Barbara Hahn and Bruce Baker, “The Cotton Kings: Capitalism and Corruption in Turn-of-the-Century New York and New Orleans” (Oxford UP, 2015)
With the recent economic collapse and rising income inequality, lessons drawn from turn-of-the century capitalism have become frequent. Pundits, policymakers, and others have looked to the era to find...
16 Sep 201656min
Jon Stobart and Mark Rothery, “Consumption and the Country House” (Oxford UP, 2016)
During the 18th century English country houses served an important function in their society as stages for the display of the status and power of the landed aristocracy. As Jon Stobart and Mark Rother...
11 Sep 201658min
Marc-William Palen, “The ‘Conspiracy’ of Free Trade: The Anglo-American Struggle over Empire and Economic Globalization, 1846-1896” (Cambridge UP, 2016)
Accounts of late-nineteenth-century US expansionism commonly refer to an open-door empire and an imperialism spurred by belief in free trade. In his new book The “Conspiracy” of Free Trade: The Anglo-...
30 Aug 201641min
Lisa Bjorkman, “Pipe Politics, Contested Waters: Embedded Infrastructures of Millennial Mumbai” (Duke UP, 2015)
Mumbai is in many ways the paradigmatic city of India’s celebrated economic upturn, but the city’s transformation went hand-in-hand with increasing water woes. In Pipe Politics, Contested Waters: Embe...
2 Aug 20161h 2min
Adam Mendelsohn, “The Rag Race” (NYU Press, 2015)
In The Rag Race: How Jews Sewed Their Way to Success in America and the British Empire (New York University Press, 2015), Adam Mendelsohn, Associate Professor of History at the University of Cape Town...
5 Juli 201629min
Geoffrey McCormack and Thom Workman, “The Servant State: Overseeing Capital Accumulation in Canada” (Fernwood, 2015)
Two Canadian political science professors contend that the grotesque inequities of the capitalist system feed hatred, nourish misogyny, promote chronic dispossession and wreak havoc on the environment...
15 Juni 201655min
Ho-fung Hung, “The China Boom: Why China Will Not Rule the World” (Columbia UP, 2016)
Ho-fung Hung‘s new book has two main goals: to to outline the historical origins of Chinas capitalist boom and the social and political formations in the 1980s that gave rise to this boom, and to expl...
18 Maj 20161h 8min
Garrett M. Broad, “More Than Just Food: Food Justice and Community Change” (U of California Press, 2016)
Resistance to the industrial food system has, over the past decades, led to the rise of alternative food movements. Debate about genetically modified food, sugar consumption, fast food and the obesity...
13 Maj 201655min
