New Books in Economic and Business History

Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu, "Experiments in Skin: Race and Beauty in the Shadows of Vietnam" (Duke UP, 2021)

26 Feb 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Through a creative focus on skin, in Experiments in Skin: Race and Beauty in the Shadows of Vietnam (Duke UP, 2021), Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu examines th...

Yanis Varoufakis, "Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism" (Melville House, 2023)

26 Feb 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism (Melville House, 2023), Yanis Varoufakis argues that capitalism is dead and a new economic era has begun....

Jacob Ward, "Visions of a Digital Nation: Market and Monopoly in British Telecommunications" (MIT Press, 2024)

23 Feb 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In Visions of a Digital Nation: Market and Monopoly in British Telecommunications (MIT Press, 2024), Jacob Ward explains why the privatization of Br...

Neil Lee, "Innovation for the Masses: How to Share the Benefits of the High-Tech Economy" (U California Press, 2024)

21 Feb 2024

Contributed by Lukas

How can we build a more equal economy? In Innovation for the Masses: How to Share the Benefits of the High-Tech Economy (U California Press, 2024), ...

Lawrence Glickman, "Free Enterprise: An American History" (Yale UP, 2019)

18 Feb 2024

Contributed by Lukas

“Free enterprise” is an everyday phrase that connotes an American common sense. It appears everywhere from political speeches to pop culture. And ...

Tobias Straumann, "1931: Debt, Crisis, and the Rise of Hitler" (Oxford UP, 2019)

17 Feb 2024

Contributed by Lukas

What can we learn from the financial crisis that brought Hitler to power? How did diplomatic deadlock fuel the rise of authoritarianism? Tobias Straum...

Ian Saxine, "Properties of Empire: Indians, Colonists, and Land Speculators on the New England Frontier" (NYU Press, 2019)

16 Feb 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In Properties of Empire: Indians, Colonists, and Land Speculators on the New England Frontier (NYU Press, 2019), Ian Saxine, Visiting Assistant Profes...

Jennifer Regan-Lefebvre, "Imperial Wine: How the British Empire Made Wine’s New World" (U California Press, 2022)

16 Feb 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Imperial Wine: How the British Empire Made Wine’s New World (University of California Press, 2022) by Dr. Jennifer Regan-Lefebvre is a bold, rigoro...

Diego Javier Luis, "The First Asians in the Americas: A Transpacific History" (Harvard UP, 2024)

15 Feb 2024

Contributed by Lukas

There’s a popular folk hero in Puebla, Mexico—Catarina de San Juan, who Mexicans hailed as a devoted religious figure after her death in 1688. She...

"War is what you make of it" with Neta Crawford of Oxford University and the Costs of War Project

13 Feb 2024

Contributed by Lukas

We begin this new season of International Horizons with an interview by RBI Director John Torpey with Neta Crawford from Oxford University and the Co...

Tim Keogh, "In Levittown’s Shadow: Poverty in America’s Wealthiest Postwar Suburb" (U Chicago Press, 2023)

11 Feb 2024

Contributed by Lukas

There is a familiar narrative about American suburbs: after 1945, white residents left cities for leafy, affluent subdivisions and the prosperity they...

Ana Lucia Araujo, "The Gift: How Objects of Prestige Shaped the Atlantic Slave Trade and Colonialism" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

11 Feb 2024

Contributed by Lukas

The Gift: How Objects of Prestige Shaped the Atlantic Slave Trade and Colonialism (Cambridge University Press, 2023) explores how objects of presti...

Dallas Michelbacher, "Jewish Forced Labor in Romania, 1940-1944" (Indiana UP, 2020)

06 Feb 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Between Romania's entry into World War II in 1941 and the ouster of dictator Ion Antonescu three years later, over 105,000 Jews were forced to work in...

Eglė Rindzevičiūtė, "The Will to Predict: Orchestrating the Future Through Science" (Cornell UP, 2023)

04 Feb 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Can we predict the future? In The Will to Predict: Orchestrating the Future Through Science (Cornell UP, 2023), Eglė Rindzevičiūtė, an Associ...

