New Books in Economic and Business History

Today, being authentic has become an aspiration and an imperative. The notion of authenticity shapes the consumption habits of individuals in the most diverse contexts such as food and drinks, clothing, music, tourism and the digital sphere, even leading to the resurgence of apparently obsolescent modes of production such as craft. It also significantly transforms urban areas, their local economie...

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 the ongoing influence of the Vietnam War on contemporary ideas about race and beauty. Framing skin as the site around which these ideas have been formed, Tu foregrounds the histories of militarism in the production of US biomedical knowledge and commerci...

In Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism (Melville House, 2023), Yanis Varoufakis argues that capitalism is dead and a new economic era has begun. Insane sums of money that were supposed to re-float our economies in the wake of the financial crisis and the pandemic have ended up supercharging big tech's hold over every aspect of the economy. Capitalism's twin pillars - markets and profit - have...

In Visions of a Digital Nation: Market and Monopoly in British Telecommunications (MIT Press, 2024), Jacob Ward explains why the privatization of British Telecom signaled a pivotal moment in the rise of neoliberalism, and how it was shaped by the longer development and digitalization of Britain’s telecommunications infrastructure.  When Margaret Thatcher sold British Telecom for £3.6 billion in 19...

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), Neil Lee, a Professor of Economic Geography at the London School of Economics, explores the question of how societies have fostered and supported innovation. The book challenges conventional assumptions that innovative economies must be unequal. Drawin...

“Free enterprise” is an everyday phrase that connotes an American common sense. It appears everywhere from political speeches to pop culture. And it is so central to the idea of the United States that some even labeled Christopher Columbus and the Pilgrims free enterprisers. In his new book, Free Enterprise: An American History (Yale University Press, 2019), Lawrence Glickman analyses that phrase’...

What can we learn from the financial crisis that brought Hitler to power? How did diplomatic deadlock fuel the rise of authoritarianism? Tobias Straumann shares vital insights with 1931: Debt, Crisis, and the Rise of Hitler (Oxford University Press, 2019). Through his fast-paced narrative, Straumann reveals how inflexible treaties created an inescapable debt trap that spawned Nazism. Caught betwee...

Imperial Wine: How the British Empire Made Wine’s New World (University of California Press, 2022) by Dr. Jennifer Regan-Lefebvre is a bold, rigorous and award-winning history of Britain’s surprising role in creating the wine industries of Australia, South Africa, and New Zealand. Dr. Regan-Lefebvre bridges the genres of global commodity history and imperial history, presenting provocative new res...

In Properties of Empire: Indians, Colonists, and Land Speculators on the New England Frontier (NYU Press, 2019), Ian Saxine, Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Bridgewater State University, shows the dynamic relationship between Native and English systems of property on the turbulent edge of Britain’s empire, and how so many colonists came to believe their prosperity depended on acknowledg...

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’s credited with creating the China Poblana dress, a connection of dubious historical veracity made several centuries after her death. But Catarina is one of Mexico’s most famous “chinos”—despite the fact that she was likely from India, not China. In fac...

We begin this new season of International Horizons with an interview by RBI Director John Torpey with Neta Crawford from Oxford University and the Cost of War Project. Prof. Crawford argues that conflict is less lethal than in the past, although the overall costs of war exceed the duration of previous wars in many dimensions. The conversation delves into the possibilities of a conflict with China...

The Gift: How Objects of Prestige Shaped the Atlantic Slave Trade and Colonialism (Cambridge University Press, 2023) explores how objects of prestige contributed to cross-cultural exchanges between Africans and Europeans during the Atlantic slave trade. An eighteenth-century silver ceremonial sword, commissioned in the port of La Rochelle by French traders, was offered as a gift to an African comm...

There is a familiar narrative about American suburbs: after 1945, white residents left cities for leafy, affluent subdivisions and the prosperity they seemed to embody. In Levittown’s Shadow: Poverty in America’s Wealthiest Postwar Suburb (U Chicago Press, 2023) tells us there's more to this story, offering an eye-opening account of diverse, poor residents living and working in those same neighbor...

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 internment and labor camps, labor battalions, government institutions, and private industry. Particularly for those in the labor battalions, this period was characterized by extraordinary physical and psychological suffering, hunger, inadequate shel...

Can we predict the future? In The Will to Predict: Orchestrating the Future Through Science (Cornell UP, 2023), Eglė Rindzevičiūtė, an Associate Professor of Criminology and Sociology at Kingston University, tells the story of Soviet and Post-Soviet attempts to order economy and society using a variety of scientific and management techniques. The analysis is wide ranging, demonstrating the contemp...

California’s wine country conjures images of pastoral vineyards and cellars lined with oak barrels. As a mainstay of the state’s economy, California wines occupy the popular imagination like never before and drive tourism in famous viticultural regions across the state. Scholars know remarkably little, however, about the history of the wine industry and the diverse groups who built it. In fact, co...

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 do they use it to transmit ideas about China, Chinese art, and Chinese culture? In New Export China: Translations across Time and Place in Contemporary Chinese Porcelain Art (University of California Press, 2023), Alex Burchmore explores the place of...

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. Not many at the time–whether legislators or company officials in London, and certainly not Indian people—though this was a great idea. As Joshua Ehrlich notes in his book The East India Company and the Politics of Knowledge (Cambridge University Press...

Drawing on historical institutionalism and interpretive tools of international law, Transforming International Institutions: How Money Quietly Sidelined Multilateralism at The United Nations (Oxford University Press, 2023) Dr. Erin Graham provides a novel theory of uncoordinated change over time. The book illuminates how a slow, quiet, subterranean process can produce big, radical change in intern...

In this first environmental history of Italian fascism, Marco Armiero, Roberta Biasillo, and Wilko Graf von Hardenberg reveal that nature and fascist rhetoric are inextricable. Mussolini's Nature explores fascist political ecologies, or rather the practices and narratives through which the regime constructed imaginary and material ecologies functional to its political project. Mussolini's Nature:...

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 how our attachment to its rhythms influences how we live. We take the seven-day week for granted, rarely asking what anchors it or what it does to us. Yet weeks are not dictated by the natural order. They are, in fact, an artificial construction of t...

Monte Carlo and Las Vegas have become synonymous with casino gambling. Both destinations featured it as part of a broad variety of leisure and consumption opportunities that normalized games of chance and created emotional atmospheres that supported the hedonistic aspects of gambling. Urban spaces and architecture were carefully designed to enable a rapid growth of the casino industry and produce...

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 has become more accessible worldwide, changing beauty trends have led to a proliferation of beauty standards for members of different racial groups. In Refashioning Race: How Global Cosmetic Surgery Crafts New Beauty Standards (University of Californ...

The poignant saga of Guatemala's adoption industry: an international marketplace for children, built on a foundation of inequality, war, and Indigenous dispossession. In 2009 Dolores Preat went to a small Maya town in Guatemala to find her birth mother. At the address retrieved from her adoption file, she was told that her supposed mother, one Rosario Colop Chim, never gave up a child for adoption...

Pious Labour: Islam, Artisanship, and Technology in Colonial India (University of California Press, 2023) focuses on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries northern India and working-class people who asserted Islamic piety through their trade while responding to industrial change, especially the development of new technologies and state and colonial projects. Indian Muslim artisans, suc...