New Books in Economic and Business History

On October 30, 1975, the New York Daily News printed the most famous headline in its history: “Ford to City: Drop Dead.” The previous day, President Gerald Ford had delivered a speech at the National Press Club in Washington on the looming bankruptcy of New York City. In the speech, Ford publicly denied the near-bankrupt New York City a federal bailout. The next morning, the streets of Manhattan were littered with the incendiary headline.  It has been fifty years since the publication of the headline, which presents an opportunity to reconsider this historical period. In this special edition episode, host Ryan Purcell talks with Benjamin Holtzman, Assistant Professor of History at Lehman College (CUNY), about the soundtracks behind New York’s fiscal crisis. Holtzman is the author of The Long Crisis: New York and the Path to Neoliberalism (Oxford University Press, 2023), a volume that returns to this turbulent period to explore the origins and implications of the diminished faith in government as capable of solving public problems. In the wake of the fiscal crisis of 1975, Holtzman argues, local people and officials rebuilt the city from the ground up, creating a system that would both exacerbate old racial and economic inequalities and produce new ones that continue to shape metropolitan areas today. Contact Soundscapes NYC Here Support the show Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Historian Hanna Rose Shell, a professor at University of Colorado, Boulder, talks about her book Shoddy: From Devil’s Dust to the Renaissance of Rags with Peoples & Things host Lee Vinsel. Along the way, Shell raises a number of important and interesting things, including the long history of reuse and recycling and how forms of technology and work become tied to social status. With shoddy, it was the anxieties of low class, low social status work and poverty. Shell also discusses how individual technologies become mirrors for the worries, fears, hatreds, and other feelings of society – how when we look into the history of any technology we often see ourselves reflected back. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For much of the late 20th century, Japanese business historians were core contributors to the global field. They published, collaborated, and shaped debates. But something shifted after 2000. Their international visibility - and participation in emerging theoretical conversations - declined. In Japan and the Great Divergence in Business History (Donzé & Umemura, 2025), the authors argue that this shift wasn’t due to a lack of scholarship, but a misalignment of frameworks. While business history globally began integrating concepts from management studies, economic sociology, political economy, and comparative capitalism, Japanese scholarship largely remained anchored in the Chandlerian paradigm: rich, rigorous firm-level histories focused on organizational growth, strategies, and industrial evolution. The consequences of this growing distance are not trivial: Fewer Japanese scholars in international research networks Reduced presence in global journals and conferences Limited cross-pollination with adjacent disciplines Underrepresentation in key theoretical debates reshaping business history Donzé, P.-Y., & Umemura, M. (2025). Japan and the Great Divergence in Business History. Journal of Evolutionary Studies in Business. Link here Hosted by Paula de la Cruz-Fernández, on behalf of the Journal of Evolutionary Studies in Business. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Joseph E. Stiglitz has had a remarkable career. He is a brilliant academic, capped by sharing the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics and the Nobel Peace Prize, and honorary degrees from Harvard, Cambridge, Oxford and more than fifty other universities, and elected not only to the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters but the Royal Society and the British Academy; a public servant, who served as Chair of President Clinton's Council of Economic Advisors and Chief Economist and Senior Vice President of the World Bank, headed international commissions for the UN and France, and was awarded the French Legion of Honor and Australia's Sydney Peace Prize; a public intellectual whose numerous books on vital topics have been best sellers.What brought him to economics were his concerns about the inequality and discrimination he saw growing up. Wanting to understand what drives it and what can be done about it has been his lifelong passion. This book gathers together and extends to new frontiers this lifelong work, drawing upon the challenges and insights of each of these phases of his career.In a still very widely cited paper written fifty years ago, Stiglitz set forth the fundamental framework for analyzing intergenerational transfer of wealth and advantage, which plays a central role in persistent inequality. That and subsequent work, developed most fully here for the first time, described today's inequality as a result of centrifugal forces increasing inequality and centripetal forces reducing it. In recent decades, the centrifugal forces have strengthened, the centripetal forces weakened. His general theory provides a framework for understanding the marked growth in inequality in recent decades, and for devising policies to reduce it.A central message is that ever-increasing inequality is not inevitable. Inequality is, in a fundamental sense, a choice. Stiglitz explains that inequality does not largely arise from differences in savings rates between capitalists and others, though that may play a role (as Piketty, Marx, and Kaldor suggest); but rather, it originates importantly from the rules of the game, which have weakened the bargaining power of workers as they have increased the market power of corporations. He also explains how monetary authorities have contributed to increasing wealth inequality, and how, unless something is done about it, likely changes in technology such as AI and robotization will make matters worse. He describes policies that can simultaneously reduce inequality and improve economic performance. Joseph E. Stiglitz is an American economist and a professor at Columbia University.  Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Colleen Dunlavy, Emeritus Professor of History at University of Wisconsin-Madison, about her recent book, Small, Medium, Large: How Government Made the U.S. Into a Manufacturing Powerhouse. Small, Medium, Large examines the crucial role that the U.S. federal government played in rationalizing and diffusing industrial production standards, which over time greatly increased economies of scale and reduced the cost of both industrial and consumer goods. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Monsoon Voyagers follows the voyage of a single dhow (sailing vessel), the Crooked, along with its captain and crew, from Kuwait to port cities around the Persian Gulf and Western Indian Ocean, from 1924 to 1925. Through his account of the voyage, Fahad Ahmad Bishara unpacks a much broader history of circulation and exchange across the Arabian Sea in the time of empire. From their offices in India, Arabia, and East Africa, Gulf merchants utilized the technologies of colonial capitalism — banks, steamships, railroads, telegraphs, and more — to transform their own regional bazaar economy. In the process, they remade the Gulf itself. Drawing on the Crooked's first-person logbooks, along with letters, notes, and business accounts from a range of port cities, Monsoon Voyagers narrates the still-untold connected histories of the Gulf and Indian Ocean. The Gulf's past, it suggests, played out across the sea as much as it did the land. Monsoon Voyagers doesn’t just tell a vivid, imaginative narrative—it teaches. Each port-of-call chapter can work as a stand-alone module. And the brief “Inscription” interludes double as turn-key primary-source labs—perfect for document analysis, quick mapping, and mini-quant work with weights, measures, and credit instruments. It invites undergraduates into a connected oceanic world and the big questions of world history, while graduate students get a method—how to read vernacular archives across scales and languages to design their own transregional, archive-driven projects. A quick heads-up: Traditional local musical interludes (see below for credits and links) will punctuate our voyage as chapter markers you can use to pause and reflect—as we sail from Kuwait to the Shatt al-Arab, then out across the Gulf to Oman, Karachi, Gujarat, Bombay, and the Malabar coast. We’ll return via Muscat and Bahrain, dropping anchor once more in Kuwait. Music Credits and Links: Prologue: The Logbook1. KuwaitInscription: Debts2. The Shatt Al-ʿArabInscription: Freightage3. The GulfInscription: Passage4. The Sea of OmanInscription: Guides5. Karachi to KathiawarInscription: Letters6. BombayInscription: Transfers7. MalabarInscription: Conversions8. CrossingsInscription: Maps9. MuscatInscription: Poems10. BahrainInscription: Accounts11. ReturnsEpilogue: Triumph and Loss Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Charles Watkins joins Jana Byars to talk about his new book, Trees Ancient and Modern (Reaktion, 2025). This delightful new book explores the relationship between trees and people and reveals how people have used, valued and understood forests over time. While trees are celebrated as symbols of natural beauty, they are increasingly at risk from climate change, disease, fires and urban expansion. Trees Ancient and Modern explores humanity’s deep connection with trees and woodlands, highlighting their beauty and importance and the challenges they face. The book looks at debates about creating new woodlands, exploring questions of location, ownership and management.Using diverse sources such as literature, art, historical records, scientific surveys and oral histories, Charles Watkins reveals how people have used, valued and understood forests over time. He also assesses modern threats to woodlands and considers how best to conserve them. Richly illustrated, this is a global social and cultural history of forests that provides valuable insights for future management. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Reformatting Agrarian Life presents a stealth urban history from the countryside that foregrounds the mutual entanglements of agrarian and urban expertise. William J. Glover traces an essential genealogy for understanding how urbanism unexpectedly left the city in late colonial India and began to settle in agrarian space, exploring how two milieus that were initially seen as distinct were gradually brought together both conceptually and in practices of ordinary life. He argues that rural change and the expert knowledge associated with managing the countryside in colonial India opened paths for urban concepts and forms to permeate agrarian settings where they were previously thought to have little relevance. This process indelibly shaped idioms and modes of agrarian life, just as it gave rural problems and processes a structural role in urban discourse. By illuminating the intellectual paths by which agrarian and urban processes came to be understood as co-constituting, and exploring multiple vivid, empirically rich case studies of projects where those relations were made evident, this book presents a compelling case to move beyond traditional intellectual silos and enter new theoretical territory to understand processes of urban and rural transformation. Arighna Gupta is a doctoral candidate in history at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His dissertation attempts to trace early-colonial genealogies of popular sovereignty located at the interstices of monarchical, religious, and colonial sovereignties in India and present-day Bangladesh. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Future of Employment in Africa: Demography, Labor Markets and Welfare explores the major trends that will define the face of the sub-Saharan continent in the next three decades. The near doubling of Africa’s population by 2050 will lead to more than twenty million new job seekers entering the African labor market every year until then. Right now, Africa doesn’t seem able to offer jobs to this many people, resulting in possible unrest and intra-African or intercontinental migration flows, including to Europe. Climate change creates additional migratory pressure as it threatens the future of agriculture and livestock. The author explores the opportunities for increased job creation in Africa. Fortunately, Africa has some major strengths. Africans excel in market-creating innovation: the ability to see market opportunities and innovations that others do not. Many Africans create their own jobs through micro and small enterprises. A young well-trained middle class, familiar with digital technologies, is emerging. Africa’s abundant natural resources attract global powers like China aspiring to secure access to critical raw materials. The author challenges pessimistic message about the continent and provides an optimistic view of Africa’s future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Never before have we been presented with the prospect of redesigning business at scale to create a more sustainable future for our planet and the people who inhabit it. As we pass the midpoint of the Sustainable Development Goals (2015–2030), the world has changed. There is not only more progress and policy but also more disagreement on the way forward. The bottom line is that the shared goals developed in 2015 will not be met, global warming will likely exceed targets, and the collective challenge will be left to a new generation. Leading the Sustainable Organization: The Quest for Ethical Brands and a Culture of Sustainable Innovation (Anthem Press, 2025) is organized as a series of business challenges and key questions that enable a transition from making legacy companies more carbon and waste efficient, to operating in fundamentally new ways. The vast majority of the new infrastructure the world will need by 2050 still needs to be built. Those challenges will not be solved by legacy companies working to protect their market position in the face of a changing world. The book offers a chapter-by-chapter guide to enable new leaders to turn challenges into opportunities. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

During the Great Depression, the proliferation of local taxpayers’ associations was dramatic and unprecedented. The justly concerned members of these organizations examined the operations of state, city, and county governments, then pressed local officials for operational and fiscal reforms. These associations aimed to reduce the cost of state and local governments to make operations more efficient and less expensive. "Mr. Taxpayer versus Mr. Tax Spender": Taxpayers’ Associations, Pocketbook Politics, and the Law during the Great Depression (Temple UP, 2023) by Dr. Linda Upham-Bornstein presents a comprehensive overview of these grassroots taxpayers’ leagues beginning in the 1860s and shows how they evolved during their heyday in the 1930s. Dr. Upham-Bornstein chronicles the ways these taxpayers associations organized as well as the tools they used—constructive economy, political efforts, tax strikes, and tax revolt through litigation—to achieve their objectives. Taxpayer activity was a direct consequence of—and a response to—the economic crisis of the Great Depression and the expansion of the size and scope of government. “Mr. Taxpayer versus Mr. Tax Spender” connects collective tax resistance in the 1930s to the populist tradition in American politics and to other broad impulses in American political and legal history. 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 Influence Economy: Decoding Supplier-Induced Demand (Oxford UP, 2025), Maxim Sytch reveals how professional services--consulting, marketing, banking, and legal firms--create demand for unnecessary and potentially harmful products and services. Such supplier-induced demand can take many forms, including superfluous reorganizations, frivolous lawsuits, and ill-conceived acquisitions. These actions may not only fail to produce positive outcomes but can also inflict detrimental consequences on the buying organization, from squandering valuable resources and demotivating the workforce to disrupting business operations and causing various operational, legal, and financial setbacks. Through empirical analyses and interviews with buyers and sellers of professional services, Sytch reveals the conditions under which supplier-induced demand is most likely to occur. The book argues that the conditions that give rise to supplier-induced demand are increasingly characteristic of today's broader knowledge-based economy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Was Britain’s industrial revolution the result of its machines, which produced goods with miraculous efficiency? Was it the country’s natural abundance, which provided coal for its engines, ores for its furnaces and food for its labourers? Or was it Britain’s colonies, where a brutalized enslaved workforce produced cotton for its factories? In Ruthless: A New History of Britain’s Rise to Wealth and Power, 1660-1800 (Yale UP, 2025), acclaimed historian Professor Edmond Smith shows how the world’s first industrial nation was founded on the ruthless exploitation of technology, people and the planet. This economic system linked the plantations of the Caribbean with the colossal cotton mills of northern England, applied the innovations of science and agriculture to colonial exploration, and formalised financial markets in self-serving ways. At the heart of these processes were Britons themselves, early capitalists who spun webs of expertise and investment to connect exploitative practices across the globe. Ruthless offers an eye-opening account of Britain’s economic transformation—and the scale and breadth of brutality that it depended upon. 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 period of the "second slavery" was marked by geographic expansion of zones of slavery into the Upper US South, Cuba, and Brazil and chronological expansion into the industrial age. As The Reinvention of Atlantic Slavery: Technology, Labor, Race, and Capitalism in the Greater Caribbean (Oxford UP, 2020) shows, ambitious planters throughout the Greater Caribbean hired a transnational group of chemists, engineers, and other "plantation experts" to assist them in adapting industrial technologies to suit their "tropical" needs and increase profitability. Not only were technologies reinvented so as to keep manufacturing processes local but slaveholders' adaptation of new racial ideologies also shaped their particular usage of new machines. Finally, these businessmen forged a new set of relationships with one another in order to sidestep the financial dominance of Great Britain and the northeastern United States. In addition to promoting new forms of mechanization, the technical experts depended on the know-how of slaves alongside whom they worked. Bondspeople with industrial craft skills played key roles in the development of new production processes and technologies like sugar mills. While the very existence of such skilled slaves contradicted prevailing racial ideologies and allowed black people to wield power in their own interest, their contributions grew the slave economies of Cuba, Brazil, and the Upper South. Together reform-minded planters, technical experts, and enslaved people modernized sugar plantations in Louisiana and Cuba; brought together rural Virginia wheat planters and industrial flour-millers in Richmond with the coffee-planting system of southeastern Brazil; and enabled engineers and iron-makers in Virginia to collaborate with railroad and sugar entrepreneurs in Cuba. Through his examination of the creation of these industrial bodies of knowledge, Daniel B. Rood demonstrates the deepening dependence of the Atlantic economy on forced labor after a few revolutionary decades in which it seemed the institution of slavery might be destroyed. The reinvention of this plantation world in the 1840s and 1850s brought a renewed movement in the 1860s, especially from enslaved people themselves in the United States and Cuba, to end chattel slavery. This account of capitalism, technology, and slavery offers new perspectives on the nineteenth-century Americas. Alejandra Bronfman is Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies Latin American, Caribbean & U.S. Latino Studies at SUNY, Albany. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Why is there no metric system in the United States? Why is it that a country known for its openness to the future, its scientific innovations, and its preference for practicality has not adopted the most practical, scientific, and innovative system of measurement? Yardstick Nation: The Metric System in America (Vanderbilt UP, 2025) by Dr. Hector Vera answers these questions by analyzing the political, economic, and international factors that determined the trajectory of the United States as a nation self-excluded from one of the most successful global technical languages. Using a historical-comparative approach and qualitative analysis of archival material, the book examines the trajectories of American scientists, engineers, politicians, and industrialists from 1787 to 1982, to detail what they wanted to attain and to explain what was actually possible to achieve given the political and economic conditions in which they lived. Yardstick Nation argues that in order to understand the unbreached distance between the United States and the metric system, we must consider the interaction between three structural elements: historical timing, state infrastructural power, and international economic integration. Dr. Vera’s systematic look at when and why countries have adopted the metric system shows that its introduction is never casual. In the countries that voluntarily embraced the metric system, this was the result of either deep internal political transformations or momentous changes in the international economy. When the adoption of the metric system is politically driven, it comes as the result of a social revolution, independence war, national unification, or the draft of a new constitution. When it is propelled by economic factors, metrication is part of the efforts of economically stagnant countries to integrate into international 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