New Books in Economic and Business History

Available Episodes

5 of 1421

Pierre-Yves Donzé & Maki Umemura, "Pierre-Yves Donzé & Maki Umemura, Japan and the Great Divergence in Business History" (JESB, 2025)
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
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How Government Made the U.S. into a Manufacturing Powerhouse
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
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1:10:28
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1:10:28
Joseph Stiglitz, "The Origins of Inequality" (Oxford UP, 2025)
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
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39:47
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39:47
Fahad Ahmad Bishara, "Monsoon Voyagers: An Indian Ocean History" (U California Press, 2025)
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
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1:49:59
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1:49:59
William J. Glover, "Reformatting Agrararian Life: Urban History from the Countryside in Colonial India" (Stanford UP, 2025)
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
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