Economic history

*Now a major movie starring Seth Rogen, Paul Dano, Pete Davidson, Shailene Woodley, Sebastian Stan and Nick Offerman*The GameStop Short Squeeze and the Ragtag Group of Amateur Traders that Brought Wall Street to its Knees. Bestselling author Ben Mezrich...

#1 WALL STREET JOURNAL BESTSELLER * NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER New York Times finance editor David Enrich's explosive exposé of the most scandalous bank in the world, revealing its shadowy ties to Donald Trump, Putin's Russia, and Nazi...

Ray Dalio, the legendary investor and international bestselling author of Principles - whose books have sold more than five million copies worldwide - shares his unique template for how debt crises work and principles for dealing with them well...

Blood, Sweat and Earth is a hard-hitting historical expos of the diamond industry, focusing on the exploitation of workers and the environment, and the monopolisation of uncut diamonds, and how little this has changed over time. It describes the use of...

Why most Americans' finances improved during the worst economic contraction since the Great Depression-and the policy choices that made this possibleIn March 2020, economic and social life across the United States came to an abrupt halt as the country...

The postwar United States enjoyed large, widely distributed economic rewards - and most Americans accepted that taxes were a reasonable price to pay for living in a society of shared prosperity. Then in 1978 California enacted Proposition 13, a property...

An Economist Biggest Book of the YearHow commerce determines whether America preserves the peace or goes to warWhen the Cold War ended, many believed that expanding trade would usher in an era of peace. Yet today the United States finds itself...

The consensus on Alan Greenspan's performance as Fed chair used to be extremely positive, but more and more it's been called into question. Now, 2008 has seen Ben Bernanke in the eye of a storm that was created largely during Greenspan's tenure. His...

How should governments and central banks use monetary policy to create a healthy economy? Traditionally, policymakers have used such strategies as controlling the growth of the money supply or pegging the exchange rate to a stable currency. In recent...

A novel perspective on monetary and fiscal policy that views money as the equity capital of a nationA conventional economic theory, monetarism, holds that inflation is a monetary phenomenon driven by changes in the supply of money. Yet recent experience...

Today, free trade is often associated with right-wing free marketeers. In Pax Economica, historian Marc-William Palen shows that free trade and globalisation in fact have roots in nineteenth-century left-wing politics. In this counterhistory of an idea,...

A history that reframes the Bolsheviks' unprecedented attempts to abolish private property after the revolutions of 1917 The revolutions of 1917 swept away not only Russia's governing authority but also the property order on which it stood. The upheaval...

How the rich and the super-rich throughout Western history accumulated their wealth, behaved (or misbehaved) and helped (or didn't help) their communities in times of crisis.The rich have always fascinated, sometimes in problematic ways. Medieval...

How climate change ushered in the collapse of one of history's mighty empiresIn 1644, after close to three centuries of relative stability and prosperity, the Ming dynasty collapsed. Many historians attribute its demise to the Manchu invasion of China,...

When economist Angus Deaton immigrated to the United States from Britain in the early 1980s, he was awed by America's strengths and shocked by the extraordinary gaps he witnessed between people. Economics in America explains in clear terms how the field...

A richly detailed history of the Bacris and the Busnachs, two renowned Jewish families whose influence and reputation shook the capitals of Europe and America.At the height of the Napoleonic Wars, the Bacri brothers and their nephew, Naphtali Busnach,...

How the development of legal and financial institutions transformed Britain into the world's first capitalist country.Modern capitalism emerged in England in the eighteenth century and ushered in the Industrial Revolution, though scholars have long...

Eminent scholar-activist Neil Davidson's brilliance is on full display in this posthumous work, a timely and prescient introduction to the neoliberal era.While it is widely agreed that neoliberalism arose in the wake of the global economic crisis of the...

Tracing the origins of modern political thought through three sets of arguments over history, morality, and freedom.In this wide-ranging work, Michael Sonenscher traces the origins of modern political thought and ideologies to a question, raised by...

The unknown history of economic conservatism in India after independenceNeoliberalism is routinely characterized as an antidemocratic, expert-driven project aimed at insulating markets from politics, devised in the North Atlantic and projected on the...

A definitive reframing of the economic, institutional, and intellectual history of the managerial era.The twentieth century was the managerial century in the United States. An organisational transformation, from entrepreneurial to managerial capitalism,...

Extensively expanded and revised, with a new foreword by Thomas FrankIn the United States, happiness and wealth are often regarded as synonymous. Consumerism, greed, and the insatiable desire for more are American obsessions. In the native tradition of...

Although Capital in the Twenty-First Centurydefinitive antidote to lingering poison of Reagan Era "trickle down" theory

India's caravan trade with central Asia was at the heart of the complex web of routes making up the Silk Roads. But what was the fate of these overland connections in the ages of sail and steam? Jagjeet Lally sets out to answer this question by bringing...

