New Books in Economic and Business History

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This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field. Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: ⁠newbooksnetwork.com⁠ Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox: ⁠https://newbooksnetwork.substack.com/⁠ Follow us on Instagram and Bluesky to learn about more our latest interviews: @newbooksnetwork

  1. 20h ago

    Notes from the Sex Worker Left: Lumpen Theory with Heather Berg (Duke UP, 2026)

    “If whores were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free” (ix). Notes from the Sex Worker Left: Lumpen Theory (Duke UP, 2026) opens with a quote from Clara expanding on the Combahee River Collective 1977 statement. Interweaving interviews and writing by sex workers like Clara, Notes from the Sex Worker Left by Heather Berg offers a political theory that critiques family/couple-form, work, and state, envisioning militant community care. Rejecting the pressure to fit into a category of hardworking, respectable workers dominant even in the Left, Heather Berg extends Marxist theorization of lumpenproletariat: the working-class “who were criminalized, itinerant, and otherwise making a living of ‘dubious means’ ” (13). Although lumpenproletariat is not a cohesive category, with sex workers offering different perspectives and experiences, Berg reads lumpenness as a “critical standpoint” (14) to reimagine the world where we are able to not only survive, but also thrive, collectively. Through theorizing, the book invites the readers to think with sex workers on the question of how we can thrive in this increasingly precarious world. This book is a thought-provoking and beautiful read for anyone who is interested in exploring these questions together at the intersections of gender studies, labor studies, and political theory. Beyond academia, anyone who wants to delve deeper into the couple-form, work, and state structure, dreaming of escape and alternatives, would find this to be a rewarding read.  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

  2. 20h ago

    Down and Out in Utopia: Unemployment as Moral Education in Norway with Kelly McKowen (U Toronto Press, 2026)

    Imagine that you have just lost your job. You wonder: “Who or what can I depend on now?” The answer, it turns out, varies significantly depending on where you live. In Norway, a small European social democracy, you would almost certainly turn to the country’s comprehensive public welfare system. With a work history, you could be eligible for two years of unemployment benefits that replace upwards of 62% of your previous salary. Meanwhile, you would not be too worried about covering other major expenses: annual out-of-pocket healthcare costs are capped at a few hundred dollars, parents receive monthly payments per child, public education is tuition-free, and pensions are guaranteed. What would this experience teach you about government, work, taxes, and freedom?  In Down and Out in Utopia: Unemployment as Moral Education in Norway (U Toronto Press, 2026), anthropologist Dr. Kelly McKowen explains what happens to those without jobs in one of the world’s wealthiest and most egalitarian countries. Following the daily lives of a diverse group of unemployed individuals during the “oil crash” of the mid-2010s, he shows that being “down and out” in a social democracy offers people a unique moral education with lessons about the nature and value of the state, labor, welfare, and belonging.  Engaging, timely, and illuminating, Down and Out in Utopia makes the case that through social policy, we shape life’s hardships – and these hardships, in turn, shape us and how we view the world.  This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose 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. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

  3. 20h ago

    Valuing Nature at the Ends of the World: Natural Capital and Climate Disaster in Belize with Patrick M. Gallagher (Columbia UP, 2026)

    Belize is often described as a “pristine” ecotourism destination with a landscape that is “naturally” valuable. Yet for much of the twentieth century, British Honduras—as the country was known under colonial rule—was seen as lacking value, an unprofitable backwater. Valuing Nature at the Ends of the World: Natural Capital and Climate Disaster in Belize (Columbia UP, 2026) explores how Belize’s precarious coastal environment has become a site for a new kind of capitalist value production, in which landscapes and ecosystems derive worth from their vulnerability or looming destruction in the era of climate change.  Drawing on a decade of ethnographic research, Dr. Patrick M. Gallagher offers a critical account of market-oriented conservation in the Caribbean that ranges across everyday coastal life, emergent ecological science, and climate policy spaces. He shows how the long material and social histories of racialized colonialism shape the making of technocratic tools for valuing nature. Gallagher traces how new forms of capitalist value emerge from the interaction among colonial pasts, contemporary conservation practices, and vivid scenarios of imminent climate change–driven disaster and loss. He also examines how people and policymakers in Belize imagine and create new ways of life in a changing environment. Ethnographically grounded and rich in theoretical insight, this book illuminates how the Anthropocene environment, newly visible and valuable at the moment of its presumed disappearance, came into being in Belize and around the world.  This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose 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. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

