New Books in Economic and Business History

In the thirteenth-century Mediterranean, commerce transformed as merchants shifted from Roman to Indo-Arabic numerals—an alternative that better facilitated complex calculations. It has long been known that this transition stemmed from Europe’s increasing exchanges with India, Persia, and the Arabic world. Yet much remains to be understood about how Indo-Arabic numerals—and the practical arithmetic they enabled—actually spread across Europe. As Dr. Raffaele Danna shows in The Craft of Indo-Arabic Numerals: How Practical Arithmetic Shaped Commerce and Mathematics in Western Europe, 1200–1600 (Harvard University Press, 2026), it was hundreds of ordinary merchants, schoolmasters, and artisans who nurtured these changes, thereby driving key advances in both commerce and mathematics.

Drawing on an original catalog of more than 1,200 practical arithmetic manuals, Dr. Danna charts the incremental spread of the new figures with unprecedented precision. While Italian merchants were the early adopters, it took nearly three centuries for Indo-Arabic numerals to become established in northern Europe. As Dr. Danna shows, adoption did not follow the routes of maritime trade. Rather, Indo-Arabic numerals moved gradually across the continent through inland networks of practitioners. Everywhere they went, the ten figures enhanced commercial practices and facilitated the emergence of a coherent language of mathematical craft. The growing social circulation of this knowledge, in turn, had a lasting impact on the economic trajectory of Western Europe. By the late sixteenth century, even academics were absorbing lessons from the vernacular tradition—a development that led to the first major breakthroughs in European mathematical theory since antiquity.

Combining economic history with the social history of mathematics, The Craft of Indo-Arabic Numerals illuminates the integral role of practical arithmetic in both intellectual and commercial transformations across Western Europe.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose 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. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.
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How did an economic system that was the result of largely uncoordinated and unplanned individual decisions come to dominate our modern world? This is the core question that my guest, Berkeley economic historian Trevor Jackson, tries to answer in his new book, The Insatiable Machine: How Capitalism Conquered the World (Norton, 2026). Jackson begins with the origins of the global monetary system in the fifteenth century and ends in the early twentieth century, when capitalism faced its most serious challenges from communism and socialism. While wage labor and financial instruments like loans and stocks feel unremarkable today, he reminds us that “it wasn’t always this way.” Capitalism is not natural, timeless, or inevitable.

Trevor Jackson is an economic historian at the University of California, Berkeley. He previous book, Impunity and Capitalism: The Afterlives of European Financial Crises, 1690–1830, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2022.

Steven P. Rodriguez is a scholarly publishing professional and historian.
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Hello! Thanks for reaching out. I'm glad you're here! Do you have any questions or thoughts about the recent discussion with Karen Hao on AI and its societal impacts?Hello! Thanks for reaching out. I'm glad you're here! Do you have any questions or thoughts about the recent discussion with Karen Hao on AI and its societal impacts?
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Despite it's centrality to a hippie counterculture which claimed an environmentalist ethos, California's "green rush" of cannabis growing from the mid-twentieth century onwards has been anything but. In Settler Cannabis: From Gold Rush to Green Rush in Indigenous Northern California, Cal Poly Humboldt Native American Studies professor Kaitlin Reed (Yurok/Hupa/Oneida) argues that the state's booming cannabis industry can be situated squarely within other extractive settler colonial enterprises such as gold mining and overfishing. From illegal land use practices to toxic pollutants in rivers, cannabis growing in northern California has been disruptive to Indigenous relations to the land and nonhuman life, and has been for decades - a problem only worsening as the industry grows from an underground enterprise into an economic engine worth billions. Yet, as Reed argues, cannabis-as-colonialism is only part of the story, as the Yurok and other California Native people engage in acts of survivance from the court room to the cannabis field here, fighting and insisting that northern California is still Native land.

Kaitlin Reed (Yurok/Hupa/Oneida) is assistant professor of Native American Studies at Humboldt State University.

Dr. Stephen R. Hausmann has been hosting New Books Network podcasts since 2017. Currently, he is a an assistant professor of American environmental history at Appalachian State University. He can be reached at [email protected]
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It’s a safe bet that most of the secretaries on the TV series Mad Men would have attended the Katharine Gibbs School in New York City. The iconic institution was in its heyday in the 1950 and '60s synonymous with supplying secretaries—always properly attired in heels, ladylike hats, and white gloves—to male executives. In Expect Great Things! Vanda Krefft turns the notion of a “Gibbs girl” on its head, showing us that while the school was getting women who could type 90 words per minute into the C-suite, its more subversive mission was to get them out of the secretarial pool to assume positions of power on the other side of the desk. And Gibbs graduates did just that, tackling the sexism of the era and paving the way for 21st-century women to succeed in any profession.Katharine Gibbs was one her own success stories. She started her school when, as a 46-year-old widow, she was left near-broke with two young sons. The school taught typing and stenography but Gibbs also hired accomplished professors from elite colleges to teach academic subjects—it was a well-rounded education that produced early feminists ready to tackle the sexism of their era. "Expect great things!" was her motto and her philosophy. Within a decade she’d opened schools in three elegant locations. With nostalgic period photographs throughout, Expect Great Things! takes us back to Katie Gibbs’s life and tells the stories of the women she influenced. We meet Gibbs graduates who worked for the Walt Disney, Marilyn Monroe, and Robert F. Kennedy. Others forged pathfinding roles as an Emmy-winning television star, a women’s rights advisor to four U.S. presidents, a writer of Wonder Woman comic books, the head of the Women’s Marines, a best-selling young adult author, and a U.S. Ambassador.For readers of The Barbizon and Come Fly the World, Expect Great Things! reveals the seismic impact the Katharine Gibbs school had on the American workplace—and on women’s opportunities today.
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