New Books in Economic and Business History

The rise to power of populists like Donald Trump is usually attributed to the shifting values and policy preferences of voters-the demand side. Paul Kenny's Why Populism?: Political Strategy from Ancient Greece to the Present (Cambridge UP, 2023) shifts the public debate on populism and examines the other half of the equation-the supply side. Kenny argues that to understand the rise of populism is to understand the cost of different strategies for winning and keeping power. For the aspiring leader, populism-appealing directly to the people through mass communication-can be a quicker, cheaper, and more effective strategy than working through a political party. Probing the long history of populism in the West from its Ancient Greek roots to the present, this highly readable book shows that the 'economic laws of populism are constant.' 'Forget ideology. Forget resentment. Forget racism or sexism.' Populism, the author writes, is the result of a hidden strategic calculus.

Paul Kenny is Professor of Political Science at IHSS at Australian Catholic University and a Visiting Fellow at the Australian National University.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network.

Calming the Storms: The Carry Trade, the Banking School and British Financial Crises Since 1825 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) by Dr. Charles Read exposes, for the first time in modern scholarship, the role that the rise of the Carry Trade played in British financial crises between 1825 and 1866, how in reaction the Bank of England improved its management of monetary policy after 1866 and how those lessons have been forgotten since the 1970s.

Britain is one of the few major capitalist economies in the world to have avoided policy-induced systemic financial crises for more than 100 years of its history—between 1866 and 1973. Beforehand, it suffered a series of serious banking panics, in 1825, 1837, 1847, 1857-58 and 1866. Since the 1970s banking instability has returned again, with the global financial crisis of 2007-09 hitting Britain hard.

Economists and policymakers have asked what can be learnt from Britain’s experience of the disappearance and reappearance of crises to help efforts to prevent future ones. This book answers that question with a major reassessment of Britain’s financial history over the past two centuries. It does so by applying the long-neglected ideas of the British Banking School to explain how crises can occur because of the Carry Trade. This book is essential reading for economists and historians of modern Britain, practitioners and policymakers, as well as anyone who is affected by financial crises and their consequences.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

Look at a map of the world and you'll see a colorful checkerboard of nation-states. But this is not where power actually resides. Over the last decade, globalization has shattered the map into different legal spaces: free ports, tax havens, special economic zones. With the new spaces, ultracapitalists have started to believe that it is possible to escape the bonds of democratic government and oversight altogether.

Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy (Metropolitan Books, 2023) follows the most notorious radical libertarians--from Milton Friedman to Peter Thiel--around the globe as they search for the perfect space for capitalism. Historian Quinn Slobodian leads us from Hong Kong in the 1970s to South Africa in the late days of apartheid, from the neo-Confederate South to the former frontier of the American West, from the medieval City of London to the gold vaults of right-wing billionaires, and finally into the world's oceans and war zones, charting the relentless quest for a blank slate where market competition is unfettered by democracy.

A masterful work of economic and intellectual history, Crack-Up Capitalism offers both a new way of looking at the world and a new vision of coming threats. Full of rich details and provocative analysis, Crack-Up Capitalism offers an alarming view of a possible future.

Quinn Slobodian is a professor of the history of ideas at Wellesley College.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network.

The Venice Arsenal: Between History, Heritage, and Re-Use (Routledge, 2022) reviews four decades of debate about restoring an industrial heritage site of inestimable value - the Venice Arsenal. Focusing on the challenges of economic, financial and institutional feasibility, it reveals how failing to address these aspects has undermined potential solutions from both technicians and heritage professionals.

With a deep connection to the city over centuries, the Arsenal was the very basis of La Serenissima's sea power, enabling its economic expansion. Later, it maintained a vital military function through shipbuilding until World War II. But the slow process of abandonment of the traditional site's uses and spaces continues to pose questions regarding its preservation and re-use. Drawing on original research from urban planners, architects and historians, the book provides a critical investigation into the organizational and managerial challenges of this unique site, and crucially, why so little has been achieved compared with potential opportunities.

Featuring numerous color photographs and exploring the particular challenges of restoration and re-use facing the Venice Arsenal, this insightful evaluation of the history of this site provides a uniquely informative case for the discipline of industrial heritage.

