New Books in Economic and Business History

Through the colorful world of Berlin’s grand hotels, this book charts a new history of German liberalism and explores the changing relationships among big business, society, and politics. 

Behind imposing facades, managers and workers were often the picture of orderly and harmonious service, despite living in sometimes uncomfortable proximity. Then, during World War I, class tensions rose to the surface and failed to resolve in the following years. Doubting the ability of the Weimar Republic to contain these conflicts, a group of hotel owners, some of the most prominent Jewish industrialists and financiers in the country, chose to let Adolf Hitler use their hotel, the Kaiserhof, as his Berlin headquarters in 1932. From a splendid suite opposite the chancellery, Hitler and his henchmen engineered the assumption of power, the death of the Weimar Republic, and the ruin of their hosts, the Kaiserhof’s owners: Jewish liberals now fleeing for their lives. Adam Bisno's book Big Business and the Crisis of German Democracy: Liberalism and the Grand Hotels of Berlin, 1875-1933 (Cambridge UP, 2023) asks how this came about and explores the decision-making processes that produced such catastrophic consequences.

Lea Greenberg is an editor, translator, and scholar of German and Jewish studies.

In this interview James Fenelon discusses his new book entitled Indian, Black and Irish: Indigenous Nations, African Peoples, European Invasions, 1492-1790, recently published with Routledge (2023).

The book traces 500 years of European-American colonization and racialized dominance, expanding our common assumptions about the ways racialization was used to build capitalism and the modern world-system. Professor Fenelon draws on personal experience and the agency of understudied Native (and African) resistance leaders, to weave a story too often hidden or distorted in the annals of the academy, that remains invisible at many universities and historical societies. 

Fenelon identifies three epochs of racial constructions, colonialism, and capitalism that created the USA. Indigenous nations, the first to be racialized on a global scale, African peoples, enslaved and brought to the Americas, and European immigrants. It offers a sweeping analysis of the forces driving the invasion, occupation, and exploitation of Native America and the significance of labor in American history provided by Indigenous people, Africans, and immigrants, specifically the Irish. Indian, Black and Irish makes major contributions toward a deeper understanding of where Supremacy and Sovereignty originated from, and how our modern world has used these socio-political constructions, to build global hegemony that now threatens our very existence through wars and climate change. It will be a vital resource to those studying history, colonialism, race and racism, labor history, and indigenous peoples.

James Fenelon is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Center for Indigenous Peoples Studies at California State University, San Bernardino. He is also currently the Lang Visiting Professor for Issues of Social Change at Swarthmore College. His books include Redskins? Sports Mascots, Indian Nations and White Racism, Indigenous Peoples and Globalization (with Thomas D. Hall), and Culturicide, Resistance and Survival of the Lakota (Sioux Nation).

Indian, Black and Irish: Indigenous Nations, African Peoples, European Invasions, 1492-1790, is published with Routledge

Aidan Beatty is a lecturer in the history department at Carnegie Mellon University

How the image collection, organized and made available for public consumption, came to define a key feature of contemporary visual culture. The origins of today’s kaleidoscopic digital visual culture are many. In Picture-Work: How Libraries, Museums, and Stock Agencies Launched a New Image Economy (MIT Press, 2023), Diana Kamin traces the sharing of photographs to an image economy developed throughout the twentieth century by major institutions. Picture-Work examines how three of these institutions—the New York Public Library, the Museum of Modern Art, and the stock agency H. Armstrong Roberts Inc.—defined the public’s understanding of what the photographic image is, while building vast collections with universalizing ambitions. 

Highlighting underexplored figures, such as the first rights and reproduction manager at MoMA Pearl Moeller and visionary NYPL librarian Romana Javitz, and underexplored professional practices, Diana Kamin demonstrates how bureaucratic work communicates ideas about images to the public. Kamin artfully shows how the public interfaces with these image collections through systems of classification and protocols of search and retrieval. These interactions, in turn, shape contemporary image culture, including concepts of authorship, art, property, and value, as well as logics of indexing, tagging, and hyperlinking. Together, these interactions have forged a concept of the image as alienable content, which has intensified with the advent of digital techniques for managing image collections. To survey the complicated process of digitization in the nineties and early aughts, Kamin also includes interviews with photographers, digital asset management system designers, librarians, and artists on their working practices.

Links Mentioned in the Episode

Hallel Yadin is an archivist and special projects manager at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.

John Taylor, the Mary and Robert Raymond Professor of Economics at Stanford University and Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, joins the podcast to discuss how he initial got interested in economics, his initial training in econometrics as a PhD student at Stanford which led him to monetary economics, his seminal contributions to the foundations of New Keynesian economics including the Taylor Rule and its influence, his views on monetary policy in the US, Europe and Japan over the decades, international economics, the state of fiscal policy, and economic growth. 

David Mitch, an economic historian and professor of economics at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, joins the podcast to discuss the The Chicago School of Economics, including his 2016 Journal of Political Economy paper which uncovered how on the University of Chicago economics department nearly hired economists Paul Samuelson and John Hicks over Milton Friedman in 1946, along with David's work on economic growth including arguing how incentives for governments to promote growth historically may have been more to promote militarism than maximize the welfare of its citizens. 

Jeremy Land's book Colonial Ports, Global Trade, and the Roots of the American Revolution (1700-1776) (Brill, 2023) takes a long-run view of the global maritime trade of Boston, New York, and Philadelphia from 1700 to American Independence in 1776. Land argues that the three cities developed large, global networks of maritime commerce and exchange that created tension between merchants and the British Empire which sought to enforce mercantilist policies to constrain American trade to within the British Empire. Colonial merchants created and then expanded their mercantile networks well beyond the confines of the British Empire. This trans-imperial trade (often considered smuggling by British authorities) formed the roots of what became known as the American Revolution.

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

Uncivil liberalism: Labour, Capital and Commercial Society in Dadabhai Naoroji's Political Thought (Cambridge University Press, 2023) by Dr. Vikram Visana studies how ideas of liberty from the colonised South claimed universality in the North. Recovering the political theory of Dadabhai Naoroji, India's pre-eminent liberal, this book offers an original global history of this process by focussing on Naoroji's preoccupation with social interdependence and civil peace in an age of growing cultural diversity and economic inequality.

Dr. Visana shows how Naoroji used political economy to critique British liberalism's incapacity for civil peace by linking periods of communal rioting in colonial Bombay with the Parsi minority's economic decline. He responded by innovating his own liberalism, characterised by labour rights, economic republicanism and social interdependence maintained by freely contracting workers. Significantly, the author draws attention to how Naoroji seeded 'Western' thinkers with his ideas as well as influencing numerous ideologies in colonial and post-colonial India. In doing so, the book offers a compelling argument which reframes Indian 'nationalists' as global thinkers.

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.

World War I was the first great general conflict to be fought between highly industrial societies able to manufacture and transport immense quantities of goods over land and sea. Yet the armies of the war were too vast in scale, their movements too complex, and the infrastructure upon which they depended too specialized to be operated by professional soldiers alone.

In Civilian Specialists at War: Britain's Transport Experts and the First World War (U London Press, 2020), Christopher Phillips examines the relationship between industrial society and industrial warfare through the lens of Britain's transport experts. Phillips analyzes the multiple connections between the army, the government, and the senior executives of some of prewar Britain's largest industrial enterprises, revealing that civilian transport experts were a key component of Britain's strategies in World War I. This book also details the application of recognizably civilian technologies and methods to the prosecution of war, and documents how transport experts were constrained by the political and military requirements of coalition warfare.

Civilian Specialists at War was a Bronze Medal winner of the Templer Medal Book Prize in 2020 and winner of the Coleman Prize in 2016. The dissertation version of this book, entitledManaging Armageddon: Britain’s Transport Experts and the First World War (awarded by the University of Leeds) is freely available from the British Library here.

Recent scholarship in organisation studies has begun to address how organisations perceive and use their history. However, how organisations preserve and access their history, and how this affects how they are able to use their history is less researched. This thesis investigates how Barclays Group Archives (BGA) contribute to Barclays PLC delivering its strategic objectives. It asks, how does BGA, as a specific unit of the organisation, facilitate the delivery of Barclays PLC's strategic objectives? The researcher was embedded in the archives, enabling the gathering of observational data on how BGA operate as well as a unique level of access to archival organisational records. These were used to target and gain access to Barclays PLC employees to conduct interviews to ascertain how they used BGA's resources and what benefits they felt BGA brought. 

Using interviews, observation, and other qualitative research methods, Ian Jones introduces archival science theory to the study of how organisations can benefit from using their history, introducing the archival science ideas of authenticity, reliability, usability, and integrity to inform the research on organisational memory and use of the past strategies. The thesis focuses on the period between 2012 and 2015, a time when Barclays PLC made extensive use of their past in an attempt to manage and recover from the various scandals. It argues that BGA, and the archivists in particular, are integral to Barclays PLC's use of the past strategies, enabling Barclays PLC to bolster their claims to be returning to a historically 'authentic' corporate culture that would inform the organisation's strategies and behaviour going forward. Additionally, the archivists themselves act as the link between the information in the archives that forms part of Barclays PLC's organisational memory, enabling users to utilise this information and transforming the static memory held into the archives into dynamic memory that is then utilised by employees. The thesis highlights the importance of how organisations access the historical information that they use to inform their historical narratives, and the importance of the individuals that act as the link between those who are using the past in some way, and the repositories of historical information. The research findings presented in this thesis will be of interest to organisation studies scholars interested in how managers use history as well as to researchers who study corporate archives.

Winner of the Coleman Prize in 2022, this research tells of the potential uses of the past as a source of competitive advantage as well as document the relationship between the Corporate Archives and Head Office in a mayor, long-lived British bank.

This thesis is available open access here. 

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

"How do you see income distribution in your time, and how and why do you expect it to change?" That is the question Branko Milanovic imagines posing to six of history's most influential economists: François Quesnay, Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Karl Marx, Vilfredo Pareto, and Simon Kuznets. Probing their works in the context of their lives, he charts the evolution of thinking about inequality, showing just how much views have varied among ages and societies. Indeed, Milanovic argues, we cannot speak of "inequality" as a general concept: any analysis of it is inextricably linked to a particular time and place.

Visions of Inequality: From the French Revolution to the End of the Cold War (Harvard UP, 2023) takes us from Quesnay and the physiocrats, for whom social classes were prescribed by law, through the classic nineteenth-century treatises of Smith, Ricardo, and Marx, who saw class as a purely economic category driven by means of production. It shows how Pareto reconceived class as a matter of elites versus the rest of the population, while Kuznets saw inequality arising from the urban-rural divide. And it explains why inequality studies were eclipsed during the Cold War, before their remarkable resurgence as a central preoccupation in economics today.

Meticulously extracting each author's view of income distribution from their often voluminous writings, Milanovic offers an invaluable genealogy of the discourse surrounding inequality. These intellectual portraits are infused not only with a deep understanding of economic theory but also with psychological nuance, reconstructing each thinker's outlook given what was unknowable to them within their historical contexts and methodologies.

Branko Milanovic is Senior Scholar at the Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality at the City University of New York and Visiting Professor at the International Inequalities Institute at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

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