New Books in Economic and Business History

What do Warren Buffett and Friedrich Nietzsche have in common? Why does Baruch Spinoza’s understanding of irrational emotions help explain financial markets? How did Voltaire’s success in a bond lottery arbitrage shape his writing? Can David Hume teach an investor when to buck the consensus and when to heed it?Exploring these questions and many others, Ethan A. Everett reveals the surprising lessons we can learn about investing from major philosophers. Demystifying ideas and texts that can often seem intimidating or irrelevant, he shows how philosophical concepts can be fruitfully applied to financial markets. Everett shares how philosophers’ insights have informed his development as an investor, and he considers how great investors have embodied philosophical wisdom in their own endeavors.Ranging from the birth of modern securities markets in seventeenth-century Amsterdam to recent trends like meme stocks, this book shows why a philosophical perspective can prove invaluable to challenging common assumptions in finance. Thinkers like Spinoza or Baudrillard are sometimes envisioned as disembodied minds constructing opaque, self-enclosed theoretical systems, but Everett elegantly concretizes their teachings, brings them to bear on our lived experience of the world, and shows how they can help us better appreciate the joys and vicissitudes of the market. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sugar is everywhere in the western diet, blamed for epidemics of obesity, diabetes, and other modern maladies. Our addiction to sweetness has a long and unsavory history. Over the past five hundred years, sugar has shaped empires, made fortunes for a few, and brought misery for millions of workers both enslaved and free. How did sugar become a defining modern food and an essential global commodity? In Unrefined: How Capitalism Reinvented Sugar (U Chicago Press, 2025), Dr. David Singerman recasts our thinking about this crucial substance in the history of capitalism. Before the nineteenth century, sugar’s value depended on natural qualities: its color, its taste, where it was grown, and who had made it. But beginning around 1850, a combination of plantation owners, industrialists, and scientists set out to redefine sugar itself. Deploying the tools and rhetoric of science, they transformed not just how sugar was produced or traded but even how people thought about it. By changing sugar into a pure chemical object, these forces stripped power from workers and enabled—and obscured—new kinds of fraud, corruption, and monopoly. Taking us to unexplored spaces in the world of sugar, from laboratories and docks to refineries and the halls of Congress, Dr. Singerman illuminates dark intersections of the histories of corruption, science, and capitalism. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Driving Productivity: Automation, Labor, and Industrial Development in the United States and Germany (Brill, 2025) reconstructs the industrial histories of the American and German automotive industries in a new light. From the Fordist assembly line to Japanese lean production and Industry 4.0, Anthony J. Knowles critically examines major technical developments within the historical dynamics of capitalism. Both countries face the pressure to automate, transform labor, and increase efficiency, yet their responses differ due to divergent paradigms of integrating business, labor, and government. Driving Productivity makes the case that improving productivity is a never-ending process that becomes a compulsory social imperative that industries must respond to but are nevertheless responded to differently between countries. Guest: Anthony Knowles (he/him) is a Teaching Assistant Professor in Sociology and a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Center for Transportation Research at the University of Tennessee. Host: Jenna Pittman (she/her), a Ph.D. student in the Department of History at Duke University. She studies modern European history, political economy, and Germany from 1945-1990. Scholars@Duke: here Linktree: here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Seeds of Exchange: Soviets, Americans, and Cooperation in Agriculture, 1921–1935 (Northern Illinois UP, 2025) examines the US and Soviet exchange of agricultural knowledge and technology during the interwar period. Maria Fedorova challenges the perception of the Soviet Union as a passive recipient of American technology and expertise. She reveals the circular nature of this exchange through official government bureaus, amid anxious farmers in crowded auditoriums, in cramped cars across North Dakota and Montana, and by train over the once fertile steppes of the Volga. Amid the post–World War I food insecurity, Soviet and American agricultural experts relied on transnational networks, bridging ideological differences. As Soviets traveled across the US agricultural regions and Americans plowed steppes in the southern Urals and the lower Volga, both groups believed that innovative solutions could be found beyond their own national borders. Soviets were avidly interested in American technology and American agricultural experts perceived the Soviet Union to be an ideal setting for experimenting with and refining modern farm systems and organizational practices. As Seeds of Exchange shows, agricultural modernization was not the exclusive domain of Western countries. Guest: Maria Fedorova (she/her) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Russian Studies at Macalester College. She received her PhD in history at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research focuses on the history of agriculture, food insecurity, US-Russia/Soviet relations, and transnational history. Host: Jenna Pittman (she/her), a Ph.D. student in the Department of History at Duke University. She studies modern European history, political economy, and Germany from 1945-1990. Scholars@Duke: https://scholars.duke.edu/pers... Linktree: https://linktr.ee/jennapittman Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Orthodoxy on the Line: Russian Orthodox Christians and Labor Migration in the Progressive Era (NYU Press, 2025) is an Immigration and labor history of the Russian Orthodox Church in the US At the turn of the twentieth century, thousands of immigrants from the borderlands of the Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires built a transnational church in North America. The community that church leaders called American Orthodox Rus’ was created by and for working people, and transformed believers’ identities as Eastern European migrants, as Orthodox Christians, and as American workers. Given how strongly the Russian Orthodox Christian community was tied to working class industrial life, this book makes the case that we cannot understand the scope of working class and immigrant religion in the United States without understanding American Orthodox Rus’. The work Russian Orthodox immigrants did in the Progressive Era United States occurred in factories, foundries, and mines; they lived mainly in industrial cities and mining towns; and they almost immediately got caught up in the most pivotal—and sometimes violent—political and social crises of their times, both nationally and internationally. To address their needs in these contexts, the Russian Orthodox Church expanded its missionary efforts in North America, forming a network of social and material aid for working-class believers. This book traces the rapid growth of this transnational religious world, then explores its unexpected collapse under the weight of the First World War, a global pandemic, and the transnational reach of revolutionary political change in Russia. A story of challenge and resilience, Orthodoxy on the Line complicates dominant paradigms in the study of labor and North American Religions. Guest: Aram G. Sarkisian (he/him) is a historian of religion, immigration, and labor in the United States. Host: Jenna Pittman (she/her), a Ph.D. student in the Department of History at Duke University. She studies modern European history, political economy, and Germany from 1945-1990. Scholars@Duke: here Linktree: here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How debt and speculation financed the suburban American dream and led to today’s inequalities In the popular imagination, the suburbs are synonymous with the “American Dream” of upward mobility and economic security. After World War II, white families rushed into newly built suburbs, where they accumulated wealth through homeownership and enjoyed access to superior public schools. In this revelatory new account of postwar suburbanization, historian Michael R. Glass exposes the myth of uniform suburban prosperity. Focusing on the archetypal suburbs of Long Island, Cracked Foundations: Debt and Inequality in Suburban America (U Pennsylvania Press, 2025) uncovers a hidden landscape of debt and speculation. Glass shows how suburbanites were not guaranteed decent housing and high-quality education but instead had to obtain these necessities in the marketplace using home mortgages and municipal bonds. These debt instruments created financial strains for families, distributed resources unevenly across suburbs, and codified racial segregation. Most important, debt transformed housing and education into commodities, turning homes and schools into engines of capital accumulation. The resulting pressures made life increasingly precarious, even for those privileged suburbanites who resided in all-white communities. For people of color denied the same privileges, suburbs became places where predatory loans extracted wealth and credit rating agencies punished children in the poorest school districts. Long Islanders challenged these inequalities over several decades, demanding affordable housing, school desegregation, tax equity, and school-funding