Julia Ornelas-Higdon, "The Grapes of Conquest: Race, Labor, and the Industrialization of California Wine, 1769–1920" (U Nebraska Press, 2023)

03 Feb 2024

Contributed by Lukas

California’s wine country conjures images of pastoral vineyards and cellars lined with oak barrels. As a mainstay of the state’s economy, Californ...

Alex Burchmore, "New Export China: Translations Across Time and Place in Contemporary Chinese Porcelain Art" (U California Press, 2023)

02 Feb 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Why do so many contemporary Chinese artists use porcelain in their work? How do artists make sense of the legacy that porcelain has in China, and how ...

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

01 Feb 2024

Contributed by Lukas

The East India Company was a unique entity in world history: More than just a commercial enterprise, the Company tried to act as its own government. N...

Marco Armiero et al., "Mussolini's Nature: An Environmental History of Italian Fascism" (MIT Press, 2022)

30 Jan 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In this first environmental history of Italian fascism, Marco Armiero, Roberta Biasillo, and Wilko Graf von Hardenberg reveal that nature and fascist ...

Erin R. Graham, "Transforming International Institutions: How Money Quietly Sidelined Multilateralism at the United Nations" (Oxford UP, 2023)

30 Jan 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Drawing on historical institutionalism and interpretive tools of international law, Transforming International Institutions: How Money Quietly Sideli...

David M. Henkin, "The Week: A History of the Unnatural Rhythms that Made Us who We are" (Yale UP, 2021)

29 Jan 2024

Contributed by Lukas

The Week: A History of the Unnatural Rhythms that Made Us who We are (Yale UP, 2021) is an investigation into the evolution of the seven-day week and...

Paul Franke, "Feeling Lucky: The Production of Gambling Experiences in Monte Carlo and Las Vegas" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023)

29 Jan 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Monte Carlo and Las Vegas have become synonymous with casino gambling. Both destinations featured it as part of a broad variety of leisure and consum...

Alka Vaid Menon, "Refashioning Race: How Global Cosmetic Surgery Crafts New Beauty Standards" (U California Press, 2023)

28 Jan 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Cosmetic surgery was once associated with a one-size-fits-all approach, modifying patients to conform to a single standard of beauty. As this surgery ...

Rachel Nolan, "Until I Find You: Disappeared Children and Coercive Adoptions in Guatemala" (Harvard UP, 2024)

28 Jan 2024

Contributed by Lukas

The poignant saga of Guatemala's adoption industry: an international marketplace for children, built on a foundation of inequality, war, and Indigenou...

Amanda Lanzillo, "Pious Labor: Islam, Artisanship, and Technology in Colonial India" (U California Press, 2024)

27 Jan 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Pious Labour: Islam, Artisanship, and Technology in Colonial India (University of California Press, 2023) focuses on the late nineteenth and early tw...

Marcia Stephenson, "Llamas beyond the Andes: Untold Histories of Camelids in the Modern World" (U Texas Press, 2023)

27 Jan 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Camelids are vital to the cultures and economies of the Andes. The animals have also been at the heart of ecological and social catastrophe: Europeans...

Bruce Wardhaugh, "Competition Law in Crisis: The Antitrust Response to Economic Shocks" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

26 Jan 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In recent years, government agencies around the world have been forced to consider the role of competition law and policy in addressing various crise...

Caleb Wellum, "Energizing Neoliberalism: The 1970s Energy Crisis and the Making of Modern America" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2023)

26 Jan 2024

Contributed by Lukas

How the 1970s energy crisis facilitated a neoliberal shift in US political culture. In Energizing Neoliberalism: The 1970s Energy Crisis and the Maki...

Nicholas Radburn, "Traders in Men: Merchants and the Transformation of the Transatlantic Slave Trade" (Yale UP, 2023)

24 Jan 2024

Contributed by Lukas

During the eighteenth century, Britain’s slave trade exploded in size. Formerly a small and geographically constricted business, the trade had, by t...

James R. Fichter, "Tea: Consumption, Politics, and Revolution, 1773–1776" (Cornell UP, 2023)

24 Jan 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In Tea: Consumption, Politics, and Revolution, 1773–1776 (Cornell University Press, 2023), Dr. James R. Fichter reveals that despite the so-called...