Capitalism - once a great engine of human progress - has lost its moral compass, lost public trust and is urgently in need of repair. This has become a familiar refrain since the global economic downturn and has worsened through the pandemic.The young of...

Using extensive documentary evidence and interviews with former Lehman employees, Oonagh McDonald reveals the decisions that led to Lehman's collapse, investigates why the government refused a bail-out and whether the implications of this refusal were...

Written by one of Italy's leading historians, this book analyses the context and legacy of Gaetano Filangieri's seven-volume 'Science of Legislation'. This study engages with the unique history of Enlightenment Naples, the intellectual traditions upon...

It started and ended with a financial catastrophe. The Darien disaster of 1700 drove Scotland into union with England, but spawned the institutions which transformed Edinburgh into a global financial centre. The crash of 2008 wrecked the city's two...

In The Making of Modern Japan, Myles Carroll offers a sweeping account of post-war Japanese political economy, exploring the transition from the post-war boom to the crisis of today and the connections between these seemingly discrete periods.Carroll...

In most accounts of the origins of money we are offered pleasant tales in which it arises to the mutual benefit of all parties as a result of barter. In this groundbreaking study David McNally reveals the true story of money's origins and development as...

In this timely and controversial treatment of the Australian labour movement, Humphrys examines the role of the Labour Party and trade unions in constructing neoliberalism in Australia.Why do we always assume it was the New Right that was at the centre...

Steve Forbes, Nathan Lewis, and Elizabeth Ames reveal what is behind the inflationary storm that is wreaking havoc on American pocketbooks.Inflation: What It Is, Why It's Bad, and How to Fix It explains what's behind the worst inflationary storm in more...

"Matthew Hennessey's Visible Hand is a wise reminder that free markets are essential to human flourishing."-Peggy Noonan,Wall Street JournalColumnist"Econ 101 should always be this much fun." -Larry Kudlow, former director of the National Economic...

Following a remarkable epoch of greater dispersion of wealth and opportunity, we are inexorably returning towards a more feudal era marked by greater concentration of wealth and property, reduced upward mobility, demographic stagnation, and increased...

In this long-anticipated sequel to his jarring takedown of professional sports, The Fix Is In, internationally recognized game fixing expert and scholarly authority Brian Tuohy further reveals the truths all sports fans need to know. Based on dedicated...

Provides the most up to date history of the Treasury, one of the central institutions of Britain's politics and economy.The Treasury is one of Britain's oldest, most powerful and secretive institutions, one that has played a central role in shaping the...

The ascent of globalisation tells the sweeping historical drama of the development of globalisation, from the Second World War to the present day. The story is told through the richly detailed accounts of eighteen remarkable men and women, describing how...

This is a pathbreaking comparative and trans-national study of the neglected influences of nation, empire and race upon the development and electoral fortunes of the Labour Party in Britain and the Australian Labor Party from their formative years of the...

The work of Karl Polanyi has gained in influence in recent years to become a point of reference to a wide range of leading authors in the fields of economics, politics, sociology and social policy. Newly available in paperback, this volume is a...

How foreign lending weakens emerging nations.In the nineteenth century, many developing countries turned to the credit houses of Europe for sovereign loans to balance their books and weather major fiscal shocks such as war. This reliance on external...

A pioneering history that transforms our understanding of the colonial era and China's place in it. China has conventionally been considered a land empire whose lack of maritime and colonial reach contributed to its economic decline after the...

From the acclaimed authors of Capitalism without Capital, radical ideas for restoring prosperity in today's intangible economyThe past two decades have witnessed sluggish economic growth, mounting inequality, dysfunctional competition, and a host of...

How beliefs shape financial markets and expose the economy to major risksThe collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008 caught markets and regulators by surprise. Nicola Gennaioli and Andrei Shleifer walk readers through the unraveling of Lehman and...

*Shortlisted for the American Library in Paris Book Award**Shortlisted for the Cundill History Prize, McGill University*"Winner of the PROSE Award in European History, Association of American Publishers*An innovative history of deep social and...

During the late nineteenth century, opium was integral to European colonial rule in Southeast Asia. The taxation of opium was a major source of revenue for British and French colonizers, who also derived moral authority from imposing a tax on a peculiar...

Governments have always struggled to tax in ways that are effective and tolerably fair. Sometimes they fail grotesquely, as when, in 1898, the British ignited a rebellion in Sierra Leone by imposing a tax on huts- and, in repressing it, ended up burning...

How the creation of the Nobel Prize in Economics changed the economics profession, Sweden, and the worldOur confidence in markets comes from economics, and our confidence in economics is underpinned by the Nobel Prize in Economics, which was first...

A pathbreaking history of art that uses digital research and economic tools to reveal enduring inequities in the formation of the art historical canon. Painting by Numbers presents a groundbreaking blend of art historical and social scientific methods to...