Shows / New Books in Economic and Business History
New Books in Economic and Business History
This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field. Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: newbooksnetwork.com Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox: https://newbooksnetwork.substack.com/…
Episodes
- New Books in Economic and Business History
Kathryn Taylor, "Ordering Customs: Ethnographic Thought in Early Modern Venice" (U Delaware Press, 2023)
Ordering Customs: Ethnographic Thought in Early Modern Venice (University of Delaware Press, 2023) explores how Renaissance Venetians sought to make sense of…
- New Books in Economic and Business History
Lori A. Flores, "Awaiting Their Feast: Latinx Food Workers and Activism from World War II to Covid-19" (UNC Press, 2025)
Though Latinx foodways are eagerly embraced and consumed by people across the United States, the nation exhibits a much more fraught relationship with Latinx…
- New Books in Economic and Business History
Melinda Cooper, "Counterrevolution: Extravagance and Austerity in Public Finance" (Zone Books, 2024)
At the close of the 1970s, government treasuries and central banks took a vow of perpetual self-restraint. To this day, fiscal authorities fret over soaring…
- New Books in Economic and Business History
Yoni Appelbaum, "Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of Prosperity" (Random House, 2025)
We take it for granted that good neighborhoods—with good schools and good housing—are inaccessible to all but the very wealthy. But, in America, this wasn’t…
- New Books in Economic and Business History
Raphael Chijioke Njoku, "Queen Elizabeth II and the Africans: Narrating Decolonization, Postwar Commonwealth, and Africa’s Development, 1947-2022" (Leuven UP, 2024)
The road to Queen Elizabeth II’s implementation of African reforms was rough, especially in the first two decades following her ascension to the throne. In…
- New Books in Economic and Business History
Xiangli Ding, "Hydropower Nation: Dams, Energy, and Political Changes in Twentieth-Century China" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
As a rising infrastructure powerhouse, China has the largest electricity generation capacity in the world today. Its number of large dams is second to none. In…
- New Books in Economic and Business History
Philip Howell, "Pub" (Bloomsbury, 2025)
The pub is an English institution. Yet its history has been obscured by myth and nostalgia. In Pub (Bloomsbury, 2025) a new addition to the Object Lessons…
- New Books in Economic and Business History
Rebecca Haw Allensworth, "The Licensing Racket: How We Decide Who Is Allowed to Work, and Why It Goes Wrong" (Harvard UP, 2025)
When we think about "red tape" and the cost of regulation it's hard to overstate the impact of professional licensing. According to Professor Rebecca Haw…
- New Books in Economic and Business History
Michael Albertus, "Land Power: Who Has It, Who Doesn't, and How That Determines the Fate of Societies" (Basic Books, 2025)
For millennia, land has been a symbol of wealth and privilege. But the true power of land ownership is even greater than we might think. In Land Power: Who Has…
- New Books in Economic and Business History
Katie Beisel Hollenbach, "The Business of Bobbysoxers: Cultural Production in 1940s Frank Sinatra Fandom" (Oxford UP, 2024)
The Business of Bobbysoxers: Cultural Production in 1940s Frank Sinatra Fandom (Oxford University Press, 2024) by Dr. Katie Beisel Hollenbach reconsiders the…
- New Books in Economic and Business History
Arvid J. Lukauskas and Yumiko Shimabukuro, "Misery Beneath the Miracle in East Asia" (Cornell UP, 2024)
Misery beneath the Miracle in East Asia (Cornell University Press, 2024) challenges prevailing views of the East Asian economic miracle. Existing scholarship…
- New Books in Economic and Business History
Zai Liang. "From Chinatown to Every Town: How Chinese Immigrants Have Expanded the Restaurant Business in the United States" (U California Press, 2023)
From Chinatown to Every Town: How Chinese Immigrants Have Expanded the Restaurant Business in the United States (University of California Press, 2024) by Dr…
- New Books in Economic and Business History
Rosemary Wakeman, "The Worlds of Victor Sassoon: Bombay, London, Shanghai, 1918–1941" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
The 1920s and 1930s were a period of cosmopolitan globalization–and no one, perhaps, exemplified it more than Victor Sassoon, business tycoon, trader and…
- New Books in Economic and Business History
Sophia Rosenfeld, "The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in Modern Life" (Princeton UP, 2025)
Choice touches virtually every aspect of our lives, from what to buy and where to live to whom to love, what profession to practice, and even what to believe…
