New Books in Economic and Business History

In 1917, the Industrial Workers of the World was rapidly gaining strength and members. Within a decade, this radical union was effectively destroyed, the victim of the most remarkable campaign of legal repression and vigilantism in American history. Under the Iron Heel is the first comprehensive account of this campaign. Founded in 1905, the IWW offered to the millions of workers aggrieved by indu...

Characterized by shared, self-managed access to food, housing, and basic conditions for a creative life, the commons are essential for communities to flourish and protect spaces of collective autonomy from capitalist encroachment. In a narrative spanning more than three centuries, Against the Commons: A Radical History of Urban Planning (University of Minnesota Press, 2022) provides a radical coun...

The squatter—defined by Noah Webster as "one that settles on new land without a title"—had long been a fixture of America's frontier past. In the antebellum period, white squatters propelled the Jacksonian Democratic Party to dominance and the United States to the shores of the Pacific. In a bold reframing of the era's political history, John Suval explores how Squatter Democracy transformed the p...

In 1776, Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations, an investigation into the nature of wealth. Smith is now considered the Father of Capitalism or the Father of Modern Economics. In fact, many people think of him as an economist and only an economist, but scholars tend to think of him as a moral philosopher. Smith lived in an era of great change, and the moral questions of the time were closely...

In 1910, the future of California wine looked dim. Beset by crises ranging from earthquakes to insect infestations, and with momentum moving toward prohibition, the nascent industry seemed dead on the vine. How then, a mere sixty years later, did a blind taste test from some of France's toughest sommeliers judge California wines superior to their French counterparts? In Crush: The Triumph of Calif...

In this podcast Jakob Feinig introduces his ideas about how and when people's practices and institutions shape money and money creation. He provided deep insight into historical episodes to support his view. Towards the end, he comments on the challenges of digital currencies. Feinig is the author of Moral Economies of Money: Politics and the Monetary Constitution of Society (Stanford UP, 2022). I...

In 2015, the anonymous leak of the Panama Papers brought to light millions of financial and legal documents exposing how the superrich hide their money using complex webs of offshore vehicles. Spiderweb Capitalism: How Global Elites Exploit Frontier Markets (Princeton UP, 2022) takes you inside this shadow economy, uncovering the mechanics behind the invisible, mundane networks of lawyers, account...

We’re all trapped. No matter how hard you try to delete apps from your phone, the power of seduction draws you back. Doom scrolling is the new normal of a 24/7 online life. What happens when your home office starts to feel like a call center and you’re too fried to log out of Facebook? We’re addicted to large-scale platforms, unable to return to the frivolous age of decentralized networks. How do...

From the late nineteenth through most of the twentieth century, the evangelical Protestant Grenfell Mission in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada, created a network of hospitals, schools, orphanages, stores, and industries with the goal of bringing health and organized society to settler fisherfolk and Indigenous populations. This infrastructure also served to support resource extraction of fisheri...

Dining out used to be considered exceptional. However, the Food Standards Authority reported that in 2014, one meal in six was eaten away from home in Britain. Previously considered a necessary substitute for an inability to obtain a meal in a family home, dining out has become a popular recreational activity for a majority of the population, offering pleasure as well as refreshment. The Social Si...

In 2011, an Ecuadorian court issued the world’s largest environmental contamination liability: a $9.5 billion judgment against Chevron. Within years, a US federal court and an international tribunal determined that the Ecuadorian judgment had been procured through fraud and was unenforceable. In The Small Matter of Suing Chevron (Duke University Press, 2022) Dr. Suzana Sawyer delves into this lega...

The global war on drugs began some 150 years before US President Richard Nixon launched the current chapter of America’s drug war in 1971. In Opium’s Orphans: The 200-Year History of the War on Drugs (Reaktion Books, 2022), P. E. Caquet tells the story of “how an ever-larger group of mind-altering products came to be prohibited throughout the world, for what reasons, and with what effects.” The st...

Told with great intimacy and compassion, Bootleg Coal Rebellion: The Pennsylvania Miners Who Seized an Industry, 1925-1942 (PM Press, 2022) uncovers a long-buried history of resistance and resilience among depression-era miners in Pennsylvania, who sunk their own mines on company grounds and fought police, bankers, coal companies and courts to form a union that would safeguard not just their livel...

In A Ritual Geology: Gold and Subterranean Knowledge in Savanna West Africa (Duke University Press, 2022), Robyn d’Avignon, Assistant Professor of History at NYU, retraces the history of gold mining and orpaillage along the geological formation known as the West African Birimian Greenstone Belt. D’Avignon proposes the expression “ritual geology” to refer to “a set of practices, prohibitions, and c...

The World That Latin America Created: The United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America in the Development Era (Harvard University Press, 2022) tells the story of how a group of intellectuals and policymakers transformed development economics and gave Latin America a new position in the world. Making an innovative and provocative intervention across the fields of global history, Latin Ameri...

Greg Marchildon interviews Charlie Angus, the author of Cobalt: Cradle of the Demon Metals, Birth of a Mining Superpower (House of Anansi P, 2022). The book explores the silver mining boom in Northern Ontario radiating from the town of Cobalt between 1903 and 1921. Charlie Angus is an author, journalist, broadcaster, musician, and a politician who ran as a candidate for the leadership of the feder...

Colonialism persists in many African countries due to the continuation of imperial monetary policy. Africa's Last Colonial Currency: The CFA Franc Story (Pluto Press, 2021) by Fanny Pigeaud and Dr. Ndongo Samba Sylla is the little-known account of the CFA Franc and economic imperialism. The CFA Franc was created in 1945, binding fourteen African states and split into two monetary zones. Why did Fr...

Edward Chancellor's just published history of interest rates could not be better timed. As the world adjusts to rising rates after decades of falling ones, Chancellor's historical and sometimes polemical account of rates kept too low for too long seems all too prescient. Chancellor's The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2022) is a surprisingly relevant and accessi...

As a collective effort, The Middle Classes in Latin America: Subjectivities, Practices, and Genealogies (Routledge, 2022) locates the formation of the middle classes at the core of the histories of Latin America in the last two centuries. Featuring scholars from different places across the Americas, it is an interdisciplinary contribution to the world histories of the middle classes, histories of...

In this podcast episode, Greg Marchildon interviews the author of Corporate Cataclysm: Abitibi Power & Paper and the Collapse of the Newsprint Industry, 1912–1946 (U of Toronto P, 2020). This book documents the rise, decline and bankruptcy of one of the largest manufacturing firms in Canada before the Second World War. A detailed review of the business and policy environment as well as the corpora...

In The New Goliaths: How Corporations Use Software to Dominate Industries, Kill Innovation, and Undermine Regulation (Yale UP, 2022), James Bessen explores the idea of how software can actually slow innovation. He makes the case that big companies in one industry after another have built "complex" software systems for managing their sales, marketing, operations and product offerings that are essen...

Today power is in the hands of Wall Street and Silicon Valley. How do we understand this transformation in power? And what can we do about it? We cannot change anything until we have a better understanding of how power works, who holds it, and why that matters. Through upgrading the concept of hegemony—understanding the importance of passive consent; the complexity of political interests; and the...

Given their cultural, intellectual, and scientific achievements, surely the Greeks were able to approach their economic affairs in a rational manner like modern individuals? Since the nineteenth century, many scholars have argued that premodern people did not behave like modern businesspeople, and that the "stagnation" that characterized the economy prior to the Industrial Revolution can be explai...

Steve Jobs called Jony Ive his "spiritual partner at Apple." The London-born genius was the second-most powerful person at Apple and the creative force who most embodies Jobs's spirit, the man who designed the products adopted by hundreds of millions the world over: the iPod, iPad, MacBook Air, the iMac G3, and the iPhone. In the wake of his close collaborator's death, the chief designer wrestled...

In 1346, a catastrophic plague beset Europe and its neighbours. The Black Death was a human tragedy that abruptly halved entire populations and caused untold suffering, but it also brought about a cultural and economic renewal on a scale never before witnessed. The World the Plague Made is a panoramic history of how the bubonic plague revolutionized labour, trade, and technology and set the stage...