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New Books in Economic and Business History

New Books Network

Interviews with scholars of the economic and business history about their new books

arts books

All Episodes

63:08

Edward Berenson, "Perfect Communities: Levitt,...

New Books in Economic and Business History ·

2025/08/13

The rise and fall of William J. Levitt, the man who made the suburban house a mass commodity.Two material artifacts defined the middle-class American lifestyle in the mid-twentieth century: the automobile, which brought gas stations, highways, commercial strips, and sprawl; and the single-family suburban home, the repository of many families’ long-term wealth. While the man who did the most to make the automobile a mass commodity—Henry Ford—is well known, few know the story of the man who did the

57:38

Every Purchase Matters: How Fair Trade Farmers,...

New Books in Economic and Business History ·

2025/08/12

We all have the power to change the world through the products we buy. This simple premise has driven the growth of the conscious consumer movement for decades. Indeed, what started with a handful of niche sustainability brands has exploded into the mainstream with labels like Organic, Non-GMO, and Fair Trade Certified now adorning products in major retailers across the country. Yet the true promise of ethical sourcing and conscious consumerism has not been fully realized. Paul Rice has dedicated

62:03

Kevin P. Donovan, "Money, Value, and the State:...

New Books in Economic and Business History ·

2025/08/12

In his book, Money, Value, and the State: Sovereignty and Citizenship in East Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2024), Kevin Donovan argues that East African decolonization was not coterminous with political sovereignty but rather consisted of a longer process of reorganizing how value was legitimately defined, produced, and distributed. It is an analysis of how postcolonial states tried to remake economic temporalities, space, and standards and how citizens pursued alternatives that subverted

38:29

Ahmad Shokr, "Harvests of Liberation: Cotton,...

New Books in Economic and Business History ·

2025/08/10

Harvests of Liberation offers a critical reinterpretation of Egypt’s path to decolonization through the lens of its most important export crop: cotton. In this richly detailed and methodologically innovative work, historian Ahmad Shokr shifts the focus from nationalist rhetoric and elite politics to the material infrastructures, commodity chains, and agrarian reforms that underpinned Egypt’s transformation from colonial dependency to postcolonial developmental state. Spanning the early twentieth

64:55

Megan Brown, "The Seventh Member State: Algeria,...

New Books in Economic and Business History ·

2025/08/09

In The Seventh Member State: Algeria, France, and the European Community (Harvard University Press, 2022), Dr. Megan Brown details the surprising story of how Algeria joined and then left the postwar European Economic Community and what its past inclusion means for extracontinental membership in today’s European Union. On their face, the mid-1950s negotiations over European integration were aimed at securing unity in order to prevent violent conflict and boost economies emerging from the disaster of

75:46

Ronald C. Po, "Shaping the Blue Dragon: Maritime...

New Books in Economic and Business History ·

2025/08/06

Shaping the Blue Dragon: Maritime China in the Ming and Qing Dynasties (Liverpool UP, 2024) offers a vivid look at China's dynamic and longstanding relationship with the sea. Through the lives of pirates, maritime advisors, cartographers, admirals, writers, and travelers, Ronald C. Po brings maritime China to life — revealing a world far more connected and sea-orientated than often assumed. Richly detailed and captivating, Shaping the Blue Dragon should interest those in Chinese history, East Asian

91:18

Toby Lincoln, "An Urban History of China" (Cambridge...

New Books in Economic and Business History ·

2025/08/04

In An Urban History of China (Cambridge UP, 2021), Toby Lincoln offers the first history of Chinese cities from their origins to the present. Despite being an agricultural society for thousands of years, China had an imperial urban civilization. Over the last century, this urban civilization has been transformed into the world's largest modern urban society. Throughout their long history, Chinese cities have been shaped by interactions with those around the world, and the story of urban China is a

47:19

David Chaffetz, "Raiders, Rulers, and Traders: The...

New Books in Economic and Business History ·

2025/08/03

No animal is so entangled in human history as the horse. The thread starts in prehistory, with a slight, shy animal, hunted for food. Domesticating the horse allowed early humans to settle the vast Eurasian steppe; later, their horses enabled new forms of warfare, encouraged long-distance trade routes, and ended up acquiring deep cultural and religious significance.Over time, horses came to power mighty empires in Iran, Afghanistan, China, India, and, later, Russia. Genghis Khan and the

62:24

Paul Vigna, "The Almightier: How Money Became God,...

New Books in Economic and Business History ·

2025/08/02

The pursuit of wealth is considered an essential function of human nature, and greed is an unspoken civic virtue. Many of us revere billionaires and Wall Street rain-makers, then complain about “the system” being rigged, and wonder why the country doesn’t seem to work for the little guy anymore. Some blame the Deep State for income inequality and corruption, and others blame capitalism, but the truth is that these issues have much deeper roots: our devotion to money is a manmade invention that has

67:47

Gavin Williams, "Format Friction: Perspectives on the...