Daniel Peris, "The Ownership Dividend: The Coming Paradigm Shift in the U.S. Stock Market" (Routledge, 2024)

23 Jan 2024

Contributed by Lukas

We are on the verge of a major paradigm shift for investors in the U.S. stock market. Dividend-focused stock investing has been receding in popularity...

Cornelia Woll, "Corporate Crime and Punishment: The Politics of Negotiated Justice in Global Markets" (Princeton UP, 2023)

23 Jan 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Over the past decade, many of the world’s biggest companies have found themselves embroiled in legal disputes over corruption, fraud, environmental ...

Chelsea Schields, "Offshore Attachments: Oil and Intimacy in the Caribbean" (U California Press, 2023)

21 Jan 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Chelsea Schields's book Offshore Attachments: Oil and Intimacy in the Caribbean (U California Press, 2023) reveals how the contested management of se...

Lewis Wade, "Privilege, Economy and State in Old Regime France: Marine Insurance, War and the Atlantic Empire Under Louis XIV" (Boydell Press, 2023)

19 Jan 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Privilege, Economy and State in Old Regime France: Marine Insurance, War and the Atlantic Empire Under Louis XIV (Boydell Press, 2023) closely analys...

Ajantha Subramanian on "The Caste of Merit" ((EF,JP))

18 Jan 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Before she became the host and star of Violent Majorities, the RTB series on Israeli and Indian ethnonationalism, Ajantha Subramanian sat down wit...

Aimee Loiselle, "Beyond Norma Rae: How Puerto Rican and Southern White Women Fought for a Place in the American Working Class" (UNC Press, 2023)

17 Jan 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In the late 1970s, Hollywood producers took the published biography of Crystal Lee Sutton, a white southern textile worker, and transformed it into a ...

Christopher Corker, "The Business and Technology of the Sheffield Armaments Industry, 1900-1930" (U of York, 2016)

16 Jan 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Christopher Corker's The Business and Technology of the Sheffield Armaments Industry, 1900-1930 (U of York, 2016) focuses on four in-depth case stud...

Gustav Cederlof, "The Low-Carbon Contradiction: Energy Transition, Geopolitics, and the Infrastructural State in Cuba" (U California Press, 2023)

15 Jan 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In the pursuit of socialism, Cuba became Latin America’s most oil-dependent economy. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the country lost 86 percent of...

James W. Cortada, "Inside IBM: Lessons of a Corporate Culture in Action" (Columbia Business School, 2023)

14 Jan 2024

Contributed by Lukas

IBM was the world's leading provider of information technologies for much of the twentieth century. What made it so successful for such a long time, a...

Stéphane Jettot, "Selling Ancestry: Family Directories and the Commodification of Genealogy in Eighteenth-Century Britain" (Oxford UP, 2023)

13 Jan 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Often cited but rarely studied in their own right, family directories allow a reconsideration of how ancestry and genealogy became an object of widesp...

Matthew Romaniello, "Enterprising Empires: Russia and Britain in Eighteenth-Century Eurasia" (Cambridge UP, 2019)

12 Jan 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In his new book Enterprising Empires: Russia and Britain in Eighteenth-Century Eurasia (Cambridge University Press), Matthew Romaniello examines the w...

Robert Michael Morrissey, "People of the Ecotone: Environment and Indigenous Power at the Center of Early America" (U Washington Press, 2022)

10 Jan 2024

Contributed by Lukas

By putting the Midwest at the center of Vast Early America, University of Illinois historian Robert Morrissey reconfigures the power dynamics in the s...

Gerald Epstein, “What's Wrong with Modern Money Theory? A Policy Critique” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019)

09 Jan 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Since the last-but-one financial crisis abated and governments responded to better times by clawing back their stimulus packages, a once-obscure econo...

Katherine Rye Jewell, "Live from the Underground: A History of College Radio" (UNC Press, 2023)

09 Jan 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Bands like R.E.M., U2, Public Enemy, and Nirvana found success as darlings of college radio, but the extraordinary influence of these stations and the...

