New Books in Economic and Business History

For the first half of the twentieth century, no American industry boasted a more motley and prolific trade press than the movie business—a cutthroat landscape that set the stage for battle by ink. In 1930, Martin Quigley, publisher of Exhibitors Herald, conspired with Hollywood studios to eliminate all competing trade papers, yet this attempt and each one thereafter collapsed.

Exploring the communities of exhibitors and creative workers that constituted key subscribers, Ink-Stained Hollywood: The Triumph of American Cinema’s Trade Press (University of California Press, 2022) by Dr. Eric Hoyt tells the story of how a heterogeneous trade press triumphed by appealing to the foundational aspects of industry culture—taste, vanity, partisanship, and exclusivity. In captivating detail, Eric Hoyt chronicles the histories of well-known trade papers (Variety, Motion Picture Herald) alongside important yet forgotten publications (Film Spectator, Film Mercury, and Camera!), and challenges the canon of film periodicals, offering new interpretative frameworks for understanding print journalism’s relationship with the motion picture industry and its continued impact on creative industries today.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new 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.

Inequality and Political Cleavage in Africa: Regionalism by Design (Cambridge University Press, 2024) by Dr. Catherine Boone integrates African countries into broader comparative theories of how spatial inequality shapes political competition over the construction of markets, states, and nations. Existing literature on African countries has found economic cleavages, institutions, and policy choices to be of low salience in national politics. This book inverts these arguments. Dr. Boone trains our analytic focus on the spatial inequalities and territorial institutions that structure national politics in Africa, showing that regional cleavages find expression in both electoral competition and policy struggles over redistribution, sectoral investment, market integration, and state design.

Leveraging comparative politics theory, Dr. Boone argues that African countries' regional and core-periphery tensions are similar to those that have shaped national economic integration in other parts of the world. Bringing together electoral and economic geography, the book offers a new and powerful map of political competition on the African continent.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new 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.

More than any other global institution, the US Federal Reserve’s decisions and communications drive capital markets and alter financial conditions everywhere from Seattle to Seoul. While its interest rate are set by an expert committee, for almost a century, the Fed’s core philosophy and operational approach have been moulded by one person: the Chair of the Board of Governors.

In this podcast series, Tim Gwynn Jones - a veteran central bank "watcher" - talks to authors of books about the Fed's most influential Chairs, starting with Marriner Eccles, Bill Martin, Arthur Burns, and Paul Volcker.

In the fourth and final episode of this series, he talks to William Silber – author of Volcker: The Triumph of Persistence (Bloomsbury, 2012). A giant (literally) of 20th-century policymaking, Volcker chaired the Fed from 1979 to 1987, implementing monetarist shock therapy, driving up the fed funds rate from 11% to 20% to crush inflation expectations, and pulling inflation down from nearly 15% in early 1980 to below 3% three years later.

“For Volcker, the most important denigrating fact of inflation was … that it undermines trust in government,” says Silber. “When we give the government the right to print money … we trust that the government will not debase the currency … When you think about inflation in that context, there is no number – two, four, six. Any number is bad. The only number that works is zero .. If you asked Volcker – and I asked him – what's the right number, he said zero”.

From 1990 until his retirement in 2019, Bill Silber was professor of economics at the Stern School of Business, New York University. His award-winning book is built on more than 100 hours of interviews with Volcker. The author of seven other books, Silber’s latest – The Power of Nothing to Lose: The Hail Mary Effect in Politics, War, and Business – will be published in paperback in September 2024.

What Work Means: Beyond the Puritan Work Ethic (ILR Press, 2024) goes beyond the stereotypes and captures the diverse ways Americans view work as a part of a good life. 

Dispelling the notion of Americans as mere workaholics, Claudia Strauss presents a more nuanced perspective. While some live to work, others prefer a diligent 9-to-5 work ethic that is conscientious but preserves time for other interests. Her participants often enjoyed their jobs without making work the focus of their life. These findings challenge laborist views of waged work as central to a good life as well as post-work theories that treat work solely as exploitative and soul-crushing.