New Books in Economic and Business History ·

2025/08/01

With the rise of the gramophone around 1900, the shellac disc traveled the world and eventually became the dominant sound format in the first half of the twentieth century. Format Friction brings together a set of local encounters with the shellac disc, beginning with its preconditions in South Asian knowledge and labor, to offer a global portrait of this format.Spun at seventy-eight revolutions per minute, the shellac disc rapidly became an industrial standard even while the gramophone itself

58:22

Jennifer Bess, "Where the Red-Winged Blackbirds Sing:...

New Books in Economic and Business History ·

2025/07/31

Where the Red-Winged Blackbirds Sing: The Akimel O'odham and Cycles of Agricultural Transformation in the Phoenix Basin (UP of Colorado, 2021) is not a simple story of environmental decline and colonial imposion. In this brilliantly interdisciplinary book, Goucher College peace studies professor Jennifer Bess instead weaves a complicated narrative of change, stability, autonomy, and adaptation, focusing on Indigenous ways of understanding the land and its beings, and how the people who were created

60:46

Daniel Morales, "Between Here and There: The...

New Books in Economic and Business History ·

2025/07/30

Between Here and There is the first history of the creation of modern US-Mexico migration patterns narrated from multiple geographic and institutional sites. This book analyzes the interplay between the US and Mexican governments, civic organizations, and migrants on both sides of the border and offers a revisionist and comprehensive view of Mexican migration as it was established in the early twentieth century and reproduced throughout the century as a socioeconomic system that reached from Texas

70:00

Thomas M. Kemple, "Marx's Wager: Das Kapital and...

New Books in Economic and Business History ·

2025/07/30

Marx’s Capital looms large today, a century and a half after first publication, a massive tome that attempts to document and map out the dynamics of a society consumed by capital accumulation. The complexity and scope, as well as its voluminous incompleteness upon his death, have left many readers perplexed, looking for a ‘royal road’ to comprehension. However, this has led to a number of misreadings, with commentators often trying to pick at what they assume is the core of the text, leaving the

105:12

Sarah Teasley, "Designing Modern Japan" (Reaktion...

New Books in Economic and Business History ·

2025/07/27

Sarah Teasley's Designing Modern Japan (Reaktion, 2022) unpicks the history of Japanese design from the mid-nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth, focusing on continuities and disruptions within communities and practices of design. Designing Modern Japan explores design in the unfolding contexts of modernization, empire and war, defeat and reconstruction, postwar economic acceleration, and beyond. Throughout, Teasley is sensitive to issues of gender and class within the communities of

49:21

Christopher Marquis and Kunyuan Qiao, "Mao and...

New Books in Economic and Business History ·

2025/07/26

Mao and Markets: The Communist Roots of Chinese Enterprise (Yale University Press, 2022) by Dr. Christopher Marquis & Dr. Kunyuan Qiao presents a thoroughly researched assessment of how China’s economic success continues to be shaped by the communist ideology of Chairman MaoIt was long assumed that as China embraced open markets and private enterprise, its state-controlled economy would fall by the wayside, that free markets would inevitably lead to a more liberal society. Instead, China’s growth

40:05

Nadya Bair, "The Decisive Network: Magnum Photos and...

New Books in Economic and Business History ·

2025/07/26

The legendary Magnum photo agency has long been associated with heroic lone wolf male photographers such as Robert Capa and Henri Cartier-Bresson, roaming the world in search of the “decisive moment” – the perfect shot that captured the essence of a major news story. Nadya Bair’s highly original book The Decisive Network: Magnum Photos and the Postwar Image Market (University of California Press 2020) argues that this idealized portrayal of Magnum occludes the larger networks within which these

67:28

Agathe Demarais, "Backfire: How Sanctions Reshape the...

New Books in Economic and Business History ·

2025/07/25

Sanctions have become the go-to foreign policy tool for the United States. Coercive economic measures such as trade tariffs, financial penalties, and export controls affect large numbers of companies and states across the globe. Some of these penalties target nonstate actors, such as Colombian drug cartels and Islamist terror groups; others apply to entire countries, including North Korea, Iran, and Russia. U.S. policy makers see sanctions as a low-cost tactic, but in reality these measures often

67:28

Agathe Demarais, "Backfire: How Sanctions Reshape the...

New Books in Economic and Business History ·

2025/07/25

65:13

Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna, "The AI Con: How to...

New Books in Economic and Business History ·

2025/07/23

Is artificial intelligence going to take over the world? Have big tech scientists created an artificial lifeform that can think on its own? Is it going to put authors, artists, and others out of business? Are we about to enter an age where computers are better than humans at everything?Linguist Emily M. Bender and sociologist Alex Hanna make clear that kind of thinking is a symptom of a phenomenon known as “AI hype.” Hype twists words and helps the rich get richer by justifying data theft,

59:32

Michael John Witgen, "Seeing Red: Indigenous Land,...

New Books in Economic and Business History ·

2025/07/20

Against long odds, the Anishinaabeg resisted removal, retaining much of their land in the Old Northwest—what’s now Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. Their success rested partly on their roles as sellers of natural resources and buyers of trade goods, which made them key players in the political economy of plunder that drove white settlement and US development in the region. But, as Michael Witgen demonstrates in Seeing Red: Indigenous Land, American Expansion, and the Political Economy of Plunder

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New Books in Economic and Business History

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