New Books in Economic and Business History

The road to Queen Elizabeth II’s implementation of African reforms was rough, especially in the first two decades following her ascension to the throne. In Queen Elizabeth II and the Africans (Leuven UP, 2024), Raphael Chijioke Njoku examines Queen Elizabeth II’s role in the African decolonization trajectories and the postcolonial state’s quest for genuine political and economic liberation since 1947. By locating Elizabeth at the center of Anglophone Africa’s independence agitations, the account harnesses the African interests to tease out the monarch’s dilemma of complying with Whitehall’s decolonization schemes while building an inclusive and unified Commonwealth in which Africans could play a vital role. Njoku argues that to gratify British lawmakers in her complex and marginal place within the British parliamentary system of conservative versus reformist, Elizabeth’s contribution fell short of African nationalists’ expectations on account of her silence and inaction during the African decolonization raptures. Yet ultimately, the author concludes, she helped build an inclusive and unified organization in which Africans could assert and appropriate political and economic autarky.Kanayo Nomeh, Ph.D. Candidate in International Relations at Florida International University, specializing in Africa's diaspora relations, superpowers and geopolitical rivalry, and African-China sociopolitical dynamics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As a rising infrastructure powerhouse, China has the largest electricity generation capacity in the world today. Its number of large dams is second to none. In Hydropower Nation: Dams, Energy, and Political Changes in Twentieth-Century China (Cambridge UP, 2024), Xiangli Ding provides a historical understanding of China's ever-growing energy demands and how they have affected its rivers, wild species, and millions of residents. River management has been an essential state responsibility throughout Chinese history. In the industrial age, with the global proliferation of concrete dam technology, people started to demand more from rivers, particularly when required for electricity production. Yet hydropower projects are always more than a technological engineering enterprise, layered with political, social, and environmental meaning. Through an examination of specific hydroelectric power projects, the activities of engineers, and the experience of local communities and species, Ding offers a fresh perspective on twentieth-century China from environmental and technological perspectives.Xiangli Ding is an associate professor of history at the Rhode Island School of Design. He considers himself a historian of modern China and environmental history. At RISD, he teaches courses on East Asian and Chinese histories. His research interests lie at the intersection of the environment, technology, politics, and human life in modern China. He is the author of Hydropower Nation: Dams, Energy, and Political Changes in Twentieth-Century China (Cambridge University Press, 2024), and multiple research and review articles in both English and Chinese.Yadong Li is a socio-cultural anthropologist-in-training. He is registered as a PhD student at Tulane University. His research interests lie at the intersection of economic anthropology, medical anthropology, hope studies, and the anthropology of borders and frontiers. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When we think about "red tape" and the cost of regulation it's hard to overstate the impact of professional licensing. According to Professor Rebecca Haw Allensworth, it's bigger than unions and more expensive than sales taxes.Millions of American workers are required - by law - to obtain a license in order to work. This barrier of entry depends on requirements set by licensing boards staffed mainly by members of the profession they oversee. It limits the number of people who can serve and also confers on licensees a certain degree of prestige and trust. In The Licensing Racket: How We Decide Who Is Allowed to Work, and Why It Goes Wrong (Harvard UP, 2025), Allensworth goes deep into a complex web of conflicting priorities. Whether it's hair stylists or doctors, plumbers or lawyers, licensing board members are asked to simultaneously represent their personal practice, fellow professionals, and the public. They have to literally "wear three hats", which leads to well-intentioned, but deeply flawed and biased, decision making.Consumers depend on licensing boards to ensure that professionals maintain high quality and reliability standards by creating - and enforcing - licensing standards. In reality, their decisions can be maddeningly arbitrary, creating unnecessary barriers to hopeful practitioners while simultaneously failing to protect the public from bad actors who abuse the trust placed in them.Despite good intent, board members lack the resources and sometimes the will to investigate even serious disciplinary cases. The consequences include, but are not limited to, the failure of medical licensing boards to remove the abusive doctors who fueled the opioid crisis and a system that allows unethical predatory lawyers to continue to practice, often targeting clients who are unable to protect themselves.While in some areas licensing is deeply flawed, in others it is critical to a well-functioning society. Allensworth argues for abolition where appropriate and reform where it is most needed.See Professor Allensworth's faculty profile videoAuthor recommended reading: - Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver - Drug Dealer, MD by Anna Lembke, MD Hosted by Meghan Cochran Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The pub is an English institution. Yet its history has been obscured by myth and nostalgia. In Pub (Bloomsbury, 2025) a new addition to the Object Lessons series, Dr. Philip Howell takes the public house as an object, or rather as a series of objects: he takes the pub apart and examines its constituent elements, from pub signs to the bar staff to the calling of “time.” But Pub also explores the hidden features of the pub, such as corporate control, cultural acceptance and exclusion, and the role of the pub in communities.