New Books in Economic and Business History

The untold story of the first-generation Jewish American toymakers who literally manufactured “the century of the child.” In 1902, Morris and Rose Michtom invented the Teddy Bear―bound by clothing scraps, stuffed with sawdust, and given button eyes with a sad, longing expression―in the back room of their Brooklyn candy store. Together they launched the Ideal Toy Corporation, joining a set of other...

Giant companies, launch rockets into space, control satellite communication and develop era-defining AI technologies. But they are also seen as promoting misinformation, undermining democracy and violating privacy. Big banks, reeling since the financial crisis of 2008, continue to be racked with major scandals. Drawing on examples such as the VW scandal in Germany, Cambridge Analytica and Samsung...

Black Power, Inc.: Corporate America and the Rise of Multinational Empowerment Politics, (U Pennsylvania Press, 2026), traces the rise of Black empowerment politics in the United States and Africa. On a cold January day in 1964, civil rights minister turned entrepreneur Rev. Leon Howard Sullivan declared to a group of supporters gathered to witness the launch of Sullivan’s latest venture, Opportu...

For decades, tree planting and forestry have been pivotal to Chinese environmentalism. During the Mao era, while forests were razed to fuel rapid increases in industrial production, the “Greening the Motherland” campaign promoted conservationist tree-planting nationwide. Contested Environmentalisms: Trees and the Making of Modern China (Stanford UP, 2025) explores the seemingly contradictory rhet...

The story of ancient Rome is predominantly one of great men with great fortunes. Surviving Rome: The Economic Lives of the Ninety Percent (Princeton UP, 2025) unearths another history, one of ordinary Romans, who worked with their hands and survived through a combination of grit and grinding labor.  Focusing on the working majority, Kim Bowes tells the stories of people like the tenant farmer Ep...

An innovative approach in the field of material culture and consumption studies, Life in the Georgian Parsonage: Morals, Material Goods and the English Clergy (Bloomsbury, 2025) by Dr. Jon Stobart looks at the houses, consumption and lifestyle of Church of England clergy in the long 18th century, linking moral debates and popular representations of the clergy to the material culture of their house...

Geoffrey Jones and Sabine Pitteloud present the latest research on the global history of multinationals and their impact on society and the environment. The Cambridge Companion to the History of Multinationals and Society (Cambridge UP, 2026) brings together leading international scholars, these essays survey key themes in our relationship with multinationals, from taxation and corruption to gende...

Respectability on the Line: Gender, Race, and Labor along British and Colonial Indian Railways (U California Press, 2026) by Dr. Mattie Armstrong-Price offers a social and cultural history of railway labor in Britain and colonial India from the 1840s through World War I. The book treats the railway industry as a microcosm through which to study the history of capitalism in the liberal imperial era...

At the heart of the modern world lie ventilation shafts. We may not notice them, but wherever there are tunnels, sewers, mines, car parks and energy stations under our feet, vents will be doing vital work keeping them cool and fume-free. Vents come in a wonderful and inventive variety of forms. Adventurous Vents: A Journey through the Ventilation Shafts of Britain (Penguin, 2025) by Lucy Lavers, J...

Standardizing Empire: The US Military, Korea, and the Origins of Military-Industrial Capitalism (U Pennsylvania Press, 2026) by Dr. Patrick Chung traces the origins of today’s United States-led capitalist world economy. The nation’s foreign policy during the Cold War saw two unprecedented developments: the continuous global deployment of US soldiers and the creation of a permanent worldwide milita...

Working-Class Courtship, Marriage, and Divorce in Scotland, 1855–1939 (Oxford UP, 2025) by Professor Eleanor Gordon, Professor Katie Barclay, and Dr. Jeff Meeks is the first book-length study of the history of working-class courtship and marriage in Scotland, from the establishment of civil registration to the introduction in 1939 of legislation which abolished irregular marriage and introduced ci...

Since 2008, there has been tremendous public interest in the social and ecological ramifications of the global land rush, a rapid increase of capital investment into land, especially for the establishment of agricultural and tree plantations. In Laos, the government has granted five percent of the national territory to investors as long-term land concessions since the early 2000s. Land investments...

The battlefields were not the only places that threatened death during World War I. As conflict raged on and supply lines tightened, the allied powers of France, Britain, and Italy faced a fundamental problem: keeping their soldier and civilian populations safe from starvation. Wheat at War: Allied Economic Cooperation in the Great War (Oxford UP, 2025) describes how, faced with this immense chall...

As European empires crumbled in the 20th century, the power structures that had dominated the world for centuries were up for renegotiation. Yet instead of a rebirth for democracy, what emerged was a silent coup – namely, the unstoppable rise of global corporate power. Exposing the origins of this epic power grab as well as its present-day consequences, Silent Coup: How Corporations Overthrew Demo...

Are jobs fair? In The Accidental Equalizer: How Luck Determines Pay after College (U Chicago Press, 2023), Jessi Streib, an associate Professor of Sociology at Duke University, uncovers the remarkable story of the way luck shapes the hiring process for a key strata of business jobs in America. Offering a thesis that is initially counterintuitive but clearly argued, empirically grounded, and ultima...

Not everything about wool is warm and fuzzy. Wool, for millennia the cold climate textile fiber, has a long relationship to war, both in terms of supporting it and causing it. Wool's strategic value in wartime, a position it gained over centuries, and contrived shortages of same in the 20th century, have helped drive consumers' transition to the synthetic fibers that have enabled fast fashion, and...

Most development histories focus on large-scale projects and multi-year plans. But how would we understand development differently if we chose a different starting point? In Village Work: Development and Rural Statecraft in Twentieth-Century Ghana (Ohio UP, 2021), Alice Wiemers exchanges the center for the periphery. Writing outwards from Kpasenpke, a village in northern Ghana, Wiemers shows how t...

Making War Safe for Capitalism: The World Bank, IMF, and the Conflict in Ukraine (Bristol UP, 2025) by Dr. Elliot Dolan-Evans examines the impact of World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) economic restructuring programmes during active conflicts. Using a critical political economy perspective, the book explores how these restructuring efforts affect vulnerable communities’ survival amid...

In the heyday of Islamic art collecting around the turn of the twentieth century, thousands of premodern ceramic objects circulated on the international antiquities market. Invisible Hands: Fabrication, Forgery, and the Art of Islamic Ceramics (Princeton University Press, 2026) tells the story of how traditional craft skills of the Islamic world, often thought to have died out with the advent of i...

A provocative book arguing that the workplace is where we learn to live democratically. In The Pandemic Workplace: How We Learned to Be Citizens in the Office (U Chicago Press, 2024) anthropologist Ilana Gershon turns her attention to the US workplace and how it changed—and changed us—during the pandemic. She argues that the unprecedented organizational challenges of the pandemic forced us to radi...

In Money and Promises: Seven Deals That Changed the World, the distinguished banker, executive, and historian Paolo Zannoni examines the complex relationship between states and banks that has changed the world. Drawing on in-depth archival research, he explores seven case studies: the republic of Pisa, seventeenth-century Venice, the early years of the Bank of England, imperial Spain, the Kingd...

How have jobs changed in the last 150 years? In The Division of Rationalized Labor (Harvard UP, 2025) Michelle Jackson, an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at Stanford University examines the original theories about the division of labour and explains why many predictions about the future of work did not emerge. Drawing on detailed case studies of medicine, law, education and m...

PONG is one of the longest- and most consistently circulating video games. Released in 1972, it remains at our fingertips as Android or iOS app, hosted at freepong.org and the Internet Archive, and even released as A Tiny Game of Pong for the Apple Watch. Despite its simplicity and ubiquity, Atari’s PONG encapsulates far more than the history of a video game and an iconic game company. King PONG:...

Industrial workers in Ukraine have a complex political lifeworld because their political action aimed at bringing radical social change coexists with a demobilizing stance that condemns all political participation as corrupt. This contradictory attitude to politics defines the character of populist mass mobilizations that shook Ukraine in 2004 and 2014, as well as the electoral overhaul of 2019 an...

In README: A Bookish History of Computing from Electronic Brains to Everything Machines (MIT Press, 2025), historian Dr. Patrick McCray argues that in order for computers to become ubiquitous, people first had to become interested in them, learn about them, and take the machines seriously. A powerful catalyst for this transformation was, ironically, one of the oldest information technologies we ha...