Drawing upon the evocative stories of unemployed Americans from a wide range of occupations, from day laborers to corporate managers, both immigrant and native-born, Strauss explores how diverse Americans think about the place of work in a good life, gendered meanings of breadwinning, accepting financial support from family, friends, and the state, and what the ever-elusive American dream means to them. By considering how post-Fordist unemployment experiences diverge from joblessness earlier, What Work Means paves the way for a historically and culturally informed discussion of work meanings in a future of teleworking, greater automation, and increasing nonstandard employment.

Claudia Strauss is Professor of Anthropology at Pitzer College. She is the author of A Cognitive Theory of Cultural Meaning with Naomi Quinn and co-editor of Human Motives and Cognitive Models.

More than any other global institution, the US Federal Reserve’s decisions and communications drive capital markets and alter financial conditions everywhere from Seattle to Seoul. While its interest rate are set by an expert committee, for almost a century, the Fed’s core philosophy and operational approach have been moulded by one person: the Chair of the Board of Governors.

In this podcast series, Tim Gwynn Jones - a veteran central bank "watcher" - talks to authors of books about the Fed's most influential Chairs, starting with Marriner Eccles, Bill Martin, Arthur Burns, and Paul Volcker.

In this third episode, he talks to Wyatt Wells – author of Economist in an Uncertain World – Arthur F. Burns and The Federal Reserve, 1970–1978 (Columbia University Press, 1994). Burns has had a bad press - so bad that Chris Hughes, one of Facebook's founders, was moved to rehabilitate him. Leading the Fed from 1970 to 1978 when inflation averaged 9%, Burns was an accomplished business-cycle economist but also a politically partisan Chair intensely loyal to Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. Going far beyond his remit as a central banker, Burns oversaw government efforts to control prices and wages as an alternative to monetary policy.

“If you couple an incomes policy with a tight fiscal and monetary policy, it can work. The problem is that it often becomes an excuse for not doing that,” says Wells. “Burns found himself trapped in this position where he felt he couldn't raise interest rates without wrecking the controls programme and possibly his own career – his own position at the Fed. It's clear in ‘73, he knows interest rates need to go up. They're trying to raise them but he's got these political concessions and he's doing this sort of dance, trying to square the circle … And of course: ‘I'm the smartest guy in the room. Therefore, I should play a key role in this effort to balance everything’. I think there are very few Federal Reserve chairmen who have elbowed their way into other areas in the way that Burns did. Maybe none”.

An economic historian, Wyatt Wells has been Professor of History at Auburn University, Montgomery, since 1997.

After two government bailouts of the American economy in less than twenty years, free market thought is due for serious reappraisal. Free Market: The History of an Idea (Basic Books, 2022) shows how the idea became so powerful, why it succeeded, and why it has failed so spectacularly. In 1990, the G7 Countries enjoyed 70 percent of world GDP. In the face of the collapse of the Soviet Union, it was supposed to be a story of the success of free markets. However, in the past thirty years, that number has dropped by half, and Asia has emerged as a major motor of world economic growth. Today, state-run China is the second biggest economy on earth, and tiny Singapore, with its state-owned companies, has become a new model of wealth creation. In other words, Milton Friedman's free market dogma, that only private companies can create wealth and that states hamper it, has not proved very clearly to be untrue. 

This book shows how we got to the current crisis of free market thought, and suggests how we can find our way out. Contrary to popular free market narratives, early market theorists believed that states had an important role in building and maintaining free markets. But in the eighteenth century, some free-market thinkers began insisting only pure free markets, without state intervention, could work. A tradition of free-market ideological brittleness emerged, and it has led orthodox free market economics to some spectacular failures. It is a paradox that an economic theory rooted in the idea of competition, adaptation and evolution, has refused to follow its own precepts. This book shows that we need to go back to the origins of free market thought in order to understand its dynamism, as well as its inherent weaknesses, and to develop new economic concepts to face the staggering challenges of the twenty-first century.

Jacob Soll is an American university professor and professor of philosophy, history and accounting at the University of Southern California. Soll's work examines the mechanics of politics, statecraft and economics by dissecting the various elements of how modern states and political systems succeed and fail.

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.

Baseball’s introduction to the Philippines. The slot machine trade between Manila and Shanghai. A musical based extremely loosely on the life of the sultan of Sulu.

These are just a few of the historical topics from Lio Mangubat’s Silk, Silver, Spices, Slaves: Lost Tales from the Philippine Colonial Period (Faction Press: 2024), a collection of 13 essays on stories from Filipino history as a Spanish and then American colony. All the stories come from Lio’s podcast, The Colonial Department, which features long-lost stories from the country's past under Spanish, British, American, and Japanese rule.

In this interview, Lio and I talk about what inspired his essay collection, his conversation with Albert Samaha (an earlier podcast guest!) and what’s missing in how we talk about the Philippines

Lio is also the editor in chief of publishing house Summit Books, and is based in Manila. Find him on Instagram at @liomangubat and @thecolonialdept.

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

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

Is a green future possible? In Petrochemical Planet: Multiscalar Battles of Industrial Transformation (Duke UP, 2023), Alice Mah, a Professor in Urban and Environmental Studies at the University of Glasgow examines the practices of the petrochemical industry, along with the communities living with, and resisting, its impact. Offering ethnographic and theoretical reflections on this often overlooked and hidden part of the oil and plastics production chain, the book offers a new perspective on our present environmental crisis. Diagnosing the acuteness of problems as well as the challenges of solutions, the book is essential reading for anyone wanting to understand our planet and environment. The book is available open access here.

How Documentaries Went Mainstream: A History, 1960-2022 (Oxford University Press, 2023) provides a more comprehensive and meaningful periodization of the commercialization of documentary film. Although the commercial ascension of documentary films might seem meteoric, it is the culmination of decades-long efforts that have developed and fortified the audience for documentary features.

Author Nora Stone refines rough explanations of these efforts through a robust synoptic history of the market for documentary films, using knowledge of film economics and the norms of industry discourse to tell a richer story. This periodization will allow scholars to compare the commercialization of documentary film with other genres. Drawing on archival documents, industry trade journals and popular press, and interviews with filmmakers and film distributors, Stone illuminates how documentary features have become more plentiful, popular, and profitable than ever before.

Ailin Zhou is a PhD student in Film & Digital Media at University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research interests include transnational Chinese cinema, Asian diasporic visual culture, contemporary art, and feminist and queer theories.

More than any other global institution, the US Federal Reserve’s decisions and communications drive capital markets and alter financial conditions everywhere from Seattle to Seoul. While its interest rate are set by an expert committee, for almost a century, the Fed’s core philosophy and operational approach have been moulded by one person: the Chair of the Board of Governors.

In this podcast series, Tim Gwynn Jones - a veteran central bank "watcher" - talks to authors of books about the Fed's most influential Chairs, starting with Marriner Eccles, Bill Martin, Arthur Burns, and Paul Volcker.

In this second episode, he interviews Robert Bremner – author of Chairman of the Fed: William McChesney Martin Jr. and the Creation of the Modern American Financial System (Yale University Press, 2004). Bill Martin still holds the record for the longest chairmanship at the Fed – holding the office from 1951 to 1970. A Democrat, he was first nominated by President Harry Truman and reappointed (more or less willingly) by Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon. He dismantled government wartime controls over interest rates, battled to save the postwar currency-management regime, democratised the Fed, and fought successive presidents to keep its independence.

These conflicts started early, says Bremner. “Martin told this story about walking down Wall Street and passing the president going the other way and Martin said: ‘Good morning, Mr. President, great to see you’. And Truman looked at him and said: ‘Traitor’. Basically Truman wanted to continue low interest

rates certainly until he left office and for as long as possible”.

After a career in finance at the World Bank and in the mutual-fund industry, Bob Bremner is now a director of the Westminster Ingleside Foundation.