- New Books in Economic and Business History
Sarah E. Bond, "Strike: Labor, Unions, and Resistance in the Roman Empire" (Yale UP, 2024)
Historian Sarah E. Bond retells the traditional story of Ancient Rome, revealing how groups of ancient workers unified, connected, and protested as they helped…
- New Books in Economic and Business History
Joel Z. Garrod, "Royal Histories: The Transformation of the Royal Bank of Canada, 1864-2022" (U Toronto Press, 2025)
In this engaging interview, young scholar Dr, Joel Z. Garrod explains his book's main argument, with a personal touch. In Royal Histories: The Transformation…
- New Books in Economic and Business History
Lionel Barber, "Gambling Man: The Wild Ride of Japan’s Masayoshi Son" (Atria, 2024)
As Wall Street swooned and boomed through the last decade, our livelihoods have—now more than ever—come to rely upon the good sense and risk appetites of a few…
- New Books in Economic and Business History
Enrico Ciappi, "Building Europe in New York: From the Munich Conference to the European Coal and Steel Community (1938-1952)" (Routledge, 2025)
Today’s European Union grew out of functional communities set up in the wake of world war in the 1950s. It would shock the new White House intake to learn that…
- New Books in Economic and Business History
Kim Pernell, "Visions of Financial Order: National Institutions and the Development of Banking Regulation" (Princeton UP, 2024)
The global financial crisis of the late 2000s was marked by the failure of regulators to rein in risk-taking by banks. And yet regulatory issues varied from…
- New Books in Economic and Business History
Richard Vague, "The Paradox of Debt: A New Path to Prosperity Without Crisis" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2023)
When we talk about debt and its impact on our economy, we almost always mean “government debt.” However, this is only a small part of the picture: individuals…
- New Books in Economic and Business History
A. G. Hopkins, "Capitalism in the Colonies: African Merchants in Lagos, 1851–1931" (Princeton UP, 2024)
In Capitalism in the Colonies: African Merchants in Lagos, 1851–1931 (Princeton UP, 2024), A. G. Hopkins provides the first substantial assessment of the…
- New Books in Economic and Business History
Adam Franklin-Lyons, "Shortage and Famine in the Late Medieval Crown of Aragon" (Penn State Press, 2022)
Adam Franklin-Lyons joins Jana Byars to talk about Shortage and Famine in the Late Medieval Crown of Aragon (Penn State Press, 2022). In the late fourteenth…
- New Books in Economic and Business History
Lennard J. Davis, "Poor Things: How Those with Money Depict Those Without It" (Duke UP, 2024)
For generations most of the canonical works that detail the lives of poor people have been created by rich or middle-class writers like Charles Dickens, John…
- New Books in Economic and Business History
Alan Bollard, "Economists in the Cold War: How a Handful of Economists Fought the Battle of Ideas" (Oxford UP, 2023)
Economists in the Cold War: How a Handful of Economists Fought the Battle of Ideas (Oxford UP, 2023) is an account of the economic drivers and outcomes of the…
- New Books in Economic and Business History
Ellen Hartigan-O'Connor, "America Under the Hammer: Auctions and the Emergence of Market Values" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024)
As the first book-length study of auctions in early America, America Under the Hammer: Auctions and the Emergence of Market Values (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024)…
- New Books in Economic and Business History
Michael Tondre, "Oil" (Bloomsbury, 2024)
Black gold. Liquid sunlight. Texas tea. Oil remains the ur-commodity of our global era, having been distilled from ancient algae and marine life to turn…
- New Books in Economic and Business History
Andy Wightman, "The Poor Had No Lawyers: Who Owns Scotland and How They Got it" (Birlinn, 2025)
Who owns Scotland? How did they get it? What happened to all the common land in Scotland? Has the Scottish Parliament made any difference? Can we get our…
- New Books in Economic and Business History
Brigid Schulte, "Over Work: Transforming the Daily Grind in the Quest for a Better Life" (Henry Holt, 2024)
Following Overwhelmed, Brigid Schulte's groundbreaking examination of time management and stress, the prizewinning journalist now turns her attention to the…
- New Books in Economic and Business History
Duncan Mavin, "Meltdown: Scandal, Sleaze and the Collapse of Credit Suisse" (Pegasus Books, 2024)
Meltdown: Scandal, Sleaze and the Collapse of Credit Suisse (Pegasus Books, 2024) is a great business history book. It meticulously chronicles the story of a…
- New Books in Economic and Business History
Steven King, "Fraudulent Lives: Imagining Welfare Cheats from the Poor Law to the Present" (McGill Queen's UP, 2024)
The Western welfare state model is beset with structural, financial, and moral crises. So-called scroungers, cheats, and disability fakers persistently occupy…
- New Books in Economic and Business History
James Michael Buckley, "City of Wood: San Francisco and the Architecture of the Redwood Lumber Industry" (U Texas Press, 2024)
California’s 1849 gold rush triggered creation of the “instant city” of San Francisco as a to base exploit the rich natural resources of the American West…
- New Books in Economic and Business History
Elizabeth L. Block, "Beyond Vanity: The History and Power of Hairdressing" (MIT Press, 2024)
In the nineteenth century, the complex cultural meaning of hair was not only significant—it could affect one’s place in society. After the Civil War…
- New Books in Economic and Business History
Brett Bannor, "American Sheep: A Cultural History" (U Georgia Press, 2024)
Why did Thomas Jefferson write that he would be happy if all dogs went extinct? What economic opportunity did attorney John Lord Hayes envision for the newly…
- New Books in Economic and Business History
Jesper Juul, "Too Much Fun: The Five Lives of the Commodore 64 Computer" (MIT Press, 2024)
The surprising history of the Commodore 64, the best-selling home computer of the 1980s—the machine that taught the world that computing should be fun. The…
- New Books in Economic and Business History
Patrick Dixon, "Nuggets of Gold: Further Processed Chicken and the Making of the American Diet" (U Georgia Press, 2024)
For McDonald’s, the Chicken McNugget, the flagship product of further processed chicken, represented a once-in-a-generation innovation, a snack item that…
- New Books in Economic and Business History
Edward Jones Corredera, "Odious Debt: Bankruptcy, International Law, and the Making of Latin America" (Oxford UP, 2024)
What are fallen tyrants owed? What makes debt illegitimate? And when is bankruptcy moral? Drawing on new archival sources, this book shows how Latin American…
- New Books in Economic and Business History
Dayne C. Riley, "Consuming Anxieties: Alcohol, Tobacco, and Trade in British Satire, 1660-1751" (Bucknell UP, 2024)
Writers of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries—a period of vast economic change—recognized that the global trade in alcohol and tobacco…
- New Books in Economic and Business History
Alex Cuadros, "When We Sold God's Eye: Diamonds, Murder, and a Clash of Worlds in the Amazon" (Grand Central Publishing, 2024)
Growing up in a remote corner of the world’s largest rainforest, Pio, Maria, and Oita learned to hunt wild pigs and tapirs, and gathered Brazil nuts and açaí…
- New Books in Economic and Business History
Joshua Brinkman on American Farming Culture and the History of Technology
Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Joshua Brinkman, Assistant Teaching Professor of Science, Technology, and Society at North Carolina State…
- New Books in Economic and Business History
Austin Dean, "China and the End of Global Silver, 1873–1937" (Cornell UP, 2020)
In the late nineteenth century, as much of the world adopted some variant of the gold standard, China remained the most populous country still using silver…
- New Books in Economic and Business History
Devin Fergus, “Land of the Fee: Hidden Costs and the Decline of the American Middle Class” (Oxford UP, 2018)
Politicians, economists, and the media have put forth no shortage of explanations for the mounting problem of wealth inequality – a loss of working class jobs…
- New Books in Economic and Business History
Jean Burgess and Nancy K. Baym, "Twitter: A Biography" (NYU Press, 2020)
As Twitter enters its own adolescence, both the users and the creators of this famous social media platform find themselves engaging with a tool that certainly…
- New Books in Economic and Business History
Joshua D. Rothman, "The Ledger and the Chain: How Domestic Slave Traders Shaped America" (Basic Book, 2021)
Joshua Rothman’s The Ledger and the Chain: How Domestic Slave Traders Shaped America was published by Basic Books in 2021, and tells a sprawling history of…
- New Books in Economic and Business History
Benjamin T. Smith, "The Dope: The Real History of the Mexican Drug Trade" (W. W. Norton, 2021)
For over a century Mexico has been embroiled in a drug war dictated by the demands of their neighbor to the north. In The Dope: The Real History of the Mexican…
- New Books in Economic and Business History
Shannan Clark, "The Making of the American Creative Class: New York's Culture Workers and 20th-Century Consumer Capitalism" (Oxford UP, 2020)
During the middle decades of the twentieth century, the production of America’s consumer culture was centralized in New York to an extent unparalleled in the…
- New Books in Economic and Business History
Randy M. Browne, "The Driver’s Story: Labor and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024)
The story of the driver is the story of Atlantic slavery. Starting in the seventeenth-century Caribbean, enslavers developed the driving system to solve their…
- New Books in Economic and Business History
Robert Darnton, "Pirating and Publishing: The Book Trade in the Age of Enlightenment" (Oxford UP, 2021)
In the late-18th century, a group of publishers in what historian Robert Darnton calls the "Fertile Crescent" — countries located along the French border…
- New Books in Economic and Business History
John Eglin, "The Gambling Century: Commercial Gaming in Britain from Restoration to Regency" (Oxford UP, 2023)
John Eglin talks with Jana Byars about The Gambling Century: Commercial Gaming in Britain from Restoration to Regency (Oxford UP, 2023). Gambling captures as…
- New Books in Economic and Business History
Juan José Rivas Moreno, "The Capital Market of Manila and the Pacific Trade, 1668-1838" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024)
Many authors have written about the Manila Galleons, the massive ships that took goods back and forth between Acapulco and Manila, ferrying silver one way, and…
- New Books in Economic and Business History
Marianne Kamp, "Collectivization Generation: Oral Histories of a Social Revolution in Uzbekistan" (Cornell UP, 2024)
In this episode, Alisa interviews Dr. Marianne Kamp to celebrate the release of her new book, Collectivization Generation: Oral Histories of a Social…
- New Books in Economic and Business History
Rebecca Ball, "A Hundred English Working-Class Lives, 1900-1945" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2024)
How do ordinary people write the stories of their lives? In A Hundred English Working-Class Lives, 1900-1945 (Palgrave MacMillan, 2024), Rebecca Ball, a…
- New Books in Economic and Business History
Leah Downey, "Our Money: Monetary Policy as If Democracy Matters" (Princeton UP, 2024)
How the creation of money and monetary policy can be more democratic. The power to create money is foundational to the state. In the United States, that power…
- New Books in Economic and Business History
Lisa Sheryl Jacobson. "Intoxicating Pleasures: The Reinvention of Wine, Beer, and Whiskey After Prohibition" (U California Press, 2024)
In popular memory the repeal of US Prohibition in 1933 signaled alcohol’s decisive triumph in a decades-long culture war. But as Dr. Lisa Jacobson reveals in…
- New Books in Economic and Business History
Christine M. Larson, "Love in the Time of Self-Publishing: How Romance Writers Changed the Rules of Writing and Success" (Princeton UP, 2024)
As writers, musicians, online content creators, and other independent workers fight for better labor terms, romance authors offer a powerful example—and a…
- New Books in Economic and Business History
Pinelopi Koujianou Goldberg, "The Unequal Effects of Globalization" (MIT, 2023)
The recent retreat from globalization has been triggered by a perception that increased competition from global trade is not fair and leads to increased…
- New Books in Economic and Business History
Theresa Flanigan, "The Ponte Vecchio: Architecture, Politics, and Civic Identity in Late Medieval Florence" (Brepols, 2024)
Famous today for the shops lining its sloped street, the Ponte Vecchio is the last premodern bridge spanning the Arno River at Florence and one of the few…
- New Books in Economic and Business History
Bob Kuska, "Balls of Confusion: Pro Baskelball Goes to War (1965-1970)" (From Way Downtown, 2024)
Balls of Confusion: Pro Basketball Goes to War(1965-70) is the first of a two-part story about one of the most transformative events inpro basketball history…
- New Books in Economic and Business History
Sara Cantillon et al., "Feminist Political Economy: A Global Perspective" (Agenda, 2023)
Challenging mainstream narratives in political economy, the new book Feminist Political Economy: A Global Perspective (Agenda Publishing, 2023) serves as an…
- New Books in Economic and Business History
Alissa Klots, "Domestic Service in the Soviet Union; Women's Emancipation and the Gendered Hierarchy of Labor" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
Domestic Service in the Soviet Union: Women's Emancipation and the Gendered Hierarchy of Labor (Cambridge University Press, 2024) by Dr. Alissa Klots is the…
- New Books in Economic and Business History
Carrie M. Lane, "More Than Pretty Boxes: How the Rise of Professional Organizing Shows Us the Way We Work Isn't Working" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
This study of organizing and decluttering professionals helps us understand—and perhaps alleviate—the overwhelming demands society places on our time and…