Seth Bernard, "Building Mid-Republican Rome: Labor, Architecture, and the Urban Economy" (Oxford UP, 2018)

07 Jan 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Building Mid-Republican Rome: Labor, Architecture, and the Urban Economy (Oxford University Press, 2018), offers a holistic treatment of the developme...

Klaus Buchenau, "From Grand Estates to Grand Corruption: The Battle Over the Possessions of Prince Albert of Thurn and Taxis in Interwar Yugoslavia" (Brill, 2023)

06 Jan 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Today I talked to Klaus Buchenau about his new book From Grand Estates to Grand Corruption: The Battle Over the Possessions of Prince Albert of Th...

Jayaseelan Raj, "Plantation Crisis: Ruptures of Dalit life in the Indian Tea Belt" (UCL Press, 2022)

06 Jan 2024

Contributed by Lukas

What does the collapse of India’s tea industry mean for Dalit workers who have lived, worked and died on the plantations since the colonial era? Pl...

Susanna Phillips Newbury, "The Speculative City: Art, Real Estate, and the Making of Global Los Angeles" (U Minnesota Press, 2021)

04 Jan 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Underlying every great city is a rich and vibrant culture that shapes the texture of life within. In The Speculative City: Art, Real Estate, and the ...

Timothy Brook, "The Price of Collapse: The Little Ice Age and the Fall of Ming China" (Princeton UP, 2023)

04 Jan 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Ming China in 1642 had suffered a series of disasters. Floods, and then drought had destroyed successive rice crops, sending the price of grain to ast...

Applying Historical Perspectives to Finance (with Daniel Peris)

04 Jan 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Before becoming a financial analyst and then a portfolio manager in New York, Daniel Peris worked as a tenure-track professor of Soviet history. I s...

Chinmay Tumbe, "The Age Of Pandemics (1817-1920): How They Shaped India and the World" (Harper Collins, 2020)

03 Jan 2024

Contributed by Lukas

On this episode of the Economic and Business History channel I spoke with Dr. Chinmay Tumbe, Assistant Professor of Economics at the Indian Institute ...

Richard Vague, "A Brief History of Doom: Two Hundred Years of Financial Crises" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2019)

02 Jan 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Richard Vague really really cares about private-sector debt. And he thinks you should too. In A Brief History of Doom: Two Hundred Years of Financia...

Max Deardorff, "A Tale of Two Granadas: Custom, Community, and Citizenship in the Spanish Empire, 1568–1668" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

02 Jan 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In 1570's New Kingdom of Granada (modern Colombia), a new generation of mestizo (half-Spanish, half-indigenous) men sought positions of increasing pow...

James O'Toole, "The Enlightened Capitalists: Cautionary Tales of Business Pioneers Who Tried to Do Well by Doing Good" (HarperBusiness, 2019)

01 Jan 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Is the University of Chicago-blessed, "greed is good" near-term profits approach to business wearing out its welcome? James O'Toole's The Enlightened ...

Benjamin Lorr, "The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket" (Penguin, 2020)

01 Jan 2024

Contributed by Lukas

This episode of the New Books in Economic and Business History is an interview with New York writer Benjamin Lorr. Benjamin Lorr is the author of Hel...

Benjamin R. Siegel, “Hungry Nation: Food, Famine, and the Making of Modern India” (Cambridge UP, 2018)

01 Jan 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In his first book Hungry Nation: Food, Famine, and the Making of Modern India (Cambridge University Press 2018), historian Benjamin Robert Siegel ...

Carolyn Birdsall, "Radiophilia" (Bloomsbury, 2023)

31 Dec 2023

Contributed by Lukas

A century ago, the emergence of radio, along with organized systems of broadcasting, sparked a global fascination with the 'wonder' of sound transmiss...

Genealogies of Modernity Episode 7: A Genealogy of Gun Violence

28 Dec 2023

Contributed by Lukas

The problem of gun violence is as old as guns themselves. According to historian Priya Satia, America’s present epidemic of gun violence has its roo...

