The Economic and Political History Podcast

How did one of history's greatest moral crimes come to be seen as legitimate? In this episode, I speak with historian John Samuel Harpham about his remarkable new book The Intellectual Origins of American Slavery . Rather than focusing on plantations or nineteenth-century defenses of slavery, Harpham takes us back to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England to uncover the ideas that made sla...

Interview with Dan Edelstein, author of 'The Revolution to Come: A History of an Idea from Thucydides to Lenin' (Princeton University Press) Rather than telling the story of revolutions themselves, Edelstein traces the evolution of the idea of revolution—from ancient fears of political instability to the modern belief in revolution as a force for progress. We explore how Enlightenment thin...

Interview with Sophia Rosenfeld, author of 'The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in Modern Life' (Princeton University Press) What does it mean to be free? Today we tend to think freedom means having more choices—more products to buy, more careers to pursue, more partners to date, more opinions to hold. But this idea is surprisingly new. In this episode, historian Sophia Rosenfeld joins...

Interview with Sven Beckert, author of 'Capitalism: A Global History' (Penguin Random House)Rather than treating capitalism as a natural or inevitable system, Beckert traces its emergence over the past millennium—showing how capitalism arose unevenly, through global connections, state power, coercion, and conflict. We discuss capitalism as a historical rupture, the idea of “islands of capi...

Interview with Jason Jackson, author of 'Traders, Speculators, and Captains of Industry' (Harvard University Press)We discuss:• Why standard explanations of Indian economic policy fall short• The rise of Indian economic nationalism and its internal paradoxes• How technology, joint ventures, and industrial policy became moral questions• The expulsion of Coca-Cola and what it symbolized• “Cowboy mul...

Interview with Lisa J. Lucero, author of 'Maya Wisdom and the Survival of Our Planet' Maya Wisdom and the Survival of Our Planet  presents the Maya way of seeing and interacting with the world, which embodies lessons and provides solutions to ensure a sustainable future of Earth. This book is based on over three decades of working with Maya associates in Belize, Central America, to study t...

Interview with Walter Scheidel, author of 'What is Ancient History?'It’s easy to think that ancient history is, well, ancient history—obsolete, irrelevant, unjustifiably focused on Greece and Rome, and at risk of extinction. In  What Is Ancient History? , Walter Scheidel presents a compelling case for a new kind of ancient history—a global history that captures antiquity’s pivotal role as a decisi...

Interview with Julia Cagé, co-author with Thomas Piketty of 'A History of Political Conflict: Elections and Social Inequalities in France, 1789–2022' Who votes for whom and why? Cagé and Piketty comb through more than two hundred years of data from some 36,000 French municipalities to show how inequality has shaped the formation of political coalitions, with stark consequences for economic...

Interview with Kim Bowes, author of 'Surviving Rome: The Economic Lives of the Ninety Percent'The story of ancient Rome is predominantly one of great men with great fortunes.  Surviving Rome  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 pe...

Interview with Patricia Owens, author of 'Erased: A History of International Thought Without Men'The academic field of international relations presents its own history as largely a project of elite white men. And yet women played a prominent role in the creation of this new cross-disciplinary field. In  Erased , Patricia Owens shows that, since its beginnings in the early twentieth century...

Interview with William T. Taylor, author of 'Hoof Beats: How Horses Shaped Human History'From the Rockies to the Himalayas, the bond between horses and humans has spanned across time and civilizations. In this archaeological journey, William T. Taylor explores how momentous events in the story of humans and horses helped create the world we live in today. Tracing the horse's origins and spread fro...

Interview with Ola Olsson, author of 'Paleoeconomics: Climate Change and Economic Development in Prehistory'This book offers an accessible introduction to the economics of prehistory, tracing human economic development from early hunter-gatherer societies to the rise of agriculture and the first states. It explores how human capital, social norms, technology, and environmental factors shap...

Interview with Rory Naismith, author of 'Making Money in the Early Middle Ages' Between the end of the Roman Empire in the fifth century and the economic transformations of the twelfth, coined money in western Europe was scarce and high in value, difficult for the majority of the population to make use of. And yet, as Rory Naismith shows in this illuminating study, coined money was made an...

Interview with Luis Schenoni, author of 'Bringing War Back In. Victory, defeat, and the state in nineteenth-century Latin America'Since Charles Tilly’s claim that “war made the state,” scholars have viewed the bellicist account of state formation through a European lens. In Europe, war drove rulers to tax, conscript, and build bureaucracies, culminating in powerful states. Yet  Latin Ameri...

Interview with Volha Charnysh, author of 'Uprooted. How post-WWII Population Transfers Remade Europe' In Uprooted , Volha Charnysh offers a new perspective on the developmental impacts of mass displacement, emphasizing that integrating displaced populations can strengthen states and boost local economies. Focusing on post-WWII Poland and West Germany, Charnysh demonstrates how the disruption of so...

Interview with Josephine Quinn, author of 'How the World Made the West: A 4000 Year History' In  How the World Made the West,  Josephine Quinn poses perhaps the most significant challenge ever to the “civilizational thinking” regarding the origins of Western culture—that is, the idea that civilizations arose separately and distinctly from one another. Rather, she locates the roots of the modern We...

Interview with Agustina Paglayan, author of 'Raised to Obey: The Rise and Spread of Mass Education' Nearly every country today has universal primary education. But why did governments in the West decide to provide education to all children in the first place? In  Raised to Obey , Agustina Paglayan offers an unsettling answer. The introduction of broadly accessible primary education was not mainly...

Interview with Eva Payne, author of 'Empire of Purity: The History of Americans' Global War on Prostitution' Between the 1870s and 1930s, American social reformers, working closely with the US government, transformed sexual vice into an international political and humanitarian concern. As these activists worked to eradicate prostitution and trafficking, they promoted sexual self-control for both m...

Interview with Daniel Waldenström, author of 'Richer and More Equal: A New History of Wealth in the West'. Using cutting-edge research and new, sometimes surprising, data, Waldenström shows that what stands out since the late 1800s is a massive rise in the size of the middle class and its share of society’s total wealth. Unfettered capitalism, it seems, doesn’t have to lead to boundless inequality...

Interview with Dale C. Copeland, author of 'A World Safe for Commerce: American Foreign Policy from the Revolution to the Rise of China' When the Cold War ended, many believed that expanding trade would usher in an era of peace. Yet today the United States finds itself confronting not just Russia in Europe but China in the Indo-Pacific, Africa, and Latin America. Shedding new light on how trade bo...

Interview with Stefanos Geroulanos, author of 'The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins' Books about humanity's origins captivate readers, while news outlets eagerly cover archaeological discoveries, reflecting a long-standing fascination with prehistory. In "The Invention of Prehistory," historian Stefanos Geroulanos explores how En...

I'm thrilled to share with you an episode from a new show called The Civic Agora. This venture is part of the Stanford Civics Initiative, where we explore the essence of citizenship and unravel the threads of thought that construct a flourishing society. In this episode of the Civic Agora, we chat with Brandice Canes-Wrone. She is a professor in the political science department and a senior fe...

Interview with Christopher M. Meissner, author of 'One From the Many: The Global Economy Since 1850' This book provides a brief introduction to the economic history of globalization since 1850. Key indicators, such as trade-to-production ratios, global foreign assets relative to world production, and the share of foreign-born in the population, are tracked over time. All globalization indi...

Interview with Faisal Ahmed, author of 'Conquests and Rents: A Political Economy of Dictatorship and Violence in Muslim Societies' Tragically, dictatorship and civil strife are prevalent in many contemporary Muslim-majority (hereon, Muslim) societies; characteristics that are detrimental to socio-economic development. In  Conquest and Rents: A Political Economy of Dictatorship and Violence...

Interview with Eric H. Cline, author of '1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed' and 'After 1177 B.C.: The Survival of Civilizations' At the end of the acclaimed history  1177 B.C. , many of the Late Bronze Age civilizations of the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean lay in ruins, undone by invasion, revolt, natural disasters, famine, and the demise of international trade. An inte...