906 episodes

Interviews with scholars of the economic and business history about their new books

New Books in Economic and Business History New Books Network

    • Arte

Interviews with scholars of the economic and business history about their new books

    John L. Sullivan, "Podcasting in a Platform Age: From an Amateur to a Professional Medium" (Bloomsbury, 2024)

    John L. Sullivan, "Podcasting in a Platform Age: From an Amateur to a Professional Medium" (Bloomsbury, 2024)

    Podcasting in a Platform Age: From an Amateur to a Professional Medium (Bloomsbury, 2024) explores the transition underway in podcasting by considering how the influx of legacy and new media interest in the medium is injecting professional and corporate logics into what had been largely an amateur media form.
    Many of the most high-profile podcasts today, however, are produced by highly-skilled media professionals, some of whom are employees of media corporations. Legacy radio and new media platform giants like Google, Apple, Amazon, and Spotify are also making big (and expensive) moves in the medium by acquiring content producers and hosting platforms. This book focuses on three major aspects of this transformation: formalization, professionalization, and monetization. Through a close read of online and press discourse, analysis of podcasts themselves, participant observations at podcast trade shows and conventions, and interviews with industry professionals and individual podcasters, John Sullivan outlines how the efforts of industry players to transform podcasting into a profitable medium are beginning to challenge the very definition of podcasting itself.
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    • 38 min
    Steven C. Beda, "Strong Winds and Widow Makers: Workers, Nature, and Environmental Conflict in Pacific Northwest Timber Country" (U Illinois Press, 2022)

    Steven C. Beda, "Strong Winds and Widow Makers: Workers, Nature, and Environmental Conflict in Pacific Northwest Timber Country" (U Illinois Press, 2022)

    Imagine an environmentalist. Are you picturing a Birkenstock-clad hippie? An office worker who hikes on weekends? A political lobbyist? What about a modern day timber worker? 
    This last group is at the center of University of Oregon historian Steven C. Beda's new book, Strong Winds and Widow Makers: Workers, Nature, and Environmental Conflict in Pacific Northwest Timber Country (U Illinois Press, 2023). In Beda's telling, it's timber workers, as lovers of the outdoors who also rely upon healthy forests for their livelihoods, who are often at the forefront of local environmentalism, including organizing at the crossroads of labor and environmental activism. From the late 19th century onwards, timber works imbued the Pacific Northwest with a sense of place inaccessible to upper-class Northern California newcomers who changed the region's cultural and political calculus in the late 20th century. We live in a timber society, Beda argues, and no one knows what that means nearly as much as the workers who turn trees into books like this.
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    • 1 hr 4 min
    Sudev Sheth, "Bankrolling Empire: Family Fortunes and Political Transformation in Mughal India" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

    Sudev Sheth, "Bankrolling Empire: Family Fortunes and Political Transformation in Mughal India" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

    In this colorful book, historian Sudev Sheth traces how a family of diamond dealers deployed wealth to play off political leaders and survive the collapse of the Mughal Empire. The story highlights the unique role played by Jain and Hindu bankers in the daily affairs of Islamic, Hindu, and early colonial forms of Indian government.
    Bankrolling Empire: Family Fortunes and Political Transformation in Mughal India (Cambridge UP, 2024) features brazen emperors, sickly princes, irate governors, and quick-witted matriarchs who commanded banking networks across cities. It explores unlikely rivalries, flaky friendships, and daring tycoons who gambled vast sums as a way to hedge against political uncertainty.
    Sheth employs unconventional sources to tap into the thrilling lives of moneyed persons. Excerpts from Persian diaries, Gujarati poems, French trading manuals, Marathi letters, Sanskrit hymns, and Dutch shipping records tell new tales and are presented in English translation for the very first time.
    Spanning several political dynasties and still thriving today as a billion-dollar family firm in its fourteenth generation, the entrepreneurs featured in this book help us see state power and social change through fresh eyes. How did capitalists outsmart politicians, and what insights can we gain for our own times?
    You can get 20% off the price of this book with code BRE2023 at Cambridge University Press.
    Brittany Puller is a PhD candidate in the department of Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Michigan. Her dissertation examines caste, kinship, and community in the making of Sikh misls in eighteenth-century Punjab.
    Arighna Gupta is a doctoral candidate in history at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His dissertation attempts to trace early-colonial genealogies of popular sovereignty located at the interstices of monarchical, religious, and colonial sovereignties in India and present-day Bangladesh.
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    • 1 hr 12 min
    Philip Mark Plotch and Jen Nelles, "Mobilizing the Metropolis: How the Port Authority Built New York" (U Michigan Press, 2023)

    Philip Mark Plotch and Jen Nelles, "Mobilizing the Metropolis: How the Port Authority Built New York" (U Michigan Press, 2023)

    The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey is everywhere in the New York metropolitan area. Founded in 1921, its portfolio includes airports, marine terminals, bus stations, bridges, tunnels, and real estate. But its history is not widely known and its inner workings are little understood by people who traverse its domain when they fly into John F. Kennedy International Airport, ride the PATH trains from New York to New Jersey, or drive across the George Washington Bridge.
    Mobilizing the Metropolis: How the Port Authority Built New York (U Michigan Press, 2023), by Philip Mark Plotch and Jen Nelles, aims to fill this gap in public knowledge with a history of the Port Authority. Spanning 100 years, Mobilizing the Metropolis closely charts the evolution of the Port Authority as it went from improving rail freight around New York Harbor to building bridges and managing real estate. At the same time, the book explores the evolution of the authority’s internal culture in the face of actions by elected officials in New York and New Jersey that have reduced the agency’s autonomy and affected its operations. Mobilizing the Metropolis also extracts from the history of the Port Authority useful lessons about how organizations charged with solving governmental problems can win support and engage opposition.
    Robert W. Snyder is Manhattan Borough Historian professor emeritus of Journalism and American Studies at Rutgers University. He is completing an oral history of the COVID-19 pandemic in New York City for Cornell University Press. He can be reached at rwsnyder@rutgers.edu.
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    • 48 min
    Michael J. Graetz, "The Power to Destroy: How the Antitax Movement Hijacked America" (Princeton UP, 2024)

    Michael J. Graetz, "The Power to Destroy: How the Antitax Movement Hijacked America" (Princeton UP, 2024)

    The anti-tax movement is "the most important overlooked social and political movement of the last half century", according to our guest Michael J. Graetz. 
    In his book The Power to Destroy: How the Antitax Movement Hijacked America (Princeton UP, 2024), Graetz chronicles the movement from a fringe theory promoted by zealous outsiders using false economic claims and thinly veiled racist rhetoric to a highly organized mainstream lobbying force, funded by billionaires, that dominates and distorts politics. 
    Building on vague and disproven theories about "supply side" economics, the movement has undermined long-held beliefs that taxes are a reasonable price to pay for civil society, sound infrastructure, national security, and shared prosperity. 
    Leaders have attacked the IRS, protected tax loopholes, and pushed aggressively for tax cuts from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump. Also known as "trickle-down" or "voodoo" economics, these theories falsely claim that tax cuts will pay for themselves, when in fact they have led to the need for increased debt, including massive foreign debt, to pay for critical national investments. 
    The antitax movement has expanded to include anti-government ideas and now, as told by Graetz, threatens the nation’s social safety net, increases inequality, saps American financial strength, and undermines the status of the US dollar.
    In 1819, Chief Justice John Marshall declared that the power to tax entails “the power to destroy.” In this book Graetz argues that it is the antitax movement itself that wields this destructive power. 
    Suggested reading: Cloud Cuckoo Land, by Anthony Doerr
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    • 1 hr 5 min
    Gary S. Cross, "Free Time: The History of an Elusive Ideal" (NYU Press, 2024)

    Gary S. Cross, "Free Time: The History of an Elusive Ideal" (NYU Press, 2024)

    Free time, one of life’s most precious things, often feels unfulfilling. But why? And how did leisure activities transition from strolling in the park for hours to “doomscrolling” on social media for thirty minutes?
    Today, despite the promise of modern industrialization, many people experience both a scarcity of free time and a disappointment in it. Free Time: The History of an Elusive Ideal (NYU Press, 2024) by Dr. Gary Cross offers a broad historical explanation of why our affluent society does not afford more time away from work and why that time is often unsatisfying. Dr. Cross explores the cultural, social, economic, and political history, especially of the past 250 years to understand the roots of our conceptions of free time and its use. By the end of the nineteenth century, a common expectation was that industrial innovations would lead to a progressive reduction of work time and a subsequent rise in free time devoted to self-development and social engagement. However, despite significant changes in the early twentieth century, both goals were frustrated, thus leading to the contemporary dilemma.
    Dr. Cross touches on leisure of all kinds, from peasant festivals and aristocratic pleasure gardens to amusement parks, movie theatres and organised sports to internet surfing, and even the use of alcohol and drugs. This wide-ranging cultural and social history explores the industrial-era origins of our modern obsession with work and productivity, but also the historical efforts to liberate time from work and cultivate free time for culture. Insightful and informative, this book is sure to help you make sense of your own relationship to free time.
    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.
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    • 48 min

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