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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For millennia, land has been a symbol of wealth and privilege. But the true power of land ownership is even greater than we might think. In Land Power: Who Has It, Who Doesn't, and How That Determines the Fate of Societies (Basic Books, 2025), political scientist Michael Albertus shows that who owns the land determines whether a society will be equal or unequal, whether it will develop or decline, and whether it will safeguard or sacrifice its environment.Modern history has been defined by land reallocation on a massive scale. From the 1500s on, European colonial powers and new nation-states shifted indigenous lands into the hands of settlers. The 1900s brought new waves of land appropriation, from Soviet and Maoist collectivization to initiatives turning large estates over to family farmers. The shuffle continues today as governments vie for power and prosperity by choosing who should get land. Drawing on a career’s worth of original research and on-the-ground fieldwork, Albertus shows that choices about who owns the land have locked in poverty, sexism, racism, and climate crisis—and that what we do with the land today can change our collective fate.Michael Albertus is professor of political science at the University of Chicago. The author of four previous books, his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Atlantic, Foreign Affairs, and elsewhere. He lives in Chicago, Illinois. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Business of Bobbysoxers: Cultural Production in 1940s Frank Sinatra Fandom (Oxford University Press, 2024) by Dr. Katie Beisel Hollenbach reconsiders the story of American popular music, celebrity following, and fan behavior during World War II through close examination of “bobbysoxers.” Preserved in popular memory as primarily white, hysterical, teen girl devotees of Frank Sinatra clad in bobby socks and saddle shoes, these girls were accused of displaying inappropriate behavior and priorities in their obsessive pursuit of a crooning celebrity at a time of international crisis. Dr. Beisel Hollenbach peels back the stereotypes of girlhood idol adoration by documenting the intimate practices of wartime Sinatra fan clubs, revealing a new side of this familiar story in American history through the perspective of the bobbysoxer.In World War II America, fan clubs and organizations like Teen Canteens offered a haven for teenage girls to celebrate their enjoyment of popular culture while cultivating relationships with each other through media icons and the entertainment industry. Many of these organizations attempted to encourage diverse memberships, influenced in part by Frank Sinatra's public work on racial and religious tolerance, and by Sinatra's own identity as an Italian American. Away from the critical public eye, these communities offered girls a place to safely explore and discuss issues including civil rights, politics, the war, patriotism, internationalism, and professional development in the context of their shared Sinatra fandom. With these broader social and political complexities in mind, The Business of Bobbysoxers shines a light on musical fan communities that provided teenage girls with peer groups at a critical moment of personal and historical change, allowing them to creatively express their desires and imagine their futures as American women together.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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

From Chinatown to Every Town: How Chinese Immigrants Have Expanded the Restaurant Business in the United States (University of California Press, 2024) by Dr. Zai Liang explores the recent history of Chinese immigration within the United States and the fundamental changes in spatial settlement that have relocated many low-skilled Chinese immigrants from New York City's Chinatown to new immigrant destinations. Using a mixed-method approach over a decade in Chinatown and six destination states, sociologist Dr. Liang specifically examines how the expansion and growing popularity of Chinese restaurants has shifted settlement to more rural and faraway areas.Dr. Liang's study demonstrates that key players such as employment agencies, Chinatown buses, and restaurant supply shops facilitate the spatial dispersion of immigrants while simultaneously maintaining vital links between Chinatown in Manhattan and new immigrant destinations.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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Misery beneath the Miracle in East Asia (Cornell University Press, 2024) challenges prevailing views of the East Asian economic miracle. Existing scholarship has overlooked the severity, persistence, and harmful consequences of the social-welfare crises affecting the region. Dr. Arvid J. Lukauskas and Dr. Yumiko Shimabukuro fill this gap and put a major asterisk on East Asia's economic record.Combining big-picture analysis, abundant data, a dynamic interdisciplinary framework, and powerful human stories, they shed light on the social ills that governments have failed to address adequately, including low wages, child abuse, elderly poverty, and substandard housing. One of the major forces behind the multidimensional welfare crises is the region's productivist welfare strategy, which prioritizes economic growth while abandoning a robust social safety net, leaving the most vulnerable segments of society largely unprotected.Misery beneath the Miracle in East Asia brings the region into debates over the dangers of seeking growth at all costs that are currently embroiling the United States and other advanced industrialized countries.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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The 1920s and 1930s were a period of cosmopolitan globalization–and no one, perhaps, exemplified it more than Victor Sassoon, business tycoon, trader and industrialist. He’s the subject of Rosemary Wakeman’s latest book The Worlds of Victor Sassoon: Bombay, London, Shanghai, 1918–1941 (U Chicago Press, 2024) which traces Victor’s journey through these three cities—and explores how the world economy changes as he travels.After all, it’s a period where the world trading system is beginning to unravel, as British dominance in manufacturing is starting to be challenged by cheaper rivals in Germany and Japan, with arguments for economic policies that seem very familiar to us today.Rosemary Wakeman is professor of history at Fordham University. She is the author of A Modern History of European Cities: 1815 to the Present (Bloomsbury: 2020) as well as The Heroic City: Paris, 1945–1958 (The University of Chicago Press: 2009) and Practicing Utopia: An Intellectual History of the New Town Movement (The University of Chicago Press: 2016).You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Worlds of Victor Sassoon. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sophia Rosenfeld, a history professor at the University of Pennsylvania and author of "The Age of Choice," dives into the fascinating evolution of choice as a symbol of freedom. She discusses how the abundance of choices today has transformed our understanding of personal and political freedom. Exploring the historical roots, from its impact on women's autonomy to its role in American democracy, she reveals the paradoxes of choice, including the anxiety it causes amidst overwhelming options, and how it shapes our modern struggles for rights.