New Books in Economic and Business History

Sarah Teasley's Designing Modern Japan (Reaktion, 2022) unpicks the history of Japanese design from the mid-nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth, focusing on continuities and disruptions within communities and practices of design. Designing Modern Japan explores design in the unfolding contexts of modernization, empire and war, defeat and reconstruction, postwar economic acceleration, and beyond. Throughout, Teasley is sensitive to issues of gender and class within the communities of design she studies. The book combines the history of design with social, economic, and geopolitical history, placing design and its material objects carefully in the larger currents of modern and contemporary Japan. Designing Modern Japan is a history of both the people who shaped Japanese design and the designs that were integral to life in modern Japan.Nathan Hopson is an associate professor of Japanese language and history in the University of Bergen's Department of Foreign Languages. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Mao and Markets: The Communist Roots of Chinese Enterprise (Yale University Press, 2022) by Dr. Christopher Marquis & Dr. Kunyuan Qiao presents a thoroughly researched assessment of how China’s economic success continues to be shaped by the communist ideology of Chairman MaoIt was long assumed that as China embraced open markets and private enterprise, its state-controlled economy would fall by the wayside, that free markets would inevitably lead to a more liberal society. Instead, China’s growth over the past four decades has positioned state capitalism as a durable foil to the orthodoxy of free markets, to the confusion of many in the West.Christopher Marquis and Kunyuan Qiao argue that China’s economic success is based on—not in spite of—the continuing influence of Communist leader Mao Zedong. They illustrate how Mao’s ideological principles, mass campaigns, and socialist institutions have enduringly influenced Chinese entrepreneurs’ business strategies and the management of their ventures. Grounded in case studies and quantitative analyses, this book shows that while private enterprise is the engine of China’s growth, Chinese companies see no contradictions between commercial drive and a dedication to Maoist ideology.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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The legendary Magnum photo agency has long been associated with heroic lone wolf male photographers such as Robert Capa and Henri Cartier-Bresson, roaming the world in search of the “decisive moment” – the perfect shot that captured the essence of a major news story. Nadya Bair’s highly original book The Decisive Network: Magnum Photos and the Postwar Image Market (University of California Press 2020) argues that this idealized portrayal of Magnum occludes the larger networks within which these photographers operated, including the crucial roles performed by often female office staff, by picture editors and corporate clients. She sets out to show that right from the outset, Magnum was also a business operation, one that pioneered modern ideas of branding borrowed from advertising agencies and commercial partners.Drawing on extensive archival work and including numerous images of photo page spreads, The Decisive Network presents Magnum in a novel and distinctive light, as the framer of new global imaginaries that reflected the evolution of post-war capitalism.Nadya Bair is an assistant professor of art history at Hamilton CollegeFor digital explorations of the Magnum network, see Nadya’s fascinating website.Duncan McCargo is an eclectic, internationalist political scientist and literature buff: his day job is directing the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies at the University of Copenhagen. Learn more here, here, here, and here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sanctions have become the go-to foreign policy tool for the United States. Coercive economic measures such as trade tariffs, financial penalties, and export controls affect large numbers of companies and states across the globe. Some of these penalties target nonstate actors, such as Colombian drug cartels and Islamist terror groups; others apply to entire countries, including North Korea, Iran, and Russia. U.S. policy makers see sanctions as a low-cost tactic, but in reality these measures often fail to achieve their intended goals--and their potent side effects can even harm American interests. Backfire: How Sanctions Reshape the World Against U.S. Interests (Columbia UP, 2022) explores the surprising ways sanctions affect multinational companies, governments, and ultimately millions of people around the world. Drawing on interviews with experts, policy makers, and people in sanctioned countries, Agathe Demarais examines the unintended consequences of the use of sanctions as a diplomatic weapon. The proliferation of sanctions spurs efforts to evade them, as states and firms seek ways to circumvent U.S. penalties. This is only part of the story. Sanctions also reshape relations between countries, pushing governments that are at odds with the U.S. closer to each other--or, increasingly, to Russia and China. Full of counterintuitive insights spanning a wide range of topics, from commodities markets in Russia to Iran's COVID response and China's cryptocurrency ambitions, Backfire reveals how sanctions are transforming geopolitics and the global economy--as well as diminishing U.S. influence. This insider's account is an eye-opening, accessible, and timely book that sheds light on the future of sanctions in an increasingly multipolar world.Mathias Fuelling is a doctoral candidate in History at Temple University, working on a political history of Czechoslovakia in the immediate post-WWII years. He can be found on Twitter at https://twitter.com/bucephalus424 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sanctions have become the go-to foreign policy tool for the United States. Coercive economic measures such as trade tariffs, financial penalties, and export controls affect large numbers of companies and states across the globe. Some of these penalties target nonstate actors, such as Colombian drug cartels and Islamist terror groups; others apply to entire countries, including North Korea, Iran, and Russia. U.S. policy makers see sanctions as a low-cost tactic, but in reality these measures often fail to achieve their intended goals--and their potent side effects can even harm American interests. Backfire: How Sanctions Reshape the World Against U.S. Interests (Columbia UP, 2022) explores the surprising ways sanctions affect multinational companies, governments, and ultimately millions of people around the world. Drawing on interviews with experts, policy makers, and people in sanctioned countries, Agathe Demarais examines the unintended consequences of the use of sanctions as a diplomatic weapon. The proliferation of sanctions spurs efforts to evade them, as states and firms seek ways to circumvent U.S. penalties. This is only part of the story. Sanctions also reshape relations between countries, pushing governments that are at odds with the U.S. closer to each other--or, increasingly, to Russia and China. Full of counterintuitive insights spanning a wide range of