New Books in Economic and Business History
New Books Network
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.
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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
Episodes
Mentioned books
Mar 30, 2026 • 1h 1min
Ben Collier on Tor: From the Dark Web to the Future of Privacy
Paula Bialski, Associate Professor of Digital Sociology who studies digital communities, and Ben Collier, Senior Lecturer and author focused on Tor, digital infrastructure, and cybersecurity ethnography. They explore Tor’s origins, how it provides anonymity through volunteer relays, the community tensions and maintenance that keep it running, and how Tor might be integrated into future privacy-preserving tools.
Mar 28, 2026 • 1h 5min
Nellie Chu, "Precarious Accumulation: Fast Fashion Bosses in Transnational Guangzhou" (Duke UP, 2026)
Nellie Chu, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Duke Kunshan University, studies migrant entrepreneurs at the center of Guangzhou’s fast fashion industry. She explores laoban identity and stalled mobility. Listens cover landlords and patrols, wholesale market rhythms, transnational ties with South Korean and West African traders, and how COVID and platforms reshaped production and precarity.
Mar 28, 2026 • 1h
Zheng Liu, "Cultural Mavericks: The Business and Politics of Independent Bookselling in China" (Columbia UP, 2026)
Zheng Liu, cultural and economic sociologist and lecturer in innovation management, explains how independent bookstores in China craft identities between commerce and intellectual autonomy. She discusses their emergence, supply and profit challenges, three "culturally adapted" strategies, store aesthetics, diversification into cafes and merchandise, and the role of subsidies and investors.
5 snips
Mar 27, 2026 • 1h 25min
Dovev Lavie, "The Cooperative Economy: A Solution to Societal Grand Challenges" (Routledge, 2023)
Dovev Lavie, a strategic management professor advocating a cooperative economy, outlines a platform-based pro-social alternative to current markets. He discusses inequality, Big Tech power, privacy loss, and overconsumption. Short sentences explain community-driven design, price subsidization, consumption and profit limits, and voluntary local rollout.
Mar 25, 2026 • 57min
James Lin, "The Global Vanguard: Agrarian Development and the Making of Modern Taiwan" (U California Press, 2025)
James Lin, historian of Taiwan and development, traces how Taiwan built and exported a “Taiwan model” of agrarian modernization. He explores land reform, scientific farming, and training institutes. He recounts missions to Vietnam and Africa, showing how on-the-ground practices and Cold War diplomacy reshaped the model.
Mar 24, 2026 • 1h 19min
J. S. Nelson, "Business Ethics: What Everyone Needs to Know" (Oxford UP, 2021)
J. S. Nelson, a law professor and business ethics scholar who coauthored the book with Lynn Stout, discusses corporate governance and managerial discretion. He explores how corporations balance shareholders, employees, customers, and communities. Topics include designing systems to channel instincts, disclosure versus hype, private equity versus public firms, and fostering dissent and accountability in organizations.
Mar 23, 2026 • 44min
Steffan Blayney, "Health and Efficiency: Fatigue, the Science of Work, and the Making of the Working-Class Body" (Activist Studies of Science, 2022)
Steffan Blayney, a historian and former Wellcome Trust Research Fellow, explores how late 19th–early 20th century science recast the worker as a machine. He discusses thermodynamic and time-motion models, fatigue reframed as pathology, the spread of efficiency into everyday life, parallels with modern productivity culture, and how workers and unions pushed back against these logics.
12 snips
Mar 22, 2026 • 32min
Elizabeth Mitchell Elder, "Company Towns: Industry Power and the Historical Foundations of Public Mistrust" (U Chicago Press, 2026)
Elizabeth Mitchell Elder, a political scientist who studies public opinion and institutions. She discusses coal’s grip on Appalachia and the Illinois Basin and how company control stunted local government capacity. She describes historical corruption, lasting civic cynicism, and surprising midcentury outmigration. The conversation links place-based histories to modern mistrust of government.
Mar 22, 2026 • 46min
Orsi Husz, "Bankminded: Banks As Intimate Agents of Everyday Life in Welfare State Sweden" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2025)
Orsi Husz, Professor at Uppsala University who studies the cultural history of personal finance, explains how banks became woven into everyday Swedish life. She discusses archival discoveries, the welfare state’s role in encouraging household banking, gendered marketing to housewives, the rise of credit cards, and how past bankification connects to today’s digital payments.
Mar 21, 2026 • 1h 3min
Doug Crandell, "Twenty-Two Cents an Hour: Disability Rights and the Fight to End Subminimum Wages" (Cornell UP, 2022)
Doug Crandell, disability advocate and University of Georgia public service faculty, probes subminimum wages and the politics that sustain them. He contrasts public perception with abusive workplaces, traces legal and historical battles, and discusses advocacy tactics, inclusive employment alternatives, and reasons for cautious optimism.