Jennifer Kaufmann-Buhler, "Open Plan: A Design History of the American Office" (Bloomsbury, 2021)

28 Dec 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Albeit inspired by a progressive vision of a working environment without walls or hierarchies, the open plan office has come to be associated with som...

Marixa Lasso, "Erased: The Untold Story of the Panama Canal" (Harvard UP, 2019)

26 Dec 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Many of our presumptions about the Panama Canal Zone are wrong; it was not carved out of uninhabited jungle, the creation of Lake Gatún did not flood...

Jeremy Yellen, "The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere: When Total Empire Met Total War" (Cornell UP, 2019)

26 Dec 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Jeremy Yellen’s The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere: When Total Empire Met Total War (Cornell University Press, 2019) is a challenging transn...

David Courtwright, "The Age of Addiction: How Bad Habits Became Big Business" (Harvard UP, 2019)

26 Dec 2023

Contributed by Lukas

We are living in an age of addiction, from compulsive gaming and binge eating to pornography and opioid abuse. Today I talked with historian David Cou...

Tamara Venit-Shelton, "Herbs and Roots: A History of Chinese Doctors in the American Medical Marketplace" (Yale UP, 2019)

26 Dec 2023

Contributed by Lukas

The modern popularity of acupuncture and herbal medicine belies the long history of Chinese medicine in the U.S. In Herbs and Roots: A History of Chin...

Matt Garcia, "Eli and the Octopus: The CEO Who Tried to Reform One of the World’s Most Notorious Corporations" (Harvard UP, 2023)

25 Dec 2023

Contributed by Lukas

The poignant rise and fall of an idealistic immigrant who, as CEO of a major conglomerate, tried to change the way America did business before he hims...

Howie Singer and Bill Rosenblatt, "Key Changes: The Ten Times Technology Transformed the Music Industry" (Oxford UP, 2023)

23 Dec 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Key Changes: The Ten Times Technology Transformed the Music Industry (Oxford University Press, 2023) by Howie Singer and Bill Rosenblatt tells a new ...

Devrim Adam Yavuz, "Democracy and Capitalism in Turkey: The State, Power, and Big Business" (Bloomsbury, 2023)

23 Dec 2023

Contributed by Lukas

While a positive correlation between capitalism and democracy has existed in Western Europe and North America, the example of late-industrializing nat...

Helen Louise Cowie, "Victims of Fashion: Animal Commodities in Victorian Britain" (Cambridge UP, 2021)

21 Dec 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Animal products were used extensively in nineteenth-century Britain. A middle-class Victorian woman might wear a dress made of alpaca wool, drape hers...

Daniel Campo, "Postindustrial DIY: Recovering American Rust Belt Icons" (Fordham UP, 2023)

20 Dec 2023

Contributed by Lukas

A pioneering Detroit automobile factory. A legendary iron mill at the edge of Pittsburgh. A campus of concrete grain elevators in Buffalo. Two monumen...

Vineeta Sinha. "Temple Tracks: Labour, Piety and Railway Construction in Asia" (Berghahn Books, 2023)

20 Dec 2023

Contributed by Lukas

The notions of labour, mobility and piety have a complex and intertwined relationship. Using ethnographic methods and a historical perspective, Vineet...

Lindsay Sarah Krasnoff, "Basketball Empire: France and the Making of a Global NBA and WNBA" (Bloomsbury, 2023)

19 Dec 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Today we are joined by Dr. Lindsay Krasnoff, who is an historian, specializing in global sport, communications and diplomacy. She is also the Director...

Sara Chatfield, "In Her Own Name: The Politics of Women’s Rights Before Suffrage" (Columbia UP, 2023)

18 Dec 2023

Contributed by Lukas

We often narrate the history of women’s rights in the United States by focusing on the fight for suffrage. Yet starting as early as 1835, states exp...

Michelle R. Scott, "T.O.B.A. Time: Black Vaudeville and the Theater Owners' Booking Association in Jazz-Age America" (U Illinois Press, 2023)

18 Dec 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Black vaudevillians and entertainers joked that T.O.B.A. stood for "tough on black artists." But the Theater Owner's Booking Association (T.O.B.A.) pl...

