New Books in Economic and Business History

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...

Himanshu Upadhyaya, "Critical Insights on Colonial Modes of Seeing Cattle in India (1850–1980)" (Springer, 2024)

25 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Critical Insights on Colonial Modes of Seeing Cattle in India: Tracing the Pre-history of Green and White Revolutions (Springer 2024) traces the cont...

Deborah Valenze, "The Invention of Scarcity: Malthus and the Margins of History" (Yale UP, 2023)

24 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

A radical new reading of eighteenth-century British theorist Thomas Robert Malthus, which recovers diverse ideas about subsistence production and envi...

Anto Mohsin, "Electrifying Indonesia: Technology and Social Justice in National Development" (U Wisconsin Press, 2023)

21 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Electrifying Indonesia: Technology and Social Justice in National Development (U Wisconsin Press, 2023) tells the story of the entanglement of politi...

Kevin Sanson, "Mobile Hollywood: Labor and the Geography of Production" (U California Press, 2024)

20 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

What is the future of the film industry? In Mobile Hollywood Labor and the Geography of Production (U California Press, 2024), Kevin Sanson, Prof...

Michael J. Alarid, "Hispano Bastion: New Mexican Power in the Age of Manifest Destiny, 1837-1860" (U New Mexico Press, 2022)

19 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In Hispano Bastion: New Mexican Power in the Age of Manifest Destiny, 1837-1860 (University of New Mexico Press, 2023), historian Dr. Michael J. Ala...

Peter C. Kunze, "Staging a Comeback: Broadway, Hollywood, and the Disney Renaissance" (Rutgers UP, 2023)

19 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In the early 1980s, Walt Disney Productions was struggling, largely bolstered by the success of its theme parks. Within fifteen years, however, it had...

Andrew G. Walder, “China Under Mao: A Revolution Derailed” (Harvard UP, 2015)

18 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

"With the benefit of hindsight, it is clear that 1949 was actually the beginning, not the end, of the Chinese revolution." Building from this premise,...

Corey Ross, "Liquid Empire: Water and Power in the Colonial World" (Princeton UP, 2024)

17 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a handful of powerful European states controlled more than a third of the land surface of the planet. These...

Tevi Troy, "The Power and the Money: The Epic Clashes Between Commanders in Chief and Titans of Industry" (Regnery History, 2024)

16 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

When U.S. presidents clash with corporate titans, what tips the balance of power? In The Power and the Money: The Epic Clashes Between Commanders in ...

Christian Velasco, "Commercial Banking in Kenya: A History from Colonisation to Digital Age" (Routledge, 2024)

15 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Commercial Banking in Kenya: A History from Colonisation to Digital Age (Routledge, 2024) investigates the impact of commercial banks in Kenya right ...

Juan José Rivas Moreno, "The Capital Market of Manila and the Pacific Trade, 1668-1838" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024)

07 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Economic history has always emphasized the importance of long-distance trade in the emergence of modern financial markets, yet almost nothing is known...

A Deep Dive on Karl Marx's "Capital"

07 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Over 150 years ago, Marx published the first volume of Capital, a systematic and voluminous account of capitalism, from the economic bedrock all the ...

Bananapocalypse: Plantation Southeast Asia and Its Many Afterlives

06 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

This episode focuses on a cluster of issues of longstanding significance in Southeast Asia and in Southeast Asian Studies – plantation agriculture, ...

Israel G. Solares, "Underground Leviathan: Corporate Sovereignty and Mining in the Americas" (U Nevada Press, 2024)

05 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Underground Leviathan: Corporate Sovereignty and Mining in the Americas (U Nevada Press, 2024) explores the emergence, dynamics, and lasting impacts ...

Jeffrey Ding, "Technology and the Rise of Great Powers: How Diffusion Shapes Economic Competition" (Princeton UP, 2024)

05 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

When scholars and policymakers consider how technological advances affect the rise and fall of great powers, they draw on theories that center the mom...

Robert Rozett, "Conscripted Slaves: Hungarian Jewish Forced Laborers on the Eastern Front During the Second World War" (Yad Vashem, 2014)

04 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

From the spring of 1942 until the summer of 1944, some 45,000 Jewish men were forced to accompany Hungarian troops to the battle zone of the Soviet Un...

Sean McMeekin, "To Overthrow the World: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Communism" (Basic Books, 2024)

04 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

When the USSR collapsed in 1991, the world was certain that Communism was dead. Today, three decades later, it is clear that it was not. While Russia ...

