Walter Scheidel, “The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality” (Princeton UP, 2017)
In 2017 half of the world’s wealth belongs to the top 1% of the population. In his new book, The Great Leveler Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century (Pr...
19 Okt 201726min
Bryant Simon, “The Hamlet Fire: A Tragic Story of Cheap Food, Cheap Government, and Cheap Lives” (The New Press, 2017)
On September 3, 1991, a fire erupted at the Imperial Foods factory in the small town of Hamlet, North Carolina. Twenty-five people died behind the factory’s locked doors that morning. Most of the vict...
6 Okt 201743min
Bradon Ellem, “The Pilbara: From the Deserts Profits Come (UWA Publishing, 2017)
In his new book, The Pilbara: From the Deserts Profits Come (UWA Publishing, 2017), Bradon Ellem, Professor of Employment Relations at the University of Sydney Business School, explores the Pilbara re...
22 Sep 201717min
Aled Davies, “The City of London and Social Democracy: The Political Economy of Finance in Post-war Britain” (Oxford UP, 2017)
In the decades following the end of the Second World War, the British economy evolved from a manufacturing-based economy to one driven by service industries, most notably finance. As Aled Davies expla...
12 Sep 201748min
Keri Leigh Merritt, “Masterless Men: Poor Whites in the Antebellum South” (Cambridge UP, 2017)
Analyzing land policy, labor, and legal history, Masterless Men: Poor Whites in the Antebellum South (Cambridge University Press, 2017) reveals what happens to excess workers when a capitalist system ...
11 Sep 201732min
Faegheh Shirazi, “Brand Islam: The Marketing and Commodification of Piety” (U. Texas Press, 2016)
Religion is big business nowadays. Within the global context of Muslim consumers Islamic commodities have become increasingly popular over the past few decades. Faegheh Shirazi, Professor in the Depar...
5 Sep 201730min
Patricia Sloane-White, “Corporate Islam: Sharia and the Modern Workplace” (Cambridge UP, 2017)
The relationship between religion and economic activity has attracted generations of scholars working in myriad settings. In recent years, many have turned to questions of how Islamic ideas are genera...
29 Aug 201751min
Tamara Plakins Thornton, “Nathaniel Bowditch and the Power of Numbers: How a Nineteenth-Century Man of Business, Science, and the Sea Changed American Life” (UNC Press, 2016)
To remember Nathaniel Bowditch today primarily for his famous navigational textbook is to acknowledge only one of his many achievements. As Tamara Plakins Thornton demonstrates in her book Nathaniel B...
27 Aug 201749min