Randall Hansen, "War, Work, and Want: How the OPEC Oil Crisis Caused Mass Migration and Revolution" (Oxford UP, 2023)

16 Dec 2023

Contributed by Lukas

The oil shock of 1973 changed everything. It brought the golden age of American and European economic growth to an end; it destabilized Middle Eastern...

The Future of Global Economic Governance: A Discussion with Jamie Martin

16 Dec 2023

Contributed by Lukas

With increasing talk of de-dollarization and the Gulf attempts to get more influence in the IMF it’s a good time to talk about the world’s interna...

Jean Yen-chun Lin, "A Spark in the Smokestacks: Environmental Organizing in Beijing Middle-Class Communities" (Columbia UP, 2023)

14 Dec 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Environmental organising in Beijing emerged in an unlikely place in the 2000s: new gated residential communities. After rapid population growth and ho...

Niall G MacKenzie et al., "Varieties of Capitalism Over Time" (Routledge, 2022)

13 Dec 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Varieties of Capitalism Over Time (Routledge, 2022) looks at how varieties of capitalism emerge over time and across different geographies, and is co...

Yan Slobodkin, "The Starving Empire: A History of Famine in France's Colonies" (Cornell UP, 2023)

11 Dec 2023

Contributed by Lukas

The Starving Empire: A History of Famine in France's Colonies (Cornell University Press, 2023) by Dr. Yan Slobodkin traces the history of famine in t...

Regina Lee Blaszczyk and David Suisman, "Capitalism and the Senses" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2023)

11 Dec 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Regina Lee Blaszczyk and David Suisman's Capitalism and the Senses (U Pennsylvania Press, 2023) is the first edited volume to explore how the forces...

Paul Crosthwaite et al., "Invested: How Three Centuries of Stock Market Advice Reshaped Our Money, Markets, and Minds" (U Chicago Press, 2022)

10 Dec 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Who hasn’t wished for a surefire formula for riches and a ticket to the good life? For three centuries, investment advisers of all kinds, legit and ...

Fae Dussart, "In the Service of Empire: Domestic Service and Mastery in Metropole and Colony" (Bloomsbury, 2022)

07 Dec 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Despite recent research, the 19th-century history of domestic service in empire and its wider implications is underexplored. In the Service of Empire...

Christopher A. Whatley and Joanna Hambly, "Salt: Scotland's Newest Oldest Industry" (Birlinn, 2023)

05 Dec 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Salt is a vital commodity. For many centuries it sustained life for Scots as seasoning for a diet dominated by grains (mainly oats), and for preservat...

Andrew C. McKevitt, "Gun Country: Gun Capitalism, Culture, and Control in Cold War America" (UNC Press, 2023)

04 Dec 2023

Contributed by Lukas

The United States has more guns than people – a condition that is “unprecedented in world history.” Scholars often focus on gun culture, the Sec...

Monica Huerta, "The Unintended: Photography, Property, and the Aesthetics of Racial Capitalism" (NYU Press, 2023)

04 Dec 2023

Contributed by Lukas

The end of the nineteenth century saw massive developments and innovations in photography at a time when the forces of Western modernity—industriali...

Lawrence Zhang, "Power for a Price: The Purchase of Official Appointments in Qing China" (Harvard UP, 2023)

04 Dec 2023

Contributed by Lukas

The Qing dynasty's office purchase system (juanna) allowed men to legally and openly pay for appointments in the civil service — enabling them to sk...

Sara Byala, "Bottled: How Coca-Cola Became African" (Oxford UP, 2023)

03 Dec 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Travel to virtually any African country and you are likely to find a Coca-Cola, often a cold one at that. Bottled asks how this carbonated drink bec...

Daniel Herbert, "Maverick Movies: New Line Cinema and the Transformation of American Film" (U California Press, 2023)

02 Dec 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Daniel Herbert's book Maverick Movies: New Line Cinema and the Transformation of American Film (U California Press, 2023) tells the improbable stor...