Mary Bridges, "Dollars and Dominion: US Bankers and the Making of a Superpower" (Princeton UP, 2024)

01 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

There was nothing inevitable or natural about the rise of US finance capitalism in the early twentieth century.  In Dollars and Dominion: US Bankers...

Paola Bertucci, "In the Land of Marvels: Science, Fabricated Realities, and Industrial Espionage in the Age of the Grand Tour" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2023)

01 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

How a journey through Italy casts light on secrets, stereotypes, and the manipulation of information in eighteenth-century science. In 1749, the celeb...

James A. Anderson, "The Dong World and Imperial China's Southwest Silk Road: Trade, Security, and State Formation" (U Washington Press, 2024)

30 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

From the eighth to thirteenth centuries along China’s rugged southern periphery, trade in tribute articles and an interregional horse market thrived...

Annette Kehnel, "The Green Ages: Medieval Innovations in Sustainability" (Brandeis UP, 2024)

29 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Annette Kehnel joins Jana Byars to talk about The Green Ages: Medieval Innovations in Sustainability (Brandeis University Press, 2024). A fascinati...

Inés Valdez, "Democracy and Empire: Labor, Nature, and the Reproduction of Capitalism" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

29 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In scholarly and popular discourse, popular sovereignty and self-determination are typically conceived of as the antitheses of imperialism, while hist...

William T. Taylor, "Hoof Beats: How Horses Shaped Human History" (U California Press, 2024)

29 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

From the Rockies to the Himalayas, the bond between horses and humans has spanned across time and civilizations. In this archaeological journey, Willi...

Samuel J. Hirst, "Against the Liberal Order: The Soviet Union, Turkey, and Statist Internationalism, 1919-1939" (Oxford UP, 2024)

28 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In the aftermath of the First World War the Western great powers sought to redefine international norms according to their liberal vision. They introd...

Ian Williams, "Vampire State: The Rise and Fall of the Chinese Economy (Birlinn, 2024)

27 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

State capitalism. Socialism with Chinese characteristics. A socialist market economy. There have been numerous descriptions of the Chinese economy. Ho...

Jeff Schuhrke, "Blue Collar Empire: The Untold Story of U.S. Labor’s Global Anticommunist Crusade" (Verso, 2024)

27 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

How the CIA used American unions to undermine workers at home and subvert democracy abroad. Blue Collar Empire: The Untold Story of U.S. Labor’s Glo...

Zeev Levin, "Collectivization and Social Engineering: Soviet Administration and the Jews of Uzbekistan, 1917-1939" (Brill, 2015)

26 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In Collectivization and Social Engineering: Soviet Administration and the Jews of Uzbekistan, 1917-1939 (Brill, 2015), Zeev Levin seeks to provide ...

Andrew W. Kahrl, "The Black Tax: 150 Years of Theft, Exploitation, and Dispossession in America" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

25 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In The Black Tax: 150 Years of Theft, Exploitation, and Dispossession in America (U Chicago Press, 2024), Andrew W. Kahrl uncovers the history of in...

Joseph Harley, "At Home with the Poor: Consumer Behaviour and Material Culture in England, c.1650-1850" (Manchester UP, 2024)

25 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

At Home with the Poor: Consumer Behaviour and Material Culture in England, c.1650-1850 (Manchester UP, 2024) by Dr. Joseph Harley opens the doors to...

Aaron Reeves and Sam Friedman, "Born to Rule: The Making and Remaking of the British Elite" (Harvard UP, 2024)

25 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Who runs Britain? In Born to Rule: The Making and Remaking of the British Elite (Harvard UP, 2024), Aaron Reeves, and Sam Friedman, both Professo...

Max Hirsh and Till Mostowlansky, "Infrastructure and the Remaking of Asia" (U Hawaii Press, 2022)

24 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In the twenty-first century, infrastructure has undergone a seismic shift from West to East. Once concentrated in Europe and North America, global inf...

Emily Carman, "Independent Stardom: Freelance Women in the Hollywood Studio System" (U Texas Press, 2016)

23 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

During the heyday of Hollywood’s studio system, stars were carefully cultivated and promoted, but at the price of their independence. This familiar ...

Ilias Alami and Adam D. Dixon, "The Spectre of State Capitalism" (Oxford UP, 2024)

22 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

After close to three decades of the hegemony of free market ideas, the state has made a big comeback as an economic actor since the 2008 financial cri...