postdoctoral fellow in the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at University of Southern ...
Justene Hill Edwards, "Savings and Trust: The Rise and Betrayal of the Freedman's Bank" (Norton, 2024)
03 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In Savings and Trust: The Rise and Betrayal of the Freedman's Bank (W. W. Norton, 2024), Justene Hill Edwards exposes how the rise and tragic fail...
Adam Hanieh, "Crude Capitalism: Oil, Corporate Power, and the Making of the World Market" (Verso, 2024)
02 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Oil is everywhere. It’s in our cars, it’s in the fertilizer used to grow our food, and it’s in the plastics used to produce and transport our co...
From Rubinomics to Bidenomics: On the Democratic Party’s Shifting Trade & Industrial Policy
01 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
This is episode two Cited Podcast’s new season, the Use & Abuse of Economic Expertise. This season tells stories of the political and scholarly ...
Dariusz Wojcik et al., "Atlas of Finance: Mapping the Global Story of Money" (Yale UP, 2024)
31 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
From the emergence of money in the ancient world to today’s interconnected landscape of high-frequency trading and cryptocurrency, the story of fina...
Eric Helleiner, "The Neomercantilists: A Global Intellectual History" (Cornell UP, 2021)
29 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
At a time when critiques of free trade policies are gaining currency, The Neomercantilists: A Global Intellectual History (Cornell UP, 2021) helps m...
Michael Hardt, "The Subversive Seventies" (Oxford UP, 2023)
29 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
A thought-provoking reconsideration of how the revolutionary movements of the 1970s set the mold for today's activism. The 1970s was a decade of "subv...
Mark W. Geiger, "Floor Rules: Insider Culture in Financial Markets" (Yale UP, 2024)
29 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Are financial markets lawless and irrational? It may seem that way from the outside, but for market insiders there are multiples sets of rules that t...
Townsend Middleton, "Quinine's Remains: Empire’s Medicine and the Life Thereafter" (U California Press, 2024)
28 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
What happens after colonial industries have run their course—after the factory closes and the fields go fallow? Set in the cinchona plantations of I...
Nicolas Delsol, "Cattle in the Postcolumbian Americas: A Zooarchaeological Historical Study" (UP of Florida, 2024)
28 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In Cattle in the Postcolumbian Americas: A Zooarchaeological Historical Study (University Press of Florida, 2024), Nicolas Delsol compares zooarch...
Toni Alimi, "Slaves of God: Augustine and Other Romans on Religion and Politics" (Princeton UP, 2024)
28 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Augustine believed that slavery is permissible, but to understand why, we must situate him in his late antique Roman intellectual context. Slaves of ...
Simon Kuznets and the Invention of the Economy
27 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Economics sometimes feels like a physics–so sturdy, so objective, and so immutable. Yet, behind every clean number or eye-popping graph, there is us...
Andrew deWaard, "Derivative Media: How Wall Street Devours Culture" (U California Press, 2024)
27 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Sequels, reboots, franchises, and songs that remake old songs—does it feel like everything new in popular culture is just derivative of something ol...