Charles S. Maier, "The Project-State and Its Rivals: A New History of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries" (Harvard UP, 2023)

29 Nov 2023

Contributed by Lukas

We thought we knew the story of the twentieth century. For many in the West, after the two world conflicts and the long cold war, the verdict was clea...

Dirk Van Laak, "Lifelines of Our Society: A Global History of Infrastructure" (MIT Press, 2023)

26 Nov 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Infrastructure is essential to defining how the public functions, yet there is little public knowledge regarding why and how it became today's stronge...

Sarah E. Stoller, "Inventing the Working Parent: Work, Gender, and Feminism in Neoliberal Britain" (MIT Press, 2023)

24 Nov 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Sarah E. Stoller, Inventing the Working Parent: Work, Gender, and Feminism in Neoliberal Britain (MIT Press, 2023) is the first historical examinati...

Tabitha Stanmore, "Love Spells and Lost Treasure: Service Magic in England from the Later Middle Ages to the Early Modern Era" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

24 Nov 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Magic is ubiquitous across the world and throughout history. Yet if witchcraft is acknowledged as a persistent presence in the medieval and early mode...

Ruth Dalton, "Living in Houses: A Personal History English Domestic Architecture" (Lund Humphries, 2022)

22 Nov 2023

Contributed by Lukas

In Living in Houses: A Personal History of English Domestic Architecture (Lund Humphries, 2022), Dr. Ruth Dalton presents a rich and rewarding histo...

Jarmo T. Kotilaine, "Sustainable Prosperity in the Arab Gulf: From Miracle to Method" (Routledge, 2023)

22 Nov 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Tracing the development journey of the Arabian Gulf region with a forward-looking perspective, Sustainable Prosperity in the Arab Gulf: From Miracle...

Economic Enchantments

22 Nov 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Anat Rosenberg, Kristof Smeyers, and Astrid Van den Bossche discuss the fresh historiographies of capitalism offered by studies of enchantment and mag...

Amy Harris, "Being Single in Georgian England: Families, Households, and the Unmarried" (Oxford UP, 2023)

21 Nov 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Being Single in Georgian England: Families, Households, and the Unmarried (Oxford University Press, 2023) by Dr. Amy Harris is the first book-length ...

Joe Lane, "Networks, Innovation, and Knowledge: the North Staffordshire Potteries, 1750-1851" (U of London, 2023)

20 Nov 2023

Contributed by Lukas

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the industrial district of the North Staffordshire Potteries dominated the British earthenware industr...

Thomas Blake Earle, "The Liberty to Take Fish: Atlantic Fisheries and Federal Power in Nineteenth-Century America" (Cornell UP, 2023)

19 Nov 2023

Contributed by Lukas

In The Liberty to Take Fish: Atlantic Fisheries and Federal Power in Nineteenth-Century America (Cornell University Press, 2023), Dr. Thomas Blake E...

Matthew F. Jordan, "Danger Sound Klaxon!: The Horn That Changed History" (U Virginia Press, 2023)

18 Nov 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Danger Sound Klaxon!:The Horn That Changed History (University of Virginia Press, 2023) reveals the untold story of the Klaxon automobile horn, one o...

Jason Puskar, "The Switch: An Off and On History of Digital Humans" (U Minnesota Press, 2023)

18 Nov 2023

Contributed by Lukas

From the telegraph to the touchscreen, how the development of binary switching transformed everyday life and changed the shape of human agency. The Sw...

Plantationocene

17 Nov 2023

Contributed by Lukas

In this episode of High Theory, Neil Safier talks with us about the Plantationocene, a geological epoch that traces the effects of climate change to t...

Monetary History, Bretton Woods, and Banking Crises

16 Nov 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Michael Bordo (Rutgers Economics Professor and Hoover Distinguished Visiting Fellow) joins the podcast to discuss his career, monetary history, the le...

Eve Warburton, "Resource Nationalism in Indonesia: Booms, Big Business, and the State" (Cornell UP, 2023)

15 Nov 2023

Contributed by Lukas

In Resource Nationalism in Indonesia: Booms, Big Business, and the State (Cornell UP, 2023), Eve Warburton traces nationalist policy trajectories in...