New Books in Economic and Business History

Through a variety of archival documents, artefacts, illustrations, and references to primary and secondary literature, On the Job: A History of American Work Uniforms (Bloomsbury, 2024) by Dr. Heather Akou explores the changing styles, business practices, and lived experiences of the people who make, sell, and wear service-industry uniforms in the United States.It highlights how the uniform business is distinct from the fashion business, including how manufacturing developed outside of the typical fashion hubs such as New York City; and gives attention to the ways that various types of employers (small business, corporate, government and others) differ in their ambitions and regulations surrounding uniforms.On the Job sheds new light on an understudied yet important field of dress and clothing within everyday life, and is an essential addition to any fashion historian's library, appealing to all those interested in material culture, the service industry, heritage and history.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming 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

Parents everywhere want their children to be happy and do well. Yet how parents seek to achieve this ambition varies enormously. For instance, American and Chinese parents are increasingly authoritative and authoritarian, whereas Scandinavian parents tend to be more permissive. Why? Love, Money, and Parenting investigates how economic forces and growing inequality shape how parents raise their children. From medieval times to the present, and from the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, Spain, and Sweden to China and Japan, Matthias Doepke and Fabrizio Zilibotti look at how economic incentives and constraints—such as money, knowledge, and time—influence parenting practices and what is considered good parenting in different countries.Through personal anecdotes and original research, Doepke and Zilibotti show that in countries with increasing economic inequality, such as the United States, parents push harder to ensure their children have a path to security and success. Economics has transformed the hands-off parenting of the 1960s and ’70s into a frantic, overscheduled activity. Growing inequality has also resulted in an increasing “parenting gap” between richer and poorer families, raising the disturbing prospect of diminished social mobility and fewer opportunities for children from disadvantaged backgrounds. In nations with less economic inequality, such as Sweden, the stakes are less high, and social mobility is not under threat. Doepke and Zilibotti discuss how investments in early childhood development and the design of education systems factor into the parenting equation, and how economics can help shape policies that will contribute to the ideal of equal opportunity for all. Love, Money, and Parenting: How Economics Explains the Way We Raise Our Kids (Princeton UP, 2019) presents an engrossing look at the economics of the family in the modern world.Matthias Doepke is professor of economics at Northwestern University. He lives in Evanston, Illinois.Fabrizio Zilibotti is the Tuntex Professor of International and Development Economics at Yale University. He lives in New Haven, Connecticut.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

Over the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, as many as eight million whites left the economically depressed southern countryside and migrated to the booming factory towns and cities of the industrial Midwest in search of work. The “hillbilly highway” was one of the largest internal relocations of poor and working people in American history, yet it has largely escaped close study by historians. In Hillbilly Highway: The Transappalachian Migration and the Making of a White Working Class (Princeton University Press, 2023), Dr. Max Fraser recovers the long-overlooked story of this massive demographic event and reveals how it has profoundly influenced American history and culture—from the modern industrial labour movement and the postwar urban crisis to the rise of today’s white working-class conservatives.The book draws on a diverse range of sources—from government reports, industry archives, and union records to novels, memoirs, oral histories, and country music—to narrate the distinctive class experience that unfolded across the Transappalachian migration during these critical decades. As the migration became a terrain of both social advancement and marginalisation, it knit together white working-class communities across the Upper South and the Midwest—bringing into being a new cultural region that remains a contested battleground in American politics to the present.The compelling story of an important and neglected chapter in American history, Hillbilly Highway upends conventional wisdom about the enduring political and cultural consequences of the great migration of white southerners in the twentieth century.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming 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