topics, from commodities markets in Russia to Iran's COVID response and China's cryptocurrency ambitions, Backfire reveals how sanctions are transforming geopolitics and the global economy--as well as diminishing U.S. influence. This insider's account is an eye-opening, accessible, and timely book that sheds light on the future of sanctions in an increasingly multipolar world.Mathias Fuelling is a doctoral candidate in History at Temple University, working on a political history of Czechoslovakia in the immediate post-WWII years. He can be found on Twitter at https://twitter.com/bucephalus424 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On October 30, 1975, the New York Daily News printed the most famous headline in its history: “Ford to City: Drop Dead.” The previous day, President Gerald Ford had delivered a speech at the National Press Club in Washington on the looming bankruptcy of New York City. In the speech, Ford publicly denied the near-bankrupt New York City a federal bailout. The next morning, the streets of Manhattan were littered with the incendiary headline. It has been fifty years since the publication of the headline, which presents an opportunity to reconsider this historical period. In this special edition episode, host Ryan Purcell talks with Benjamin Holtzman, Assistant Professor of History at Lehman College (CUNY), about the soundtracks behind New York’s fiscal crisis. Holtzman is the author of The Long Crisis: New York and the Path to Neoliberalism (Oxford University Press, 2023), a volume that returns to this turbulent period to explore the origins and implications of the diminished faith in government as capable of solving public problems. In the wake of the fiscal crisis of 1975, Holtzman argues, local people and officials rebuilt the city from the ground up, creating a system that would both exacerbate old racial and economic inequalities and produce new ones that continue to shape metropolitan areas today.Contact Soundscapes NYC Here Support the show Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Is artificial intelligence going to take over the world? Have big tech scientists created an artificial lifeform that can think on its own? Is it going to put authors, artists, and others out of business? Are we about to enter an age where computers are better than humans at everything? Linguist Emily M. Bender and sociologist Alex Hanna make clear that kind of thinking is a symptom of a phenomenon known as “AI hype.” Hype twists words and helps the rich get richer by justifying data theft, motivating surveillance capitalism, and devaluing human creativity in order to replace meaningful work with jobs that treat people like machines. In The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech's Hype and Create the Future We Want (Harper, 2025), Bender and Hanna offer a, and wide-ranging take-down of AI hype across its many forms. They show you how to spot AI hype, how to deconstruct it, and how to expose the power grabs it aims to hide. Bender and Hanna expose AI hype for what it is: a mask for Big Tech’s drive for profit, with little concern for who it affects. Alfred Marcus is Edson Spencer Professor at the Carlson School. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Against long odds, the Anishinaabeg resisted removal, retaining much of their land in the Old Northwest—what’s now Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. Their success rested partly on their roles as sellers of natural resources and buyers of trade goods, which made them key players in the political economy of plunder that drove white settlement and US development in the region. But, as Michael Witgen demonstrates in Seeing Red: Indigenous Land, American Expansion, and the Political Economy of Plunder in North America (Omohundro Institute/UNC Press, 2021), the credit for Native persistence rested with the Anishinaabeg themselves. Outnumbering white settlers well into the nineteenth century, they leveraged their political savvy to advance a dual citizenship that enabled mixed-race tribal members to lay claim to a place in US civil society. Telling the stories of mixed-race traders and missionaries, tribal leaders and territorial governors, Witgen challenges our assumptions about the inevitability of US expansion.John Cable is assistant professor of history at Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College in Tifton, Georgia. He earned the Ph.D. in history at Florida State University in 2020. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

 Today I’m speaking with Marcus Golding, historian and Director of Educational Operations at ClioVis. ClioVis is an incredible software and learning tool that allows educators and studies to create digital timelines, network visualizations, and interactive presentations. Founded by UT Austin history professor Erika Bsumek, ClioVis is made for professors and teachers by current professors and scholars. I’m thrilled to get the chance today to speak with Marcus about this software to share with our listeners how they can enhance their own work and teaching. Visit ClioVis' website to learn more: Click Here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Apostles of Development: Six Economists and the World They Made (Oxford University Press and Penguin RandomHouse South Asia, 2025) by Dr. David Engerman recounts the work of six individuals, all former classmates at Cambridge University, who helped make international development--the effort to reduce poverty and inequality around the world--into a juggernaut of the second half of the twentieth century. International development employed millions, affected billions, and spent trillions; it held the hopes of the former colonies to create an economic independence to match their newfound political one, and the plans of wealthy counties to build an enduring economic order.The six Apostles in this book include some of South Asia's best-known names, like Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen and long-serving Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, as well as leading academics (Jagdish Bhagwati) and key policy-makers in both national and international circles. Taken together, this group both reflected and shaped the growing enterprise of international development from the time they left Cambridge in the mid-1950s well into the 2010s.For many years, the second half of the twentieth century was understood primarily through the lens of the Cold War. And yet, for the majority of the world, living in what was then called the Third World (and which is now called the Global South), development was a constant, while American-Soviet geopolitics only occasionally impinged upon their lives. And these six, as much as any other group, changed the way economists theorized development and aid officials practiced it. Their biographies, then, are the history of development.Based on newly available archival documents from 10 countries, and on interviews with four of the subjects, the widows of the other two, and almost 100 of their colleagues, friends, classmates, and rivals, this book combines riveting personal accounts with a sweeping history of one of the enduring human activities of the late 20th century and early 21st centuries: creating a more prosperous and equitable world. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices