New Books in Economic and Business History

Eighteenth-century France witnessed an unprecedented proliferation of materially unstable art, from oil paintings that cracked within years of their creation to enormous pastel portraits vulnerable to the slightest touch or vibration. In A Delicate Matter: Art, Fragility, and Consumption in Eighteenth-Century France (Penn State University Press, 2024), Dr. Oliver Wunsch traces these artistic pract...

In 1717, the Council of Trade and Plantations received "agreeable news" from New England. "Bellamy with his ship and Company" had perished on the shoals of Cape Cod. Who was this Bellamy and why did his demise please the government? Born Samuel Bellamy circa 1689, he was a pirate who operated off the coast of New England and throughout the Caribbean. Later known as "Black Sam," or the "Prince of P...

Rachel S. Gross's Shopping All the Ways to the Woods (Yale University Press, 2024) tells the fascinating history of the profitable paradox of the American outdoor experience: visiting nature first requires shopping No escape to nature is complete without a trip to an outdoor recreational store or a browse through online offerings. This is the irony of the American outdoor experience: visiting wild...

A new economic history which uncovers the forgotten left-wing, anti-imperial, pacifist origins of economic cosmopolitanism and free trade from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century.  The post-1945 international free-trade regime was established to foster a more integrated, prosperous, and peaceful world. As US Secretary of State Cordell Hull (1933-1944), "Father of the United Nations" an...

In an era where states and politicians regularly weaponize moral emotions to foment intergroup conflict and violence, understanding the dynamics of violent mobilization and state authority are more relevant than ever before.  In Righteous Revolutionaries: Morality, Mobilization, and Violence in the Making of the Chinese State (U Michigan Press, 2022), Javed illustrates how states appeal to popular...

Famine brought ruin to the Irish countryside in the nineteenth century. In response, people around the world and from myriad social, ethnic, and religious backgrounds became involved in Irish famine relief. They included enslaved Black people in Virginia, poor tenant farmers in rural New York, and members of the Cherokee and Choctaw nations, as well as plantation owners in the US south, abolitioni...

Through a variety of archival documents, artefacts, illustrations, and references to primary and secondary literature, On the Job: A History of American Work Uniforms (Bloomsbury, 2024) by Dr. Heather Akou explores the changing styles, business practices, and lived experiences of the people who make, sell, and wear service-industry uniforms in the United States. It highlights how the uniform busin...

Parents everywhere want their children to be happy and do well. Yet how parents seek to achieve this ambition varies enormously. For instance, American and Chinese parents are increasingly authoritative and authoritarian, whereas Scandinavian parents tend to be more permissive. Why? Love, Money, and Parenting investigates how economic forces and growing inequality shape how parents raise their chi...

Over the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, as many as eight million whites left the economically depressed southern countryside and migrated to the booming factory towns and cities of the industrial Midwest in search of work. The “hillbilly highway” was one of the largest internal relocations of poor and working people in American history, yet it has largely escaped close study by histori...

Charles Dallara, managing director of the Institute of International Finance from 1993–2013, talks about his crisis memoir: Euroshock: How the Largest Debt Restructuring in History Helped Save Greece and Preserve the Eurozone (Rodin Books, 2024). Dallara, who co-led a small team who negotiated a €100-billion write-off of Greek debt in 2011-12, discusses how it felt to be an American "interloper",...

Nancy Folbre’s The Rise and Decline of Patriarchal Systems: An Intersectional Political Economy (Verso, 2021) asks the questions of why and under what conditions overlapping systems of exploitation persist and decline. Folbre adds this book to a long repertoire of studying the economics of care, social reproduction, household-state relations, and women’s coalition building. In making sense of the...

In the sixteenth century, members of the Ouchi family were kings in all but name in much of Japan. Immensely wealthy, they controlled sea lanes stretching to Korea and China, as well as the Japanese city of Yamaguchi, which functioned as an important regional port with a growing population and a host of temples and shrines. The family was unique in claiming ethnic descent from Korean kings, and-re...