Charles Dallara, managing director of the Institute of International Finance from 1993–2013, talks about his crisis memoir: Euroshock: How the Largest Debt Restructuring in History Helped Save Greece and Preserve the Eurozone (Rodin Books, 2024). Dallara, who co-led a small team who negotiated a €100-billion write-off of Greek debt in 2011-12, discusses how it felt to be an American "interloper", crippling European indecision, and performative politicians.Produced by Emin Fikić at davidstudio.This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit twentyfourtwo.substack.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Nancy Folbre’s The Rise and Decline of Patriarchal Systems: An Intersectional Political Economy (Verso, 2021) asks the questions of why and under what conditions overlapping systems of exploitation persist and decline. Folbre adds this book to a long repertoire of studying the economics of care, social reproduction, household-state relations, and women’s coalition building. In making sense of the gender-skewed outcomes of capitalist development, the undervaluation of care, and the dynamics of social reproduction, Folbre draws from various economic and sociological perspectives to introduce an analytical framework attuned to the multiple layers of patriarchal systems of control. The book’s theoretical toolbox (Part 1) is particularly valuable for those interested in key concepts and theories in feminist political economy. The Reconstructed Narratives (Part 2) engages readers with polemics on gendered dynamics of bargaining power, the disciplining of social reproduction labor, the intertwined nature of affect and care, and prospects for progressive collective organizing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the sixteenth century, members of the Ouchi family were kings in all but name in much of Japan. Immensely wealthy, they controlled sea lanes stretching to Korea and China, as well as the Japanese city of Yamaguchi, which functioned as an important regional port with a growing population and a host of temples and shrines. The family was unique in claiming ethnic descent from Korean kings, and-remarkably for this time-such claims were recognized in both Korea and Japan. Their position, coupled with dominance over strategic ports and mines, allowed them to facilitate trade throughout East and Southeast Asia. They also played a key cultural role in disseminating Confucian texts, Buddhist sutras, ink paintings, and pottery, and in creating a distinctive, hybrid culture that fused Japanese, Korean, and Chinese beliefs, objects, and customs.Kings in All But Name: The Lost History of Ouchi Rule in Japan, 1350-1569 (Oxford UP, 2024) illustrates how Japan was an ethnically diverse state from the fourteenth through the sixteenth centuries, closely bound by trading ties to Korea and China. It reveals new archaeological and textual evidence proving that East Asia had integrated trading networks long before the arrival of European explorers and includes an analysis of ores and slag that shows how mining techniques improved and propelled East Asian trade. The story of the Ouchi rulers argues for the existence of a segmented polity, with one center located in Kyoto, and the other in the Ouchi city of Yamaguchi. It also contradicts the belief that Japan collapsed into centuries of turmoil and rather proves that Japan was a stable and prosperous trading state where rituals, policies, politics, and economics were interwoven and diverse. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On July 27th, 1827, the dey of Algiers struck the French consul over his country’s refusal to pay back its debts–specifically, to two Jewish merchant families: the Bacris, and the Busnachs. It was an error of judgment: France blockaded Algiers, and later invaded, turning Algeria into a French colony.The unpaid debt has festered as a diplomatic issue for almost 30 years. Foreign consuls in the corsairing capital of Algiers sent missives back to their superiors complaining about the Bacris and Busnachs and the doggedness they had in pursuing their debts.Julie Kalman writes about these two families–and their inter-familial business dealing and squabbles–in The Kings of Algiers: How Two Jewish Families Shaped the Mediterranean World during the Napoleonic Wars and Beyond (Princeton University Press, 2023).In this interview, Julie and I talk about the Bacris and the Busnachs, the strange relationships between Algiers, Britain, France and the U.S., and what “sanctions” and “debt diplomacy” looked like in the early nineteeth century.Julie Kalman is Associate Professor of history at Monash University. She has published widely on the history of French Jewry in the nineteenth century, and in the post-war period. She is also the author of Orientalizing the Jew: Religion, Culture and Imperialism in Nineteenth-Century France (Indiana University Press: 2017), and Rethinking Antisemitism in Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge University Press: 2010).You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Kings of Algiers. 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

The 2020 toppling of slave-trader Edward Colston's statue by Black Lives Matter protesters in Bristol was a dramatic reminder of Britain's role in trans-Atlantic slavery, too often overlooked. Yet the legacy of that predatory economy reaches far beyond bronze memorials; it continues to shape the entire visual fabric of the country.Architect Victoria Perry explores the relationship between the wealth of slave-owning elites and the architecture and landscapes of Georgian Britain. She reveals how profits from Caribbean sugar plantations fed the opulence of stately homes and landscape gardens. Trade in slaves and slave-grown products also boosted the prosperity of ports like Bristol, Liverpool and Glasgow, shifting cultural influence towards the Atlantic west. New artistic centers like Bath emerged, while investment in poor, remote areas of Wales, Cumbria and Scotland led to their "reimagining" as tourist destinations: Snowdonia, the Lakes and the Highlands. The patronage of absentee planters popularized British ideas of "natural scenery"--viewing mountains, rivers and rocks as landscape art--and then exported the concept of "sublime and picturesque" landscapes across the Atlantic.A Bittersweet Heritage: Slavery, Architecture and the British Landscape (Hurst, 2022) unearths the slavery-tainted history of Britain's manors, ports, roads and countryside, and powerfully explains what this legacy means today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Most people rely only on their life experience to make investment decisions. This causes them to overlook cyclical forces that repeatedly reshape economies and markets. Investing in U.S. Financial History: Understanding the Past to Forecast the Future (Greenleaf, 2024) fills this void by recounting the comprehensive financial history of the United States of America. It begins with Alexander Hamilton's financial programs in 1790 and ends with the Federal Reserve's battle with inflation in 2023.Authored by Mark Higgins, an experienced investment advisor and financial historian, this book will help you:- Understand key drivers of financial crises and the principles for managing them.- Recognize warning signs of speculative manias that lead to asset bubbles.- Understand why few investors outperform market indices and why index funds are preferable for most individuals and institutions.- Identify the major threats to U.S. economic prosperity in the twenty-first century.Investing in U.S. Financial History reveals that there is almost no financial event that is unprecedented. By understanding the fundamental drivers underpinning key economic events, you will internalize investment principles, avoid common pitfalls, and resist the temptation to panic amid market volatility.Mark J. Higgins, CFA, CFP(R), has served for twelve years as a senior investment consultant advising institutional investors with more than $60 billion in assets. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A total of 305,000 enslaved Africans arrived in the New World aboard American vessels over a span of two hundred years as American merchants and mariners sailed to Africa and to the Caribbean to acquire and sell captives. Using exhaustive archival research, including many collections that have never been used before, historian Sean M. Kelley argues that slave trading needs to be seen as integral to the larger story of American slavery.In American Slavers: Merchants, Mariners, and the Transatlantic Commerce in Captives, 1644-1865 (Yale UP, 2023), Kelley examines the experience of captivity, drawing on more than a hundred African narratives to offer a portrait of enslavement in the regions of Africa frequented by American ships. Kelley also provides a social history of the two American ports where slave trading was most intensive, Newport and Bristol, Rhode Island.In telling this tragic, brutal, and largely unknown story, Kelley corrects many misconceptions while leaving no doubt that Americans were a nation of slave traders. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices