New Books in Economic and Business History

Dec 02 2024 1135 ep. 57 mins 186
New Books in Economic and Business History Podcast artwork

Interviews with scholars of the economic and business history about their new books

  Arts  History  Science
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Adrian Tinniswood, "The Power and the Glory: Life in the English Country House Before the Great War" (Basic Books, 2024)

Dec 02 2024 56 mins  
In the decades before the First World War, the owners of the nation’s stately homes revelled in a golden age of glory and glamour. Nothing lay beyond their reach in a world where privilege and hedonism went hand-in-hand with duty and honour. This was a time when the ancestral seats of ancient nobility stood side-by-side with the fabulous palaces of Jewish bankers and Indian princ

Steven King et al., "In Their Own Write: Contesting the New Poor Law, 1834–1900" (McGill-Queen's Press, 2022)

Dec 02 2024 65 mins  
Few subjects in European welfare history attract as much attention as the nineteenth-century English and Welsh New Poor Law. Its founding statute was considered the single most important piece of social legislation ever enacted, and at the same time, the coming of its institutions - from penny-pinching Boards of Guardians to the dreaded workhouse - has generally been viewed as a ca

James T. White and John Punter, "Condoland: The Planning, Design, and Development of Toronto's CityPlace" (UBC Press, 2023)

Dec 01 2024 83 mins  
Casting an eye toward the frantic vertical urbanization of Toronto, Condoland: The Planning, Design, and Development of Toronto’s CityPlace (UBC, 2023) traces the forty-year history of the city’s largest residential megaproject. James T. White and John Punter summarize the tools used to shape Toronto’s built environment and critically explore the underlying political economy

Ken Wilcox, "The China Business Conundrum: Ensure That "Win-Win" Doesn't Mean Western Companies Lose Twice" (John Wiley & Sons, 2024)

Dec 01 2024 62 mins  
The China Business Conundrum: Ensure That "Win-Win" Doesn't Mean Western Companies Lose Twice (Wiley, 2024) describes former CEO of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) Ken Wilcox's firsthand challenges he encountered in four years “on the ground” trying to establish a joint venture between SVB and the Chinese government to fund local innovation design―and the Chinese Communist Party (C

Sidney A. Shapiro and Joseph P. Tomain, "How Government Built America" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

Dec 01 2024 88 mins  
How Government Built America (Cambridge UP, 2024) challenges growing, anti-government rhetoric by highlighting the role government has played in partnering with markets to build the United States. Sidney A. Shapiro and Joseph P. Tomain explore how markets can harm and fail the country, and how the government has addressed these extremes by restoring essential values to benefit all

Maria Adamopoulou, "The Greek Gastarbeiter in the Federal Republic of Germany (1960–1974)" (de Gruyter, 2024)

Nov 30 2024 87 mins  
Was migration to Germany a blessing or a curse? The main argument of this book is that the Greek state conceived labor migration as a traineeship into Europeanization with its shiny varnish of progress. Jumping on a fully packed train to West Germany meant leaving the past behind. However, the tensed Cold War realities left no space for illusions; specters of the Nazi past and the

Karen Lystra, "Love and the Working Class: The Inner Worlds of Nineteenth Century Americans" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Nov 30 2024 68 mins  
Love and the Working Class: The Inner Worlds of Nineteenth Century Americans (Oxford University Press, 2024) by Dr. Karen Lystra is a unique look at the emotions of hard-living, nineteenth-century Americans who were often on the cusp of literacy. These laboring folk highly valued letters and, however difficult it was, wrote to stay connected to those they loved. This book displays

Ryan Moran, "Selling the Future: Community, Hope, and Crisis in the Early History of Japanese Life Insurance" (Cornell UP, 2024)

Nov 29 2024 103 mins  
Ryan Moran’s Selling the Future: Community, Hope, and Crisis in the Early History of Japanese Life Insurance (Cornell UP, 2023) is a history of the life insurance industry in Japan from its origins in the early 1880s to Japan’s surrender in 1945. Moran shows how both private and public insurers exploited a mix of “certainty, fear, and optimism” to promise a secure utopia on

Brian Donahue, "Slow Wood: Greener Building from Local Forests" (Yale UP, 2024)

Nov 26 2024 52 mins  
In Slow Wood: Greener Building from Local Forests (Yale UP, 2024), environmental historian Brian Donahue advances a radical proposal for healing the relationship between humans and forests through responsible, sustainable use of local and regional wood in home building. American homes are typically made of lumber and plywood delivered by a global system of ruthless extraction, or

Steve J. Shone, "Dangerous Anarchist Strikers" (Brill, 2023)

Nov 25 2024 47 mins  
Dangerous Anarchist Strikers (Brill, 2023) explores the ideas of three largely forgotten radical women who participated in labor union strikes in Argentina and Uruguay, Canada, and the United States: Virginia Bolten (c.1876-1960), one of the most militant anarchists of southern South America; Helen Armstrong (1875-1947), a major leader of the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919, whose