On July 27th, 1827, the dey of Algiers struck the French consul over his country’s refusal to pay back its debts–specifically, to two Jewish merchant families: the Bacris, and the Busnachs. It was an error of judgment: France blockaded Algiers, and later invaded, turning Algeria into a French colony. The unpaid debt has festered as a diplomatic issue for almost 30 years. Foreign consuls in the cor...

The 2020 toppling of slave-trader Edward Colston's statue by Black Lives Matter protesters in Bristol was a dramatic reminder of Britain's role in trans-Atlantic slavery, too often overlooked. Yet the legacy of that predatory economy reaches far beyond bronze memorials; it continues to shape the entire visual fabric of the country. Architect Victoria Perry explores the relationship between the wea...

Most people rely only on their life experience to make investment decisions. This causes them to overlook cyclical forces that repeatedly reshape economies and markets. Investing in U.S. Financial History: Understanding the Past to Forecast the Future (Greenleaf, 2024) fills this void by recounting the comprehensive financial history of the United States of America. It begins with Alexander Hamilt...

"Luddite" has become an insult and Brain Merchant wants to change that. Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech (Little, Brown, 2023) tells the story of when machines starting taking human jobs, when an underground network of 19th century rebels, the Luddites, took up arms against the industrialists that were automating their work--and how it explains the power, threat,...

A total of 305,000 enslaved Africans arrived in the New World aboard American vessels over a span of two hundred years as American merchants and mariners sailed to Africa and to the Caribbean to acquire and sell captives. Using exhaustive archival research, including many collections that have never been used before, historian Sean M. Kelley argues that slave trading needs to be seen as integral t...

Wartime is not just about military success. Economists at War: How a Handful of Economists Helped Win and Lose the World Wars (Oxford UP, 2020) tells a different story - about a group of remarkable economists who used their skills to help their countries fight their battles during the Chinese-Japanese War, Second World War, and the Cold War. 1935-55 was a time of conflict, confrontation, and destr...

A culinary and cultural history of plant-based eating in the United States that delves into the subcultures and politics that have defined alternative food.  The vegan diet used to be associated only with eccentric hippies and tofu-loving activists who shop at co-ops and live on compounds. We’ve come a long way since then. Now, fine-dining restaurants like Eleven Madison Park cater to chic upscale...

Showing how the history of the apple goes far beyond the orchard and into the social, cultural and technological developments of Britain and the USA, Apples and Orchards since the Eighteenth Century: Material Innovation and Cultural Tradition (Bloomsbury, 2023) by Dr. Joanna Crosby takes an interdisciplinary approach to reveal the importance of the apple as a symbol of both tradition and innovatio...

Kristine M. McCusker's book Just Enough to Put Him Away Decent: Death Care, Life Extension, and the Making of a Healthier South, 1900-1955 (U Illinois Press, 2023) takes, as its focus, the combined history of death and health in the American South between 1900 and 1955. The text is ambitious in scope, and weaves together multiple oral histories to create a nuanced and engaging narrative. McCusker...

Why did khadi become so central to India’s freedom struggle? How did it evolve into an international trademark – and what does khadi signify in India today? In this episode, Kenneth Bo Nielsen talks to Subhadeep Chowdhury about the political, cultural, and economic importance of khadi, the famous handspun and woven natural fiber cloth that we often associate with Mahatma Gandhi, but which is also...

In 1817, in a region of the eastern coast of British India then known as Cuttack, a group of Paiks, the area's landed militia, began agitating against the East India Company's government, burning down government buildings and looting the treasury. While the attacks were initially understood as an attempt to return the territory's native ruler to power, investigations following the rebellion's supp...

Japan is often imagined as a nation with a long history of whaling. In The Gods of the Sea: Whales and Coastal Communities in Northeast Japan, c.1600-2019 (Cambridge UP, 2023), Fynn Holm argues that for centuries some regions in early modern Japan did not engage in whaling. In fact, they were actively opposed to it, even resorting to violence when whales were killed. Resistance against whaling was...

Bankers brought the global economic system to its knees in 2007 and nearly did the same in 2020. Both times, the US government bailed out the banks and left them in control. How can we end this cycle of trillion-dollar bailouts and make finance work for the rest of us? Busting the Bankers' Club confronts the powerful people and institutions that benefit from our broken financial system—and the str...