New Books in Economic and Business History

Porcelain for the Emperor: Manufacture and Technology in Qing China (University of Washington Press; 2023) looks at the history of court-sponsored porcelain production in Qing China through the work and career of the Manchu polymath Tang Ying (1682-1756). Viewing him as a technocrat — an official who combined technological specialization and managerial expertise — Kai Jun Chen uses Tang to explore how porcelain manufacture was carried out in the Qing, how technological innovations were created and passed on, and how technocrats learned their skills. At the same time, the book shows how technocrats imposed and extended imperial order over local society, and how essential technocrats were to the operation and success of Qing cultural policies.Lucidly written and complete with truly striking images, Porcelain for the Emperor is a beautiful combination of the study of material culture, literature, art history, and technology. This book should be of interest not only to historians of the Qing and the early modern world, but also art historians and curators, as well as anyone who has ever seen a piece of Qing porcelain and wondered how it came to be. Curious readers should also seek out Making the Palace Machine Work, co-edited by Kai Jun Chen, Martina Siebert, and Dorothy Ko.Sarah Bramao-Ramos is a PhD candidate in History and East Asian Languages at Harvard. She works on Manchu language books and is interested in anything with a kesike. She can be reached at sbramaoramos@g.harvard.edu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Political Scientist Brendan Doherty has a new book that dives into the ways that presidents have raised money for themselves, their parties, and other elected officials over the past six decades. Doherty is an expert on campaign fundraising, especially by presidents, and Fundraiser in Chief: Presidents and the Politics of Campaign Cash (UP of Kansas, 2023) continues the research he has been doing in this area within political science. The overarching thesis of Doherty’s work in Fundraiser in Chief is examining the intersection between campaigning and governing, especially when it comes to the president him(her)self. Doherty’s chief claim in the book is that presidential fundraising, which is usually studied and explored in direct connection with presidential campaigns, should be more fully integrated into the other dynamics and components of how a president governs and uses his/her time. In an effort to examine the time spent fundraising, not just at public events, but also in private venues and closed events, Doherty compiled an extensive data set that includes information for every president from Jimmy Carter to Donald Trump. (Doherty has continued to add to the data set to include President Joe Biden, but the research analyzed in the book concludes with the 2020 election cycle and Donald Trump’s presidency.)This is a fascinating examination of fundraising, particularly as the laws and regulations have continued to change and shift over the decades. As Doherty notes, every time there is a shift, presidents pursue different options in order to fundraise for themselves, for their parties, and for other elected officials. And since fundraising is a constant undertaking, not just ramped up during election cycles, it needs to be considered alongside other dimensions of presidential governance, like speechmaking/rhetoric, congressional relations, foreign and domestic travel, and the other ways that presidents spend their scarcest resource, their time. The fundraising world that President Jimmy Carter entered, following the establishment of new laws, regulations, and restrictions on campaign fundraising after Watergate, is much different than the world in which former President Trump and President Biden are now operating as the 2024 election cycle moves forward. Presidents must make strategic choices around fundraising, and this also shapes the ways that individuals govern from the Oval Office, the way they work with members of their parties, and the way that they work with other elected officials. Fundraiser in Chief: Presidents and the Politics of Campaign Cash is an important contribution to the scholarship on the American presidency, especially in our understanding of how governing and fundraising and campaigning all integrate into each other.Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-host of the New Books in Political Science channel at the New Books Network. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (University Press of Kansas, 2022), as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). She can be reached @gorenlj.bsky.social Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Immigrant laborers who came to the New South in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries found themselves poised uncomfortably between white employers and the Black working class, a liminal and often precarious position. Campaigns to recruit immigrants primarily aimed to suppress Black agency and mobility. If that failed, both planters and industrialists imagined that immigrants might replace Blacks entirely. Thus, white officials, citizens, and employers embraced immigrants when they acted in ways that sustained Jim Crow. However, when they directly challenged established political and economic power structures, immigrant laborers found themselves ostracized, jailed, or worse, by the New South order. Both industrial employers and union officials lauded immigrants' hardworking and noble character when it suited their purposes, and both denigrated and racialized them when immigrant laborers acted independently.Jennifer E. Brooks's Resident Strangers: Immigrant Laborers in New South Alabama (LSU Press, 2022) restores immigrant laborers to their place in the history of the New South, considering especially how various immigrant groups and individuals experienced their time in New South Alabama. Brooks utilizes convict records, censuses, regional and national newspapers, government documents, and oral histories to construct the story of immigrants in New South Alabama. The immigrant groups she focuses on appeared most often as laborers in the records, including the Chinese, southern Italians, and the diverse nationals of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, along with a sprinkling of others. Although recruitment crusades by Alabama's employers and New South boosters typically failed to bring in the vast numbers of immigrants they had envisioned, significant populations from around the world arrived in industries and communities across the state, especially in the coal- and ore-mining district of Birmingham.Resident Strangers reveals that immigrant laborers' presence and individual agency complicated racial categorization, disrupted labor relations, and diversified southern communities. It also presents a New South that was far from isolated from the forces at work across the nation or in the rest of the world. Immigrant laborers brought home to New South Alabama the turbulent world of empire building, deeply embedding the region in national and global networks of finance, trade, and labor migration. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The 1970s was a golden age for representations of African American life on TV sitcoms: Sanford & Son, Good Times, The Jeffersons. Surprisingly, nearly all the decade’s notable Black sitcoms were made by a single company, Tandem Productions. Founded by two white men, the successful team behind All in the Family, writer Norman Lear and director Bud Yorkin, Tandem gave unprecedented opportunities to Black actors, writers, and producers to break into the television industry. However, these Black auteurs also struggled to get the economic privileges and creative autonomy regularly granted to their white counterparts.Scratchin' and Survivin': Hustle Economics and the Black Sitcoms of Tandem Productions (Rutgers UP, 2023) discovers surprising parallels between the behind-the-scenes drama at Tandem and the plotlines that aired on their sitcoms, as both real and fictional African Americans devised various strategies for getting their fair share out of systems prone to exploiting their labor. The media scholar Adrien Sebro describes these tactics as a form of “hustle economics,” and he pays special attention to the ways that Black women—including actresses like LaWanda Page, Isabel Sanford, and Esther Rolle—had to hustle for recognition. Exploring Tandem’s complex legacy, including its hit racially mixed sitcom Diff’rent Strokes, he showcases the Black talent whose creative agency and labor resilience helped to transform the television industry.Adrien Sebro is an assistant professor of media studies at the University of Texas at Austin. He specializes in critical media studies at the intersections of comedy, gender, and Black popular culture.Peter C. Kunze is a visiting assistant professor of communication at Tulane University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

No two nations have exchanged natural resources, produced transborder environmental agreements, or cooperatively altered ecosystems on the same scale as Canada and the United States. Environmental and energy diplomacy have profoundly shaped both countries’ economies, politics, and landscapes for over 150 years.Natural Allies: Environment, Energy, and the History of US-Canada Relations (McGill-Queen's UP, 2023) looks at the history of US-Canada relations through an environmental lens. From fisheries in the late nineteenth century to oil pipelines in the twenty-first century, Daniel Macfarlane recounts the scores of transborder environmental and energy arrangements made between the two nations. Many became global precedents that influenced international environmental law, governance, and politics, including the Boundary Waters Treaty, the Trail Smelter case, hydroelectric megaprojects, and the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreements. In addition to water, fish, wood, minerals, and myriad other resources, Natural Allies details the history of the continental energy relationship - from electricity to uranium to fossil fuels -showing how Canada became vital to American strategic interests and, along with the United States, a major international energy power and petro-state.Environmental and energy relations facilitated the integration and prosperity of Canada and the United States but also made these countries responsible for the current climate crisis and other unsustainable forms of ecological degradation. Looking to the future, Natural Allies argues that the concept of national security must be widened to include natural security - a commitment to public, national, and international safety from environmental harms, especially those caused by human actions.Daniel Macfarlane is associate professor at the School of the Environment, Geography, and Sustainability at Western Michigan University and senior fellow at the Bill Graham Centre for Contemporary International History at the University of Toronto.Filippo De Chirico is a PhD student in History and Politics of Energy at Roma Tre University (Italy). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Toward a Free Economy: Swantantra and Opposition Politics in Democratic India (Princeton University Press, 2023), Aditya Balasubramanian charts the birth and rise of a political ideology rooted in the tenets of ‘free market’ economics, and the loosely associated ideas of neoliberalism, conservatism, and libertarianism. Balasubramanian offers an altogether fresh origin story for this movement that is often framed as a Cold War North Atlantic export to the rest of the poorer, developing world championed by the International Monetary Fund backed Washington consensus.In his compellingly told and richly layered account, we are not only given one of the few comprehensive histories of the Swantantra (“Freedom”) Party and its tryst with democratic electoral politics in newly independent India, but we are also shown how the most important facets of this moment in history cannot simply rely on a narrative woven around party politics. This results in a focus on what Balasubramanian calls “economic consciousness,” and exposes us to a vast, multifarious archival base that spans print, visual, and urban cultures, economists’ papers, government films, and much more that palpably reconstructs how economic ideals floated in the political arena also circulated in and were propped up by the wider public sphere in southern and western India.The Swantantra Party emerged in the late 1950s, as a response to the Indian National Congress Party’s (INC) purported hegemony in independent India’s constitutional democratic structure. The party encouraged Indians to break with the INC, which spearheaded the anticolonial nationalist movement and now dominated Indian democracy. Rejecting heavy-industrial developmental state and the accompanying rhetoric of socialism that was seen as emblematic of INC, Swatantra promised “free economy” through its project of opposition politics.As the “free economy” idea was disseminated across various genres and cultures, it took on meanings that varied by region and language, caste, and class, and won diverse advocates. These articulations, informed by but distinct from neoliberalism, came chiefly from relatively wealthy communities who felt threatened by the INC’s economic policies as they embraced new forms of entrepreneurial activity. At their core, they connoted anticommunism, unfettered private economic activity, decentralized development, and the defense of private property.Opposition politics encompassed ideas and practice. Swatantra’s leaders imagined a conservative alternative to a progressive dominant party in a two-party system. They communicated ideas and mobilized people around such issues as inflation, taxation, and property. And they made creative use of India’s institutions to bring checks and balances to the political system.Democracy’s persistence in India is uncommon among postcolonial societies. By excavating a perspective of how Indians made and understood their own democracy and economy, Aditya Balasubramanian broadens our picture of the free market, neoliberalism, democracy, and the postcolonial world. In the process, he helps us understand why geographically specific and culturally rooted histories from the Global South are necessary in qualifying and nuancing these ostensibly universal concepts.Archit Guha is a PhD researcher in the Duke University History Department. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Governing Death, Making Persons: The New Chinese Way of Death (Cornell UP, 2023) tells the story of how economic reforms and changes in the management of death in China have affected the governance of persons. The Chinese Communist Party has sought to channel the funeral industry and death rituals into vehicles for reshaping people into "modern" citizens and subjects. Since the Reform and Opening period and the marketization of state funeral parlors, the Party has promoted personalized funerals in the hope of promoting a market-oriented and individualistic ethos. However, things have not gone as planned.Huwy-min Lucia Liu writes about the funerals she witnessed and the life stories of two kinds of funeral workers: state workers who are quasi-government officials and semilegal private funeral brokers. She shows that end-of-life commemoration in urban China today is characterized by the resilience of social conventions and not a shift toward market economy individualization. Rather than seeing a rise of individualism and the decline of a socialist self, Liu sees the durability of socialist, religious, communal, and relational ideas of self, woven together through creative ritual framings in spite of their contradictions.Huwy-min Lucia Liu is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at George Mason University.Victoria Oana Lupașcu is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and Asian Studies at University of Montréal. Her areas of interest include medical humanities, visual art, 20th and 21st Chinese, Brazilian and Romanian literature and Global South studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Xaq Frohlich’s From Label to Table: Regulating Food in America in the Information Age (U California Press, 2023) is a biography of the Nutrition Facts label that adorns millions of food products and has become an integral part of the food and information landscape in the United States. Frohlich’s story unfolds in part as an institutional history of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the agency responsible for the label, using the agency as a way to understand the ideological and policy debates about responsibility for communicating scientific information to the public, from regulation and gatekeeping to information brokering and nudging. From Label to Table is the story of how the contemporary American food information environment emerged out of this history of transformation from paternalism to “informationism.”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

Sand, salt, iron, copper, oil, and lithium. These fundamental materials have created empires, razed civilizations, and fed our ingenuity and greed for thousands of years. Without them, our modern world would not exist, and the battle to control them will determine our future.The fiber-optic cables that weave the World Wide Web, the copper veins of our electric grids, the silicon chips and lithium batteries that power our phones and cars: though it can feel like we now live in a weightless world of information—what Ed Conway, author of Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization (Knopf, 2023)--calls “the ethereal world”—our twenty-first-century lives are still very much rooted in the material. Listen to him in conversation with Owen Bennett-Jones. Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Silk—a luxury fabric, a valuable trade good, and a scientific marvel. This material, created by the bombyx mori silkworm, has captivated artisans for centuries—and it captivated science presenter and writer Aarathi Prasad, who was studying the scientific potential of silk for new treatments.That started Aarathi on a journey to explore the world of silk—not just the traditional silk we use today, but all its different varieties: wild silks, made from less famous moths; sea silks, made from mollusks; and spider silk, strong, yet significantly more difficult to harvest. This all comes together in her latest book, Silk: A History in Three Metamorphoses (William Collins, 2023)In this interview, Aarathi and I explore this world of silk, in all its forms, and why silk may be the hottest new material in biotechnology today.Aarathi Prasad is a writer, broadcaster, and researcher interested in the intersection of science and technology with cultures, history, health, and the environment. She is also the author of In The Bonesetter’s Waiting Room: Travels Through Indian Medicine (Profile Books Limited: 2016) which was about health and disease in modern India, and Like A Virgin: How Science is Redesigning the Rules of Sex (Simon and Schuster: 2012), which explored the history and future of reproduction. Aarathi has a PhD in genetics from Imperial College London and is an Honorary Research Fellow at University College London’s Department of Genetics, Evolution and Environment.You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Silk. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.Nicholas Gordon is an associate 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