equalization. Yet the unequal circumstances created by the mortgages and bonds remain very much in place, even today. Cracked Foundations not only transforms our understanding of housing, education, and inequality but also highlights how contemporary issues like the affordable housing crisis and school segregation have their origins in the postwar golden age of capitalism. Guest: Michael Glass (he/him) is a political and urban historian of the twentieth-century United States, with research and teaching interests in racism, capitalism, and inequality. Michael is an Assistant Professor of History at Boston College. Host: Jenna Pittman (she/her), a Ph.D. student in the Department of History at Duke University. She studies modern European history, political economy, and Germany from 1945-1990. Scholars@Duke: here Linktree: here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The abortion market was a powerful economic force in American life. Before legalization lowered the cost, one million women each year collectively paid upward of $750 million for abortions. In The Abortion Market: Buying and Selling Access in the Era Before Roe (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025), Dr. Katherine Parkin reveals the strength of a massive consumer market that involved loans, advertising, and travel, as well as the costs associated with the procedure itself. Laying the foundation for the emergence of a public market that facilitated the buying and selling of abortions, wealthy population control ideologues encouraged positive public discourse on abortion, funded medical studies, and waged legal battles. White, middle- and upper-class women sought out abortions and paid exorbitantly for them. Male entrepreneurs emerged to capitalize on the booming market and profit from the incredible demand. Advertising on billboards and in college newspapers, men profited by providing the phone number, getting kickbacks for delivering patients, and arranging for women’s travel to Mexico, Puerto Rico, England, and Japan. Students demanded abortion access and organized when it came at a steep cost, especially to the poorest among them. Abortion providers in Kansas, California, and Washington, D.C. attracted out-of-state consumers, with some women aided by their universities or by medical insurance. Between 1970 and 1973, entrepreneurs, providers, and hundreds of thousands of women seeking to buy abortions headed to New York City, heralded by some as the “abortion capital of the world.” While we may have imagined that securing an abortion was best understood as a hidden, woman-only experience, The Abortion Market reveals the extent to which businesses and businessmen openly selling abortion access shaped the experience of buying abortions for millions of women. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In The Money Revolution: How to Finance the Next American Century, economist and bestselling author Richard Duncan lays out a farsighted strategy to maximize the United States' unmatched financial and technological potential. In compelling fashion, the author shows that the United States can and should invest in the industries and technologies of the future on an unprecedented scale in order to ignite a new technological revolution that would cement the country’s geopolitical preeminence, greatly enhance human wellbeing, and create unimaginable wealth. This book also features a history of the Federal Reserve. Richard Duncan has served as Global Head of Investment Strategy at ABN AMRO Asset Management in London, worked as a financial sector specialist for the World Bank in Washington, D.C., and headed equity research departments for James Capel Securities and Salomon Brothers in Bangkok, Thailand. He is now the publisher of Macro Watch , a video-newsletter that analyzes the forces driving the global economy in the 21st Century. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Architecture of the Wire explores the development of telecommunications infrastructure and its impact on the architectural and urban culture of the modern age—from poles, wires, and cables, to “micro-architectures,” such as the théâtrophone and the telephone booth. Starting with the intrepid worldwide infrastructures of the late nineteenth century, Carlotta Darò proposes a new history that explores the multiple links and crossroads of such technical “things” with architecture and art.Based on extensive research of North American company archives, and French institutional ones, and drawing on secondary literature in art and architectural history, media studies, and the history of technology, Darò examines the aesthetic implications of material objects that have forever changed our urban, rural, and domestic environments. This interview was conducted by Matthew Wells, Senior Lecturer in Architectural Studies at the University of Manchester. His research explores architecture in the long nineteenth century, focusing on artistic techniques, technology, and political economy. Wells is the author of Modelling the Metropolis: The Architectural Model in Victorian London (2023). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This open access book is about Mozambicans and Angolans who migrated in state-sponsored schemes to East Germany in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s. They went to work and to be trained as a vanguard labor force for the intended African industrial revolutions. While they were there, they contributed their labor power to the East German economy. This book draws on more than 260 life history interviews and uncovers complex and contradictory experiences and transnational encounters. What emerges is a series of dualities that exist side by side in the memories of the former migrants: the state and the individual, work and consumption, integration and exclusion, loss and gain, and the past in the past and the past in the present and future. By uncovering these dualities, the book explores the lives of African migrants moving between the Third and Second worlds. Devoted to the memories of worker-trainees, this transnational study comes at a time when historians are uncovering the many varied, complicated, and important connections within the global socialist world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, host Andrea Talabér (CEU Press) sat down with Emília Barna to discuss her new book, Working in Music on the Semiperiphery: Local Cultural Production and Global Capitalism (CEU Press, 2025). We talked about the changes and continuities that the Hungarian music industry underwent from the communist to the post-communist era, the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on Barna’s research, and the gendered aspects of the music industry. Working in Music on the Semiperiphery is available in Open Access, through CEU Press’ Opening the Future initiative. You can download the book free here. You can find out more about Opening the Future here. You can purchase a physical copy here. The CEU Press Podcast delves into various aspects of the publishing process: from crafting a book proposal, finding a publisher, responding to peer review feedback on the manuscript, to the subsequent distribution, promotion and marketing of academic books. We also talk to series editors and authors, who will share their experiences of getting published and discuss their series or books. Stay tuned for future episodes and subscribe to our podcast to be the first to be notified. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Vanilla is one of the most expensive of flavorings—so valuable that it was smuggled or stolen by pirates in the early days—and yet it is everywhere. It is a key ingredient in dishes ranging from crème brûlée to Japanese purin. It is the quintessential ice cream flavor in the United States. In Vanilla: The History of an Extraordinary Bean (Yale UP, 2025) Dr. Eric T. Jennings explains how the world’s only edible orchid, originally endemic to Central America, became embedded in the international culinary and cultural landscape. In tracing vanilla’s rise, Dr. Jennings describes how in the 1840s an enslaved boy named Edmond Albius discovered a way to pollinate vanilla orchids with a toothpick or needle—an ingenious process that is still in use. This method transformed the vanilla sector by enabling the plant to be grown outside of its natural range. Dr. Jennings also looks at how the vanilla craze led to the search for now‑pervasive substitutes, and how a vanilla lobby has fought back. He further unravels how vanilla—the world’s most expensive crop and once considered its most refined fragrance—came to mean “bland.” This tale of botany, production techniques, consumption habits, and colonial rivalry connects the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific Oceans, revealing how vanilla has become a potent symbol of the modern global village. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Since the Reagan era, conservatives in the United States have championed cutting taxes, especially for wealthy individuals and corporations, as the best way to achieve economic prosperity. In his new book, Pay Up!: Conservative Myths about Tax Cuts for the Rich (Cambridge UP, 2025) John L. Campbell shows that while these claims are highly influential, they are also wrong. Using historical and cross-national evidence, the book challenges and refutes every justification conservatives have made for tax cuts - that American taxes are too high; they hurt the economy; they facilitate government waste; they constitute an unfair downward redistribution of income; and they threaten individual freedom - and conversely shows that countries can actually benefit from higher taxes, especially when tax increases fall most heavily on those most able to pay them. Through clear prose and a well-reasoned argument, Campbell's book provides an accessible, engaging, and much-needed perspective on the role of taxes in American society. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism (W.W. Norton, 2025) is an in-depth analysis into the growing industry of green technologies and the environmental, social, and political consequences of the mining it requires. In the fight against climate change, lithium's role in reducing emissions by powering green economies is a mixed blessing. Drawing on groundbreaking fieldwork in Chile, Nevada, and Portugal, Riofrancos explores the environmental and social costs of the global race to expand lithium mining amid supply chain concerns. With haunting descriptions of vulnerable ecosystems, she examines how mining harms landscapes, provokes protest, takes center stage in national politics, and links countries on the peripheries of the world economy to huge corporations, commodity markets, and powerful investors. Riofrancos traces the history of global extraction from colonial conquest, to the 1970s energy crisis, to the still uncertain green future. While an unregulated mining boom could inflict irreversible harm, Riofrancos offers compelling ideas about how to harmonize climate action with social justice. Across the world’s extractive frontiers, we encounter the most brutal aspects of capitalism—but also witness inspiring visions for our planetary future. Thea Riofrancos is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Providence College and the Strategic Co-Director of the Climate Community Institute Alec Fiorini is a PhD student at Queen Mary University London's Centre for Labour, Sustainability and Global Production (CLaSP) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

From the bustling ports of Lisbon to the coastal inlets of the Bight of Benin to the vibrant waterways of Bahia, Black mariners were integral to every space of the commercial South Atlantic. Navigating this kaleidoscopic world required a remarkable cosmopolitanism--the chameleonlike ability to adapt to new surroundings by developing sophisticated medicinal, linguistic, and navigational knowledge. In Captive Cosmopolitans: Black Mariners and the World of South Atlantic Slavery (Omohundro Institute and UNC Press, 2025) Mary E. Hicks shows how Portuguese slaving ship captains harnessed and exploited this hybridity to expand their own traffic in human bondage. At the same time, she reveals how enslaved and free Black mariners capitalized on their shipboard positions and cosmopolitan expertise to participate in small-scale commodity trading on the very coasts where they themselves had been traded as commodities, reshaping societies and cultures on both sides of the Atlantic. Indeed, as Hicks argues, the Bahian slave trade was ruthlessly effective because its uniquely decentralized structure so effectively incorporated the desires and financial strategies of the very people enslaved by it. Yet taking advantage of such fraught economic opportunities ultimately enabled many enslaved Black mariners to purchase their freedom. And, in some cases, they became independent transatlantic slave traders themselves.Hicks thus explores the central paradox that defined the lives of the captive cosmopolitans and, in doing so, reveals a new history of South Atlantic slavery centered on subaltern commercial and cultural exchange. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the years after World War II, as women were being pushed from wartime jobs for returning soldiers, government and business leaders—and women themselves—saw small business ownership as a viable economic solution. In just five years, US women owned nearly a million of the nation’s businesses. In the decades since, women have moved increasingly into business ownership, often outpacing male start-ups so that today, they own more than fourteen million businesses, 40 percent of all US companies. She's the Boss: The Rise of Women’s Entrepreneurship since World War II (Rutgers UP, 2025) by Dr. Debra Michals chronicles the forces that made entrepreneurship attractive to women. In rich detail, Dr. Michals shares the stories of the countless women of all races, ethnicities, genders, and abilities who contributed to this important history. The book also explores the intersection of women’s personal choices within changing social, political, and economic factors, such as the rising divorce rates of the 1960s and 1970s, ongoing workplace and credit discrimination, civil and women’s rights activism and activist entrepreneurs, the 1970s recession and 1980s “Reagan Revolution,” and more recently, the internet, crowd-funding, and social entrepreneurship. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Business of Transition: Jewish and Greek Merchants of Salonica from Ottoman to Greek Rule (Stanford UP, 2024) examines how the cosmopolitan bourgeoisie of the Eastern Mediterranean navigated the transition from empire to nation-state in the early twentieth century. In this social and cultural history, Paris Papamichos Chronakis shows how the Jewish and Greek merchants of Salonica (present-day Thessaloniki) skillfully managed the tumultuous shift from Ottoman to Greek rule amidst revolution and war, rising ethnic tensions, and heightened class conflict. Bringing their once powerful voices back into the historical narrative, he traces their entangled trajectories as businessmen, community members, and civic leaders to illustrate how the self-reinvention of a Jewish-led bourgeoisie made a city Greek. Papamichos Chronakis draws on previously untapped local archival material to weave a rich narrative of individual portraits, introducing us to revered philanthropists and committed patriots as well as vilified profiteers and victimized Salonicans. Offering a kaleidoscopic view of a city in transition, this book reveals how the collapse of empire shook all the constitutive elements of Jewish and Greek identities, and how Jews and Greeks reinvented themselves amidst these larger political and economic disruptions. 2024: National Jewish Book Awards Winner of the 2024 National Jewish Book Awards - JDC-Herbert Katzki Award (Writing Based on Archival Material), sponsored by the Jewish Book Council. Roberto Mazza is currently a visiting scholar at the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs at Northwestern University. He is the host of the Jerusalem Unplugged Podcast and to discuss and propose a book for interview can be reached at by email. Blusky and IG: @robbyref Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“The acme of skill,” Sun Tzu wrote in The Art of War, is not “to win one hundred victories in one hundred battles,” but “to subdue the enemy without fighting.” The author of Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare (Portfolio, 2025) has devoted much of his career to exploring how economic power can advance this goal. He served on the teams at the U.S. State Department that designed and negotiated Western sanctions against Russia after its 2014 annexation of Crimea, and whose economic pressure campaign against Iran led to a landmark nuclear deal in 2015. Economic warfare is how America fights its most important geopolitical battles today. From thwarting Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons to checking Russian imperialism and China’s bid for world mastery, the United States has reached into its economic arsenal to get the job done. In the process, the world economy has become a battlefield. Its weapons take the form of sanctions, export controls, and investment restrictions. Its commanders are not generals and admirals but lawyers, diplomats, and economists. Its foot soldiers are not brave men and women who volunteer for military service but business executives who seek to maximize profits yet often find they have no option other than to obey Washington’s marching orders. And America’s strength in these battles stems not from its gargantuan defense budget but from its primacy in international finance and technology. This book is about this kind of war. It blends research, analysis, and extensive interviews with more than one hundred of the key players in the events described, highlighting inflection points, interpreting their significance, and pulling back the curtain on the places where economic wars have been fought. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For decades coal has been crucial to America's culture, society, and environment, an essential ingredient in driving out winter's cold, cooking meals, and lighting the dark. In the coalfields and beyond, in Black Gold: The Rise, Reign, and Fall of American Coal (University of California Press, 2025) Bob Wyss describes how this magical elixir sparked the Industrial Revolution, powered railroads, and built urban skylines, while providing home comforts for families. Coal's history and heritage are fundamental to understanding its legacy of threats to America's well-being. As industry developed so did clashes between powerful tycoons, coal miners, and innocent families. Exploitation and avarice led to victimization, deadly violence, and ultimately the American labor movement. More recently coal has endangered American lives and safety, brought on by two centuries of carbon combustion, and here the threat remains unresolved. This is coal's most enduring legacy, and Black Gold is pivotal in helping us understand how we got to this point. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Driving Terror: Labor, Violence, and Justice in Cold War Argentina (U New Mexico Press, 2025) by Dr. Karen Robert tells the story of twenty-four Ford autoworkers in Argentina who were tortured and “disappeared” for their union activism in 1976, miraculously survived, and pursued a decades-long quest for truth and justice. In December 2018, more than four decades after their ordeal, the men won a historic human-rights case against a military commander and two retired Ford Argentina executives who were convicted of crimes against humanity. The book uses this David-and-Goliath story to explore issues of labor repression and corporate complicity with Argentina’s last military dictatorship as well as to shed light on the enormous obstacles facing victims of such crimes. Its emphasis on working-class activism in the arenas of labor and human rights introduces North American readers to a new narrative of contemporary Argentine history. The Ford survivors’ story intertwines with the symbolic evolution of the car the men helped build at Ford: the Falcon sedan. The political polarization and violence of the Cold War era transformed the Falcon from a popular family car to a tool of state terror after the coup of 1976, when it became associated with the widespread practice of “disappearance.” Its meaning continued to evolve after the return to democracy, when artists and activists used it as a symbol of military impunity during Argentina’s long-term struggles over justice and memory. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dr. J Calvin Schermerhorn is a professor of history in the School of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies at Arizona State University. His books include The Business of Slavery and the Rise of American Capitalism, 1815–1860, and Unrequited Toil: A History of United States Slavery. He lives in Tempe, AZ. The long history of the racial wealth gap in America told through the stories of seven Black families who struggled to build wealth over multiple generationsWealth is central to the American pursuit of happiness and is an overriding measure of well-being. Yet wealth is conspicuously absent from African American households. Why do some 3.5 million Black American families have zero or negative wealth?In The Plunder of Black America: How the Racial Wealth Gap Was Made (Yale UP, 2025) historian Calvin Schermerhorn traces four hundred years of Black dispossession and decapitalization—what Frederick Douglass called plunder—through the stories of families who have strived to earn and keep the fruits of their toils. Their struggles reveal that the ever-evolving strategies to strip Black income and wealth have been critical to sustaining a structure of racialized disadvantage. These accounts also tell of the quiet heroism of those who worked to overcome obstacles and defy the plunder.From the story of Anthony and Mary Johnson, abducted from Angola and brought to Virginia in 1619, to the enslaved Black workers dispossessed by the Custis-Washington family, to Venture Smith (born Broteer Furro), who purchased his freedom, to three generations of a family enslaved in the South who moved north after Emancipation, to the Tulsa massacre and the subprime lending crisis, Schermerhorn shows that we cannot reckon with today’s racial wealth inequality without understanding its unrelenting role in American history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How many female entrepreneurs, economic revolutionaries, merchants, and industrialists can you name? You would be forgiven for thinking that, until very recently, there were none at all. But what about Phryne, the richest woman in ancient Athens, who offered to pay to rebuild the walls of Thebes after the city was razed by Alexander the Great? Or what about Priscilla Wakefield, the writer who set up the first English bank for women and children? And, just as important, what about the everyday women who, paid only a pittance, labored for the profit of others? From the most successful women of their day to those who struggled to make ends meet, Economica: A Global History of Women, Wealth, and Power (Seal Press, 2025) by Dr. Victoria Bateman takes you on a journey that begins in the Stone Age and ends in the twenty-first century, spanning the world’s historic centers of prosperity: Egypt, Mesopotamia, Peru, the Indus Valley, the Roman Empire, the Islamic Empire, China, Europe, and the United States. By shining a light on the women whose contributions to the economy have been hidden for far too long, Economica is more than a history of women—it is a more accurate economic history of us all. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Bradley Gorski, a literary and culture scholar, examines the breakneck commercialization of Russian book publishing and of Russian literature more broadly – in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union. In the early 1990s, thousands of new publishers emerged, up from a mere two hundred at the Soviet Union’s end. The notion of the “bestseller” quickly came to dominate the new market, fueling he rise of immensely popular genres such as detective novels, including its zhenskii variety (detective novels written by women and featuring female sleuths. Gorski artfully weaves together the evolution of the book market - from the chaos of the early post-Communist years to the near-monopoly in the 2000s - with literary analysis of some of the most prominent post-Soviet authors. At early stages, post-Soviet literature often reflected a degree of optimism about the Western ideal of personal liberty and embraced what sociologist Boris Dubin called a Russian version of the “American success story”. In recent years, however, the Russian literary market has taken a distinctly illiberal turn, exemplified by the writer Zakhar Prilepin, a bestselling author turned jingoistic patriot who fought in the Donbas region of Ukraine and inspired many of his admirers to join the front. Cultural Capitalism: Literature and the Market after Socialism (Northern Illinois University Press, 2025) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

From 1907 to 1967, a network of reservoirs and aqueducts was built across more than one million acres in upstate New York, including Greene, Delaware, Sullivan, and Ulster Counties. This feat of engineering served to meet New York City’s ever-increasing need for water, sustaining its inhabitants and cementing it as a center of industry. West of the Hudson, it meant that twenty-six villages, with their farms, forest lands, orchards, and quarries, were bought for a fraction of their value, demolished, and submerged, profoundly altering ecosystems in ways we will never fully appreciate. This paradox of victory and loss is at the heart of Nineteen Reservoirs: On Their Creation and the Promise of Water for New York City (The Experiment, 2022) Lucy Sante’s meticulous account of how New York City secured its seemingly limitless fresh water supply, and why it cannot be taken for granted. In inimitable form, Sante plumbs the historical record to surface forgotten archives, bringing lost places back to life on the page. Her immaculately calibrated sensitivity honors both perspectives on New York City’s reservoir system and helps us understand the full import of its creation. An essential history of the New York City region that will reverberate far beyond it, Nineteen Reservoirs examines universal divisions in our resources and priorities—between urban and rural, rich and poor, human needs and animal habitats. This is an unmissable account of triumph, tragedy, and unintended consequences. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Moorings: Voyages of Capital across the Indian Ocean (U of California Press, 2025) follows sailors from the Gulf of Kachchh in India as they voyage across the Indian Ocean on mechanized wooden sailing vessels known as vahans, or dhows. These voyages produce capital through moorings that are spatial, moral, material, and conceptual. With a view from the dhow, the book examines the social worlds of Muslim seafarers who have been rendered invisible even as they maneuver multiple regulatory regimes and the exigencies of life, navigating colonialism, neoliberalism, the rise of Hindutva, insurgency, climate change, and border regimes across the ocean. Based on historical and ethnographic research aboard ships, at ports, and in religious shrines and homes, Moorings shows how capitalism derives value from historically sedimented practices grounded in caste, gender, and transregional community-based forms of regulation. Nidhi Mahajan is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Reighan Gillam is Associate Professor in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. Her research examines the ways in which Afro-Brazilian media producers foment anti-racist visual politics through their image creation. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (University of Illinois Press). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Crusading for Globalization: US Multinationals and Their Opponents Since 1945 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025) tells the story of an extraordinarily influential group of business executives at the helms of the largest US multinational corporations and their quest to drive globalization forward over the last eight decades. Janick Marina Schaufelbuehl argues that the spectacular expansion of international investment, trade, and production after 1945 cannot be understood without considering the role played by these corporate globalizers and the organization they created, the US Council (today’s United States Council for International Business). By shaping governmental policy through their congressional lobbying and close connections to successive presidential administrations, US Council members, including executives from General Electric, Coca Cola, and IBM, among others, consistently fought for ever more market deregulation, culminating in the creation of the World Trade Organization in 1995. Crusading for Globalization is also a book about those who opposed the growing might of multinationals. In the years immediately after World War II, resistance came from business protectionists, before labor and policymakers from the Global South joined the effort in the early 1970s. Schaufelbuehl breaks new ground by offering a panorama of this early anti-globalization movement, and by showing how the leaders of multinationals organized to limit its political influence. She also examines continuities between this early movement and the opposition to globalization that emerged at the beginning of the twenty-first century from the left and the populist right and discusses how business responded by promoting corporate social responsibility and voluntary guidelines.The first book to shed light on what caused corporate executives to pursue a pro-globalization agenda and to examine their methods for dealing with their opponents, Crusading for Globalization reveals the historical roots of today’s disparities in wealth and income distribution. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Social Railway and Its Workers in Europe’s Modern Era, 1880-2023: Moments of Fury, Ramparts of Hope (Bloomsbury, 2025) by Dr. David Welsh examines the evolution of rail transport and a number of railway workforces across Europe in the modern era, from around 1880 to 2023.Each chapter explores how, within the context of a social railway, rail workers developed distinct national and international perspectives on the nature of their work and their roles in societies and states. Dr. Welsh convincingly argues that workers formed a raft of entirely new and enduring organisations such as trade unions that, in turn, became ramparts of hope. Welsh goes on to consider how the insurgent character of these organisations produced moments of fury during tumultuous periods in the 20th century. The Social Railway and its Workers in Europe's Modern Era, 1880-2023 explores the national and European contexts in which both characteristics came to the fore, including the ecology of fossil fuel technology (coal and oil). Above all, it argues that social, economic and political forces are not simply external 'scene-shifting' but integral to the history of railway systems.The book examines the cultural construction of European railways through literature, art and other forms of writing as well as recent oral history. It also includes a detailed investigation of the role played by nationalisation and public ownership in Europe. In the context of neoliberalism and globalization, it proposes a 21st century programme for the social railway. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jumping Through Hoops: Performing Gender in the 19th Century Circus, by Betsy Golden Kellem, reveals the hidden history of early female circus performers: boundary-breaking women like Lavinia Warren, known as the Queen of Beauty; to Millie-Christine McKoy, the Two-Headed Nightingale; to Patty Astley, the mother of the modern circus. These astounding female and gender-nonconforming artists wrestled snakes, performed magic tricks with electricity, and walked across waterfalls on tightropes, shattering taboos by performing in public. Betsy deftly explores how major forces in the long nineteenth century combined to create the uniquely American spectacle of the traveling circus. During the transformation of the circus from scrappy “mud shows” to a major international business, these extraordinary women challenged contemporary ideas of femininity, creating new possibilities for women far beyond the big top. Our guest is: Betsy Golden Kellem, who is a scholar of the unusual. She has served on the boards of the Barnum Museum and the Circus Historical Society, is the Emmy-winning host and writer of the Showman’s Shorts video series on P.T. Barnum, and writes for JSTOR Daily. An expert media and intellectual property attorney, she has taught at Yale and the University of Connecticut, and regularly speaks on the weirder corners of history and law. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is a dissertation and writing coach, and a developmental editor for scholars in the humanities. She is the producer of the Academic Life podcast. Women’s History playlist for listeners: The World She Edited Witchcraft: A History in 13 Trials We Refuse Tomboy Dear Miss Perkins The Lost Journals of Sacajewea The Untold Life of Julia Chinn Smithsonian American Women Share And Share Alike The House on Henry Street Speaking While Female Sophonisba Breckinridge Remembering Lucille Never Caught Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can support the show by downloading and sharing episodes. Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 275+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Cecil John Rhodes became one of the most influential people in the history of the British Empire. He made a fortune in South Africa by leading the world's most important diamond mining company, De Beers, as well as a gold-mining concern called Consolidated Gold Fields. While he was a busy entrepreneur, he was also a member of the Cape Colony's legislature and served as prime minister from 1890 to 1896, a key period for the development of racial discrimination. His British South Africa Company was given a charter to govern what is today Zambia and Zimbabwe. His most famous legacy is the Rhodes Trust, which funds the Rhodes Scholarships at Oxford University. A complex figure, admired and detested in his own time, Rhodes dreamt to unite Southern Africa's colonies and republics into one state, dominated by white settlers, with labor provided by Black people who were constrained and pressured by discriminatory laws. He built his wealth on the backs of African migrant laborers, for whom he had little regard. His British South Africa Company was accused of fraud. And in 1895 and 1896, he famously encouraged a failed plot to overthrow the independent Boer republic in the Transvaal. Rhodes' coup helped to precipitate the South African War, which started in 1899 and ended in 1902, the year of Rhodes' death. This authoritative biography focuses on the relationship between Rhodes' well-known activities in business and politics and the development of Southern Africa's infrastructure, most famously his plan for a Cape-to-Cairo railway. Rhodes envisioned a region where racism became embedded in the mining, farming, communication, and transportation industries. He pursued this vision in the face of opposition from many quarters. Understanding the extent of Rhodes' activities helps us to understand the challenges of modern Africa and the recent Rhodes Must Fall movement. A critical analysis of this contested figure, The Colonialist: The Vision of Cecil Rhodes (Oxford University Press, 2025) offers an original portrait of a crucial figure of his era. William Kelleher Storey is Professor of History and Dean of Arts and Humanities at Millsaps College. Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Eyes by Hand: Prosthetics of Art and Healing (MIT Press, 2025) is a book about artificial eyes—about the artisans and artists who make them, and about the life-changing and sometimes life-saving experience of wearing them, as author Dan Roche has done for 15 years. Eye making is done by hand, for one person at a time, by a very small number of ocularists (fewer than 200 in the US); it is a slow, intricate, and unusually intimate process of molding, fitting, and painting that brings ocularist and patient together for many hours or even days.In Eyes by Hand, Dr. Roche describes the craft that goes into the making of an eye that looks uncannily real, as well as the psychological and emotional healing that such service brings to someone who has suffered the very visible trauma of eye loss—a loss that can go to the heart of self-identity.In an engaging, frankly fascinating fashion, Roche captures the intricacies of a profession whose techniques and culture have been remarkably consistent for 200 years. He explores, too, how that profession may now be facing a digital transformation in the form of scan-print-mail possibilities. Such a change might make prosthetic eyes more easily and cheaply available, though it may also risk the aesthetic qualities and intimate connection fundamental to the process of healing. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The triumphant globalization that began in the 1990s has given way to a world riven by conflict, populism, and economic nationalism. In The World's Worst Bet: How the Globalization Gamble Went Wrong (And What Would Make It Right), (PublicAffairs, 2025) David J. Lynch offers a trenchant, fast-paced narrative of the rise and fall of the greatest engine of prosperity the world has ever known. Lynch explains what went right, what went wrong, and what needs to change to preserve the benefits of global integration and to build prosperity for all Americans. Lynch brings a deep understanding of the forces affecting Americans’ lives to his portrayal of a fascinating cast of characters: presidents and policymakers; factory workers whose anger over lost jobs reshaped a nation’s politics; and the anti-globalization warriors of the right and left. Their stories show how the United States made a bad bet on globalization, gambling that it could enjoy its benefits while ignoring its costs: dislocated workers, vulnerable supply chains, and the rise of a powerful rival. With trillions of dollars now at stake, The World’s Worst Bet explains the failings of the past and offers an insightful guide to the opportunities of the future. David J. Lynch is the global economics correspondent of the Washington Post. The recipient of the National Press Foundation’s Hinrich Award for Distinguished Reporting on Trade in 2021, Lynch has reported from more than sixty countries for the Post and earlier in his career with the Financial Times of London, Bloomberg News, and USA Today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