  4. 2d ago

    Soviet Blocks: The Bizarre Puzzle of How Tetris Embraced Western Values with Julien Mailland (MIT Press, 2026)

    A geopolitical and legal history of the bestselling videogame Tetris—the stunningly successful game that began in a Soviet research lab monitored by the KGB. Tetris—the game that would take the world by storm—was formally introduced to the West in 1987, at a time when Soviet technology exports were minimal and the Berlin Wall was still standing strong. Far from being a capitalist cultural product, the game had actually been designed in a Soviet computer lab tightly monitored by the KGB, at a time when Ronald Reagan referred to the USSR as the “evil empire.” So, how did Tetris jump the wall to become such a blockbuster? And why does a US company, The Tetris Company (TTC), now own the game, when it was the property of Mother Russia? Why has TTC been able to monopolize both the shape of the pieces which predated Tetris and the very concept of an electronic puzzle game with falling pieces, which flies in the face of traditional copyright law? Why and how have Soviet socialists morphed into hardcore capitalists? In Soviet Blocks: The Bizarre Puzzle of How Tetris Embraced Western Values (MIT Press, 2026), Julien Mailland answers these questions and more, explaining the fascinating history of Tetris’ commercial success as a story of two systems radically opposed in histories, cultures, economics, and politics. Rudolf Thomas Inderst (*1978) enjoys video games since the early 1980s. He received a master’s degree in political science, American cultural studies as well as contemporary and recent history from Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich and holds three PhDs in game studies (LMU Munich, University of Passau & University of Vechta). Currently, he's teaching as a professor for game design and game studies at the University of Applied Sciences Neu-Ulm HNU, Germany, holds the position as lead editor at the online journal TITEL kulturmagazin for the game section, and is editor of the weekly game research newsletter Game Studies Watchlist. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

  5. 4d ago

    Lives, Land, and Labour: A Social History of Eighteenth-Century Sri Lanka with Luc Bulten (Brill, 2026)

    The "Thombos" are a rather unique collection of eighteenth-century land and population registers detailing the lives lived, lands held, and labour provided by tens of thousands of people inhabiting the coastal regions of Sri Lanka that were colonised by the Dutch East India Company. Turning this archive inside out by highlighting both the indigenous and colonial roots of this administrative system, Luc Bulten presents a gateway into everyday social realities surrounding caste, conjugality, (forced) work, and land tenure. In doing so, he demonstrates how both European expansionism and local agency reciprocally affected the ways such social realities were shaped. Tune in to our conversation about Lives, Land, and Labour: A Social History of Eighteenth-Century Sri Lanka (Brill, 2026) Dr Luc Bulten is Assistant Professor of Social and Economic History at Radboud University and Postdoctoral Fellow in Sri Lankan History at the University of Cambridge. This interview is conducted by Dr Lewis Wade, a Humboldt Research Fellow at the University of Bamberg. He is the author of the prize-winning Privilege, Economy and State in Old Regime France and can be found on Bluesky @wadehistory.bsky.social. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

  6. 5d ago

    Credit to the Nation: Eastern European Jewish Immigrant Bankers and the Shaping of American Finance, 1873–1930 with Rebecca Kobrin (Harvard UP, 2026)

    From a leading historian, the story of how entrepreneurial Jewish immigrants transformed commercial banking and enabled the economic and social advancement of Jews in America.What are immigrants to do when business opportunities abound in their new home, but banks refuse essential financial support? How could they make the journey in the first place without helping hands? In this lively history, Rebecca Kobrin chronicles the turn-of-the-twentieth-century Jewish immigrants who stepped up by doing the lending themselves. Arriving from the Russian Empire and settling primarily in New York, they made livelihoods by assisting fellow Jews so they could purchase passage to the United States and, after arriving, obtain credit that other lenders would not dare provide.Credit to the Nation: Eastern European Jewish Immigrant Bankers and the Shaping of American Finance, 1873–1930 (Harvard UP, 2026) traces the novel practices of bankers who not only enabled the flourishing of American Jewry but also revolutionized the US financial industry. Drawing on previously unexamined archival materials in Russian, Yiddish, German, and English, Kobrin tells a story that is also crucial to the history of New York, as immigrant bankers’ financing of real estate transformed wide swathes of the city. Lenders drove a boom in the prices of tenement buildings, but heavy speculation eventually precipitated the downfall of immigrant banking. Kobrin notes in particular the case of the Bank of United States—a private lender catering primarily to Jewish businessmen—which the Federal Reserve refused to bail out from bankruptcy in 1930.Immigrants’ grasping for credit, and the rise and fall of immigrant banks, gave way to a contemporary banking industry that, ironically, refuses credit to today’s immigrants. Kobrin reminds us that now, as before, the denial of credit pushes entrepreneurial Americans into unregulated money-lending and the trap of endless debt. Rebecca Kobrin, author of Jewish Bialystok and Its Diaspora, is Russell and Bettina Knapp Associate Professor of American Jewish History at Columbia University, where she codirects the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies. Geraldine Gudefin is a modern Jewish historian researching Jewish migrations, family life, and legal pluralism. She is currently a Visiting Scholar at the Centre for Asian Legal Studies at the National University of Singapore, and is completing a book titled An Impossible Divorce? East European Jews and the Limits of Legal Pluralism in France, 1900-1939. The book can be purchased on the Harvard University Press website: Credit to the Nation. Use code CRE30 to receive a 30% discount. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

  7. Sep 29

    Do We Really Need To Choose Between Jobs and the Environment?

    Host Licia Cianetti talks to Lorenzo Feltrin about his recent book Workers and the World: Fighting Ecological Crisis from Within (Verso, 2016). They discuss how the climate and ecological crisis often confronts workers with the impossible choice between the end of the month and the end of the world, but how this choice between jobs and environment is not as zero-sum as it is usually represented. Lorenzo explains how people living near toxic industries often lose both jobs and the environment, how this takes different forms in different parts of the world, and how new solidarities can emerge that could save livelihoods and nature. Guest: Lorenzo Feltrin is a post-doctoral researcher at the University Ca’ Foscari in Venice, working on a Marie Curie Global Fellowship titled "Labour and Ecology in an International Perspective: Porto Marghera in the Phosphates Archipelago". Between 2021 and 2024 he worked at the University of Birmingham. Presenter: Licia Cianetti is Associate Professor at the University of Birmingham and Founding Deputy Director of CEDAR. She is the Principal Investigator of an upcoming research project on “Resisting Inter-Scalar Authoritarian Networks and Coalitions” (funded by the EU under Horizon Europe grant no. 101286676). The People, Power, Politics podcast brings you the latest insights into the factors that are shaping and re-shaping our political world. It is brought to you by the Centre for Elections, Democracy, Accountability and Representation (CEDAR) based at the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom. Transcript here Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

  8. Sep 28

    Vulgar Marxism: Revolutionary Politics and the Dilemmas of Worker Education, 1891-1931 with Edward Baring (U Chicago Press, 2025)

    Offers a transformative reading of the Marxist tradition by uncovering its connections to the institutions and practices of worker education. For the past hundred years, “vulgar Marxism” has been the go-to insult among socialist and communist intellectuals, a shorthand for the ways Marxist theory could go wrong. But why would thinkers advocating for working-class emancipation use “vulgarity” as an epithet? In Vulgar Marxism: Revolutionary Politics and the Dilemmas of Worker Education, 1891–1931 (U Chicago Press, 2025), Edward Baring seeks an answer by delving into debates over Marxism in the first decades of the twentieth century. He shows that this common phrase wasn’t aimed primarily at popular understandings of Marx. Rather, it was used to attack intellectuals for failing to teach Marx’s theory to the working masses correctly. His history of “vulgar Marxism” homes in on the project of mass worker education at a time when the project was both widely pursued and fiercely contested. Worker education offered a mechanism through which Marxist theory was meant to promote large-scale social and political change, and it drew on a massive infrastructure of schools, publishing houses, and educational bureaus that stretched across Europe and reached millions. By centering this project, Baring radically recasts the history of Marxism from the Second International to World War II. He challenges classic oppositions between “economistic” and “cultural” versions of Marxism; rereads many of the most significant Marxist theorists of the time, including Karl Kautsky, Rosa Luxemburg, Georg Lukács, and Antonio Gramsci; and offers new resources for understanding how Marxist ideas transformed as they traveled around Europe and then spread throughout the world. Edward Baring is associate professor of history and human values at Princeton University. He is the author of Converts to the Real and The Young Derrida. 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.  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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Ratings & Reviews

4.6
out of 5
14 Ratings

About

This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field. Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: ⁠newbooksnetwork.com⁠ Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox: ⁠https://newbooksnetwork.substack.com/⁠ Follow us on Instagram and Bluesky to learn about more our latest interviews: @newbooksnetwork

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