Luca Zan, a faculty member at the University of Bologna, teaches and researches in Arts management from different perspectives in Italy, the United States (Carnegie Mellon University, and China (China Academy of Fine Arts). His research has international comparative perspective with fieldwork in China, Turkey, Peru, Ecuador, and Europe. His contributions also include management and accounting in historical perspectives, particularly on the history of the Venice Arsenal.

He has been the author or coauthor of Managerial Rhetoric and Arts Organizations, 2006; The Management of Cultural Heritage in China, 2008; Managing Cultural Heritage, 2016; Heritage Sites in Contemporary China, 2018; The Venice Arsenal. Between History Heritage and Re-use, 2022.

Along side academic activities Zan is actively involved in the management of arts/heritage organizations. 

Bernardo Batiz-Lazo is currently straddling between Newcastle and Mexico City. You can find him on twitter on issues related to business history of banking, fintech, payments and other musings. Not always in that order. @BatizLazo

In 2014, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi closed the Planning Commission, which he accused of stifling the country’s growth and being a holdover from the country’s time as a socialist country. It was an ignoble end to the government body, which in the early days of independence charted the country’s Five-Year Plans for economic development.

Nikhil Menon, in his first book Planning Democracy: Modern India’s Quest for Development from Cambridge University Press (2022), looks at how India’s efforts towards economic planning helped the country find a path between Western and Soviet economic models, supercharged the growth of Indian statistics, and tried to foster a more public democracy.

In this interview, Nikhil and I talk about planning and democracy, statistics, and perhaps one of the book’s central figures, Professor Mahalanobis, the father of Indian statistics.

Nikhil Menon is a historian of modern South Asia, specializing in the political and economic history of twentieth-century India. His research explores the histories of democracy and development in independent India.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Planning Democracy. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

How did British society become financialised? In Are We Rich Yet? The Rise of Mass Investment Culture in Contemporary Britain (U California Press, 2022), Dr Amy Edwards, a senior lecturer in the Department of History at the University of Bristol, analyses the cultural, social, and economic history of the 1980s to understand how British society became a nation of investors. The book ranges from well-known examples, such as Yuppies and privatisation of national utilities, through to everyday examples of share shops and investment clubs. Linking the analysis to broader trends in British and in financial history, alongside issues of class and gender, the book is essential reading across the humanities and social sciences, as well as for anyone interested in why money is so important to contemporary life.

Dave O'Brien is Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Sheffield.

A comprehensive look into how Macau’s recent decades of gambling-related growth produced one of the wealthiest territories on the planet.

Betting on Macau: Casino Capitalism and China's Consumer Revolution (U Minnesota Press, 2023) delves into the radical transformation of what was formerly the last remaining European territory in Asia, returned to the People’s Republic of China in 1999 after nearly half a millennium of Portuguese rule. Examining the unprecedented scale of its development and its key role in China’s economic revolution, Tim Simpson follows Macau’s emergence from historical obscurity to become the most profitable casino gaming locale in the world.

Identified as a UNESCO World Heritage Site and renowned for its unique blend of Chinese and Portuguese colonial-era architecture, contemporary Macau has metamorphosed into a surreal, hypermodern urban landscape augmented by massive casino megaresorts, including two of the world’s largest buildings. Simpson situates Macau’s origins as a strategic trading port and its ensuing history alongside the emergence of the global capitalist system, charting the massive influx of foreign investment, construction, and tourism in the past two decades that helped generate the territory’s enormous wealth.

Presented through a cross section of postcolonial studies and social theory with extensive insight into the global gambling industry, Betting on Macau uncovers the various roots of the territory’s lucrative casino capitalism. In turn, its trenchant analysis provides a distinctive view into China’s broader project of urbanization, its post-Mao economic reforms, and the continued rise of its consumer culture.

Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He is the author of Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River (Lexington, 2022). His general area of study is on media representations of people and place at festivals and celebrations. He is currently working on his next book where he conducted research on an annual canoeing and kayaking event that takes place on the Upper Mississippi River. To learn more about Michael O. Johnston you can go to his website, Google Scholar, Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or by email at [email protected].

For almost fifty years, coal dominated the Navajo economy. But in 2019 one of the Navajo Nation’s largest coal plants closed.

This comprehensive new work offers a deep dive into the complex inner workings of energy shift in the Navajo Nation. In Carbon Sovereignty: Coal, Development, and Energy Transition in the Navajo Nation (University of Arizona Press, 2023) geographer Andrew Curley, a member of the Navajo Nation, examines the history of coal development within the Navajo Nation, including why some Diné supported coal and the consequences of doing so. He explains the Navajo Nation’s strategic choices to use the coal industry to support its sovereignty as a path forward in the face of ongoing colonialism. Carbon Sovereignty demonstrates the mechanism of capitalism through colonialism and the construction of resource sovereignty, in both the Navajo Nation’s embrace and its rejection of a coal economy.

For the people of the Navajo Nation, energy sovereignty is dire and personal. Thanks to on-the-ground interviews with Diné coal workers, environmental activists, and politicians, Curley documents the real consequences of change as they happened. While some Navajo actors have doubled down for coal, others have moved toward transition. Curley argues that political struggles ultimately shape how we should understand coal, capitalism, and climate change. The rise and fall of coal magnify the nuance and complexity of change. Historical and contemporary issues intermingle in everyday life with lasting consequences.

Andrew Curley is a member of the Navajo Nation and an assistant professor in the School of Geography, Development & Environment at the University of Arizona. Twitter.

Brian Hamilton is chair of the Department of History and Social Science at Deerfield Academy. Twitter. Website.

The Dress Diary: Secrets from a Victorian Woman’s Wardrobe (Penguin, 2023) by Dr. Kate Strasdin presents the hidden fabric of a Victorian woman's life - from family and friends to industry and Empire - told through her unique textile scrapbook.

In 1838, a young woman was given a diary on her wedding day. Collecting snippets of fabric from a range of garments she carefully annotated each one, creating a unique record of her life and times. Her name was Mrs Anne Sykes.

Nearly two hundred years later, the diary fell into the hands of Dr. Kate Strasdin, a fashion historian and museum curator. Dr. Strasdin spent the next six years unravelling the secrets contained within the album's pages.

Piece by piece, she charts Anne's journey from the mills of Lancashire to the port of Singapore before tracing her return to England in later years. Fragments of cloth become windows into Victorian life: pirates in Borneo, the complicated etiquette of mourning, poisonous dyes, the British Empire in full swing, rioting over working conditions and the terrible human cost of Britain's cotton industry.

This is life writing that celebrates ordinary people: the hidden figures, the participants in everyday life. Through the evidence of waistcoats, ball gowns and mourning outfits, Dr. Strasdin lays bare the whole of human experience in the most intimate of mediums: the clothes we choose to wear.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

In this episode of High Theory, Karl Dudman tells us about the Cooperative Extension System.

Formed in 1914 as an extension of the Land Grant University system in the United States, the Cooperative Extension System is an extraordinarily public model of scientific communication. There is an extension officer in every county of the US. The original goal was to transmit academic scientific knowledge on agriculture to America’s farmers, but the program’s remit has expanded over the past hundred years. And it varies widely from place to place. You might go to an extension office to test the soil of your rose bed, to find a food pantry, or attend a kids exercise class. You might also have a conversation about climate change.

In the full version of our conversation, Karl discussed the National Extension Climate Initiative which aims to unite climate change education and research across the cooperative extension system and Christopher Henke’s book, Cultivating Science, Harvesting Power: Science and Industrial Agriculture in California (MIT Press, 2008).

Karl Dudman is doctoral candidate at the University of Oxford’s Institute for Science, Innovation and Society and a fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Program on Science Technology and Society. He does qualitative research on climate science in the US. His ongoing fieldwork, hosted by the North Carolina State Climate Office, examines how actors within climate science, coastal management and local politics navigate accelerating sea level rise in the context of widespread ambivalence towards the mainstream climate change narrative. Karl is also a photographer, and through his work explores the politics of competing cultural relationships with landscapes, and their subsequent representation.

This week’s image is a photograph of two men in a field of tall grass taken November 11, 2008 by Dennis Pennington, Bioenergy Educator, Michigan State University Extension.