David McNally's Slavery and Capitalism: A New Marxist History (U California Press, 2025)presents the first systematic Marxist account of the capitalist character of Atlantic slavery. McNally argues that enslaved labour within the plantation system constituted capitalist commodity production, and crucially, reframes the resistance of enslaved people as profound labour struggles. He posits a "social conception of freedom", contrasting it with the liberal individualist view, asserting that for enslaved people, freedom was communal and collective, as no individual could break the structures of slavery alone. The book revives a "forgotten critical Marxist tradition" that consistently upheld the capitalist nature of New World slavery, drawing on three crucial thinkers: C.L.R. James, who argued that the collective labour of enslaved sugar cane workers on Haitian plantations was "closer to a modern proletariat than any group of workers in the world at the time". W.E.B. Du Bois, who described the overthrow of slavery in the U.S. Civil War as a "general strike of the slaves," recognizing their withdrawal of labour as commodity producers. Sylvia Wynter, who referred to this "new world enslaved class" as the "plantation proletariat," seeing them as "the most thoroughly modern social class". At the heart of McNally's analysis is the concept of the "chattel proletariat," which he describes as the "pivot point" of his analysis. This concept challenges the idea that the proletariat must mean "free workers". He demonstrates that enslaved people were economically bonded to capital, much like "free" labourers are bonded by economic necessity, with both forms of labour exploited for surplus value. Contrary to common belief, enslaved workers on Atlantic plantations "regularly used the strike weapon," engaging in collective acts like mass strikes (e.g., Toussaint Louverture's call, Bussa's rebellion, the 1831 Jamaica strikes, and Du Bois's "general strike"). These actions lead McNally to assert they were "among the foremost innovators in mass strikes" and should be recognized as part of the proletariat, necessitating a rewriting of modern labour history. McNally incorporates the insights of Marxist feminists and social reproduction theorists, emphasizing the "life-making" aspect of the chattel proletariat. He highlights that enslaved Black women not only produced commodities but also performed the essential, gendered labour of reproducing human existence. He also stresses the "necessity of theory" in historical analysis, arguing that empirical approaches alone cannot grasp "collective social processes" without a broader theoretical framework of commodity and social relationships. This book represents a significant confrontation with racial capitalism, weaving together McNally's long-standing interests in political economy and anti-racist commitments. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Maren A. Ehlers’s Give and Take: Poverty and the Status Order in Early Modern Japan (Harvard University Asia Center, 2018) examines the ways in which ordinary subjects—including many so-called outcastes and other marginalized groups—participated in the administration and regulation of society in Tokugawa Japan. Within this context, the book focuses on self-governing occupation-based and other status groups and explore their roles making Tokugawa Japan tick. The title, Give and Take, is part of Ehlers’s argument about the ways in which their relationship to government was one of reciprocity between ostensibly benevolent rulers and dutybound status groups. Within this, Ehlers evinces a special interest in marginalized groups and in poverty, especially “beggar bosses” and blind guilds. Through a detailed examination of an extraordinary collection of primary sources from the castle town of Ōno (Fukui prefecture), Ehlers uses the case study of approaches to the problems of poverty to enrich our understanding of the complex dynamics of interconnectivity and reciprocity that characterized Japan under Tokugawa rule. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Tiia Sahrakorpi, Visiting Professor at Weber State University, about her interesting book project, Our Land: An Oral History of Energy, which was funded by the Research Council of Finland. The project, which was rooted in oral histories in three locations in Finland, takes a use-based perspective and examines how ordinary Finnish people adopted and used electricity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Why do Americans eat so much beef? In Red Meat Republic: A Hoof-to-Table History of How Beef Changed America (Princeton University Press, 2019), the historian Joshua Specht provides a history that shows how our diets and consumer choices remain rooted in nineteenth century enterprises. A century and half ago, he writes, the colonialism and appropriation of indigenous lands enabled the expansion of western ranch outfits. These corporate ranchers controlled loose commodity chains, until powerful corporate meat packers in Chicago seized the economic order through the tools of modern capitalism (scientific management, standardization, labor suppression). These capitalists expanded the supply chains to far-flung consumers in New York and around the globe. But as meat became a staple of the American diet, and measure of progress, consumers cared more about the price and taste than the violence to people, animals, and environment behind the scenes. “America made modern beef” Specht writes, “at the same time that beef made America modern.” Ryan Driskell Tate is a Ph.D. candidate in American history at Rutgers University. He is completing a book on fossil-fuels and energy development in the American West. He teaches courses on modern US history, environmental history, and histories of labor and capitalism. @rydriskelltate Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A celebrated revolution brought freedom to a group of enslaved people in northern India. Or did it? Millions of people around the world today are enslaved; nearly eight million of them live in India, more than anywhere else. Freedomville: The Story of a 21st-Century Slave Revolt (Columbia Global Reports, 2021) by Dr. Laura Murphy is the story of a small group of enslaved villagers in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, who founded their own town of Azad Nagar—Freedomville—after staging a rebellion against their slaveholders. International organizations championed this as a nonviolent “silent revolution” that inspired other villagers to fight for their own freedom. But Professor Murphy, a leading scholar of contemporary global slavery, who spent years researching and teaching about Freedomville, found that whispers and deflections suggested that there was something troubling about Azad Nagar’s success. Professor Murphy embarks on a Rashomon-like retelling—a complex, constantly changing narrative of a murder that captures better than any sanitized account just why it is that slavery continues to exist in the twenty-first century. Freedomville’s enormous struggle to gain and maintain liberty shows why it is unrealistic to expect radical change without violent protest—and how a global construction boom is deepening and broadening the alienation of impoverished people around the world. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Many local policymakers make decisions based on a deep-seated belief: what’s good for the rich is good for cities. Convinced that local finances depend on attracting wealthy firms and residents, municipal governments lavish public subsidies on their behalf. Whatever form this strategy takes—tax-exempt apartments, corporate incentives, debt-financed mega projects—its rationale remains consistent and assumed to be true. But this wasn’t always the case. Between the 1870s and the 1970s, a wide range of activists, citizens, and intellectuals in New York City connected local fiscal crises to the greed and waste of the rich. These figures saw other routes to development, possibilities rooted in alternate ideas about what was fiscally viable. In The Menace of Prosperity: New York City and the Struggle for Economic Development, 1865–1981 (U of Chicago Press, 2025), Daniel Wortel-London argues that urban economics and politics are shaped by what he terms the “fiscal imagination” of policymakers, activists, advocates, and other figures. His survey of New York City during a period of explosive growth shows how residents went beyond the limits of redistributive liberalism to imagine how their communities could become economically viable without the largesse of the wealthy. Their strategies—which included cooperatives, public housing, land value taxation, public utilities, and more—centered the needs and capabilities of ordinary residents as the basis for local economies that were both prosperous and just. Reed Schwartz (@reedschwartzsf) holds an MPhil in intellectual history from the University of Cambridge. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022 brought a tragic close to a thirty-year period of history that began with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the reopening of Russia to the West after six decades of Soviet isolation. The opening lasted for three tumultuous decades and ended with a new closing, driven by the Ukrainian war, the imposition of Western sanctions, and the Russian responses to them. In Perfect Storm: Russia's Failed Economic Opening, the Hurricane of War and Sanctions, and the Uncertain Future (Oxford University Press, 2025), Russia analyst Thane Gustafson reinterprets the story of Russia's failed opening to the West, focusing on its economic, technological, and social aspects, and the role they played in its ultimate failure. These parallel events are essential for understanding what happened and what went wrong. Yet they have received much less attention than the military and geopolitical aspects of the current conflict. Gustafson tells the story of the West's entry into Russia, the arrival of Russians into the West, and the conflicting emotions and responses these aroused on both sides, contributing to the ultimate breakdown of relations and the unprecedented hurricane of Western sanctions. The book concludes with an examination of possible futures under a new generation of leaders. A measured and nuanced account of the evolution of Russia's economic relations with the world, Perfect Storm illuminates the longer history of Russia's opening to the West, from its achievements and disappointments to the complexity of the post-invasion sanctions regime and Russia's responses to them. Thane Gustafson is Professor of Government at Georgetown University. He is the author of many books, including Klimat (2021), The Bridge (2020), and Wheel of Fortune (2012). Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What does it mean to supervise a bank? And why does it matter who holds that power? In this episode, Sean H. Vanatta joins us to explore the hidden machinery behind American finance, as told in his new book Private Finance, Public Power: A History of Bank Supervision in America (Princeton UP, 2025), co-authored with Peter Conti-Brown. Spanning nearly 150 years, the book traces the evolution of bank supervision from a patchwork of state-level oversight to a complex, layered system involving federal agencies, private actors, and political discretion. Sean takes us from the wildcat banks of the 1830s to the rise of the Federal Reserve, through crises, reforms, and the quiet work of bank examiners who shaped the rules behind the scenes. We discuss why supervision differs from regulation, how discretion has become central to managing financial risk, and what the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank in 2023 reveals about the enduring tension between private profit and public responsibility. Along the way, Sean shares stories of forgotten institutions, colourful characters, and the surprising role of gender and civil rights in shaping financial oversight. Whether you're a policymaker, historian, or simply curious about how money and power interact, this conversation offers a fresh perspective on the institutions that quietly govern our financial lives. Tune in for a rich and engaging journey through the history and current state of banking politics.The interview on "Plastic Capitalism" is available here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

My guest today is Anders M. Greene-Crow. Anders teaches at the Woods College of Advancing Studies and is a former Professor of English at Boston College. More recently, Anders has been preparing for the New York state bar exam, while also co-hosting the podcast “Say Podcast and Die!,” about R.L. Stine’s book series, Goosebumps. Today, we are discussing Anders’s first book, Austerity Measures: The Poetics of Food Insecurity in Early Modern English Literature (U of Pennsylvania Press, 2025). Austerity Measures is a brilliant intervention in how we read early modern poetry. Crow looks at a range of lyric poets and writers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, including Thomas Tusser, George Herbert, Robert Herrick, Anne Bradstreet, and Thomas Tryon. Austerity Measures argues that early modern poets used literary form to model solutions addressed to pressing concerns about food insecurity and food ethics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On this episode of the Economic and Business History channel, I spoke with Dr. Victoria Basualdo and Dr. Marcelo Bucheli about their new edited book. Big Business and Dictatorships in Latin America: A Transnational History of Profits and Repression (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) is an edited volume that studies the relationship between big business and the Latin American dictatorial regimes during the Cold War. The first section provides a general background about the contemporary history of business corporations and dictatorships in the twentieth century at the international level. The second section comprises chapters that analyze five national cases (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, and Peru), as well as a comparative analysis of the banking sector in the Southern Cone (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay). The third section presents six case studies of large companies in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, and Central America. This book is crucial reading because it provides the first comprehensive analysis of a key yet understudied topic in Cold War history in Latin America. Victoria Basualdo is Researcher at the Argentine National Scientific Council (CONICET) and at the Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales (FLACSO), and Professor in the Political Economy Master's Degree Program at FLACSO, Argentina. She specializes in contemporary economic and labor history, with special focus on structural changes and the transformations of trade-union organizations in Argentina and Latin America. Hartmut Berghoff is Director of the Institute of Economic and Social History at the University of Göttingen, Germany. He was the Director of the German Historical Institute in Washington DC (2008-2015) and held various visiting positions at the Center of Advanced Study, Harvard Business School, the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, and the Henley Business School. He has worked on the history of consumption, business history, immigration history and the history of modern Germany. Marcelo Bucheli is Associate Professor of Business Administration at the Gies College of Business, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA. His research focuses on the political economy of multinational corporations in Latin America, theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of the relationship between firms and states in a historical perspective, and business groups. Hosted by Paula De La Cruz-Fernandez, consultant, historian, and digital editor. New Books Network en español editor. Edita CEO. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Empire of Austerity: Russia and the Breaking of Eurasia (Hurst, 2025) traces how Russian economic policy precipitated the country’s slide towards an increasingly coercive authoritarianism, a hubristic challenge to the West, and all-out war with Ukraine. Decades of dependence on commodity exports, failure to invest and failure to consume enough have condemned not only the Russian Federation, but Eurasia more broadly, to stagnation and conflict. Only time will tell if Russia and its neighbours can escape the zero-sum politics of austerity in a world of rapidly evolving geopolitical, energy and climate crises. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the early 1920s, Americans owned 80 percent of the world’s automobiles and consumed 75 percent of the world’s rubber. But only one percent of the world’s rubber grew under the U.S. flag, creating a bottleneck that hampered the nation’s explosive economic expansion. To solve its conundrum, the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company turned to a tiny West African nation, Liberia, founded in 1847 as a free Black republic. Empire of Rubber: Firestone's Scramble for Land and Power in Liberia (New Press, 2021) tells a sweeping story of capitalism, racial exploitation, and environmental devastation, as Firestone transformed Liberia into America’s rubber empire. Historian and filmmaker Gregg Mitman scoured remote archives to unearth a history of promises unfulfilled for the vast numbers of Liberians who toiled on rubber plantations built on taken land. Mitman reveals a history of racial segregation and medical experimentation that reflected Jim Crow America—on African soil. As Firestone reaped fortunes, wealth and power concentrated in the hands of a few elites, fostering widespread inequalities that fed unrest, rebellions and, eventually, civil war. A riveting narrative of ecology and disease, of commerce and science, and of racial politics and political maneuvering, Empire of Rubber uncovers the hidden story of a corporate empire whose tentacles reach into the present. Gregg Mitman is the Vilas Research and William Coleman Professor of History, Medical History, and Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. An award-winning author and filmmaker, his recent films and books include The Land Beneath Our Feet and Breathing Space: How Allergies Shape Our Lives and Landscapes. He lives near Madison, Wisconsin. Website. Brian Hamilton is Chair of the Department of History and Social Science at Deerfield Academy. Twitter. Website Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You’ve got to speculate to accumulate. We apply that notion to individuals in pursuit of wealth, but what about countries? The Debt of a Nation: Land and the Financing of the Canadian Settler State, 1820–73 (U of British Columbia Press, 2025) is the first comprehensive history of Canada’s nineteenth-century public debt. Beginning in the 1820s, loans gave British North American settler governments access to unprecedented amounts of capital at low interest rates. The credit for such loans derived from colonial appropriation of Indigenous territories, and this process essentially created a market value for stolen land. Dr. Angela Tozer explores the role of public debt financing in the consolidation of the Canadian settler state: Upper Canada’s first public debt, issued as securities on the London Stock Exchange; the unique government land tenure of Prince Edward Island and attendant impact on Mi’kmaw homelands; and the purchase of Rupert’s Land via a loan. She analyzes how an economic system centred on credit and debt relied on two factors: settlers had to become the risk bearers – though not necessarily the beneficiaries – of loans, and colonial governments had to have the power to appropriate Indigenous territories in order to appear creditworthy. This history of the intimate relationship between public debt and colonization underscores the importance of the appropriation of Indigenous lands to global markets. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Trade between belligerents during wartime should not occur. After all, exchanged goods might help enemies secure the upper hand on the battlefield. Yet as history shows, states rarely choose either war or trade. In fact, they frequently engage in both at the same time. To explain why states trade with their enemies, in Trade in War: Economic Cooperation across Enemy Lines (Cornell UP, 2025) Dr. Mariya Grinberg examines the wartime commercial policies of major powers during the Crimean War, the two World Wars, and several post-1989 wars. She shows that in the face of two competing imperatives—preventing an enemy from increasing its military capabilities, and maintaining its own long-term security through economic exchange—states at war tailor wartime commercial policies around a product's characteristics and war expectations. If a product's conversion time into military capabilities exceeds the war's expected length, then trade in the product can occur, since the product will not have time to affect battlefield outcomes. If a state cannot afford to jeopardize the revenue provided by the traded product, trade in it can also occur. Dr. Grinberg's findings reveal that economic cooperation can thrive even in the most hostile of times—and that interstate conflict might not be as easily deterred by high levels of economic interdependence as is commonly believed. Trade in War compels us to recognize that economic ties between states may be insufficient to stave off war. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Think running an insurance company or a bank is hard? Try doing it as an African-American woman in the Jim Crow South. Shennette Garrett-Scott's new book, Banking on Freedom: Black Women in U.S. Finance Before the New Deal (Columbia University Press, 2019) tells the fascinating story of just such an endeavor, first the Independent Order of St. Luke, and then the St. Luke Penny Savings Bank, founded in Richmond in 1903. Along the way, she tells the tale of force-of-nature strong women, particularly Maggie Lena Walker, who wouldn't take no for an answer as she built up a culture of business and entrepreneurship against incredibly long odds and never-ending efforts by regulators and competitors to thwart her efforts. It makes for gripping reading. Daniel Peris is Senior Vice President at Federated Investors in Pittsburgh. Trained as a historian of modern Russia, he is the author most recently of Getting Back to Business: Why Modern Portfolio Theory Fails Investors. You can follow him on Twitter @Back2BizBook or at http://www.strategicdividendinvestor.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“Ladies and gentlemen, the Bronx is burning!” That legendary and apocryphal phrase, allegedly uttered by announcers during the 1977 World Series as flames rose above Yankee Stadium, seemed to encapsulate an entire era in this nation’s urban history. Across that decade, a wave of arson coursed through American cities, destroying entire neighborhoods home to poor communities of color. Yet as historian Bench Ansfield demonstrates in Born in Flames: The Business of Arson and the Remaking of the American City (Norton, 2025), the vast majority of the fires were not set by residents, as is commonly assumed, but by landlords looking to collect insurance payouts. Driven by perverse incentives—new government-sponsored insurance combined with tanking property values—landlords hired “torches,” mostly Black and Brown youth, to set fires in the buildings, sometimes with people still living in them. Tens of thousands of families lost their homes to these blazes, yet for much of the 1970s, tenant vandalism and welfare fraud stood as the prevailing explanations for the arson wave, effectively indemnifying landlords. Ansfield’s book, based on a decade of research, introduces the term “brownlining” for the destructive insurance practices imposed on poor communities of color under the guise of racial redress. Ansfield shows that as the FIRE industries—finance, insurance, and real estate— eclipsed manufacturing in the 1970s, they began profoundly reshaping Black and Brown neighborhoods, seeing them as easy sources of profit. At every step, Ansfield charts the tenant-led resistance movements that sprung up in the Bronx and elsewhere, as well as the explosion of popular culture around the fires, from iconic movies like The Towering Inferno to hit songs such as “Disco Inferno.” Ultimately, they show how similarly pernicious dynamics around insurance and race are still at play in our own era, especially in regions most at risk of climate shocks. Bench Ansfield is Assistant Professor of History at Temple University. They hold a PhD in American Studies from Yale University and won the Allan Nevins Prize for the best dissertation in American history from the Society of American Historians. They live in Philadelpha, Pennsylvania. Bluesky. Website. Brian Hamilton is chair of the Department of History and Social Science at Deerfield Academy. Twitter. Website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Mirages of Reform : The Politics of Elite Protectionism in the Arab World (Cornell UP, 2025), Steve L. Monroe argues that geopolitics and social connections between state and capital underpin the Arab world's uneven trade policies. Despite decades of international pressure, neoliberal trade policy reform in the Arab world has been varied, selective, and often ineffective. Neoliberal trade policies have not deepened international trade in many of the region's markets. This book explains why. When the region's regimes have strong support from global powers and strong social connections to the industrial elite, they engage in extensive but deceptive trade policy reform. Behind an edifice of neoliberal trade policies, neopatrimonial forms of protectionism like tax evasion and noncompetitive procurement shield the socially connected from international competition and obstruct actual trade liberalization. Industrialists are less trustful of regime promises of neopatrimonial protectionism after reform when they have weak social connections to their regime and their regime has low support from global powers. They are more likely to defend existing protectionist policies under these conditions, resulting in less trade policy reform. Drawing on interviews, firm- and industry-level data, and evidence from Jordan to Morocco, Mirages of Reform reveals how international and domestic factors interact to shape the Arab world's rugged trade policy terrain. Insightful and well researched, this book imparts important lessons and warnings about the repercussions of economic reform in the region. Steve L. Monroe is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the National University of Singapore. He is a scholar of development, with a primary focus on the Arab world. Monroe's scholarship examines two of the region's most pressing developmental challenges: limited economic integration, and gender inequality. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Capitalism is typically treated as a force for relentless commodification. Yet it consistently fails to place value on vital aspects of the nonhuman world, whether carbon emissions or entire ecosystems. In Free Gifts, Alyssa Battistoni explores capitalism’s persistent failure to value nature, arguing that the key question is not the moral issue of why some kinds of nature shouldn’t be commodified, but the economic puzzle of why they haven’t been. To understand contemporary ecological problems from biodiversity collapse to climate change, she contends, we have to understand how some things come to have value under capitalism—and how others do not. To help us do so, Battistoni recovers and reinterprets the idea of the free gift of nature used by classical economic thinkers to describe what we gratuitously obtain from the natural world, and builds on Karl Marx’s critique of political economy to show how capitalism fundamentally treats nature as free for the taking. This novel theory of capitalism’s relationship to nature not only helps us understand contemporary ecological breakdown, but also casts capitalism’s own core dynamics in a new light.Battistoni addresses four different instances of the free gift in political economic thought, each in a specific domain: natural agents in industry, pollution in the environment, reproductive labor in the household, and natural capital in the biosphere. In so doing, she offers new readings of major twentieth-century thinkers, including Friedrich Hayek, Simone de Beauvoir, Garrett Hardin, Silvia Federici, and Ronald Coase. Ultimately, she offers a novel account of freedom for our ecologically troubled present, developing a materialist existentialism to argue that capitalism limits our ability to be responsible for our relationships to the natural world, and imagining how we might live freely while valuing nature’s gifts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Mary Bridges, Ernest May Fellow in History and Policy at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, about her book, Dollars and Dominion: US Bankers and the Making of a Superpower. Dollars and Dominion takes an infrastructural view of banking institutions and examines how US banks, almost by accident, became a durable part of the global financial system in the first half of the 20th century, supporting the global dominance of the US dollar after World War II. Vinsel and Bridges also discuss the benefits and limitations of using infrastructure as a framework of analysis and the next projects Bridges is working on. Lee wrote a new essay for the Peoples & Things newsletter, “Disinvestment and Decline in Infrastructure Studies,” inspired by a key moment in the discussion. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices