New Books in Economic and Business History

Working-Class Courtship, Marriage, and Divorce in Scotland, 1855–1939 (Oxford UP, 2025) by Professor Eleanor Gordon, Professor Katie Barclay, and Dr. Jeff Meeks is the first book-length study of the history of working-class courtship and marriage in Scotland, from the establishment of civil registration to the introduction in 1939 of legislation which abolished irregular marriage and introduced civil marriage. Adopting a 'life course' approach, the book explores the social, economic, and cultural contexts of romantic partnerships, from courtship through to marital or family dissolution.Drawing from a wide range of sources that capture official accounts and discourses on the one hand, and the testimony and experience of working-class people on the other, the book offers a uniquely broad and textured view of courtship and marriage in this period. In so doing, it advances recent historiographical debates surrounding marriage in the Anglophone world, particularly the mutability of 'love', and whether the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries constituted a social and cultural 'turning point' for the working classes in terms of choice of marriage partner, the nature of the marital relationship, and the parent-child relationship. The book also engages with debates about extra-marital sexual activity in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, whether the family was more or less 'stable' than the contemporary family, and the different ways that marriages broke down before the advent of divorce reform. This has important implications for wider European and North American historiography, and raises timely questions about the primacy of the 'traditional family' in policy and public discourse. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Since 2008, there has been tremendous public interest in the social and ecological ramifications of the global land rush, a rapid increase of capital investment into land, especially for the establishment of agricultural and tree plantations. In Laos, the government has granted five percent of the national territory to investors as long-term land concessions since the early 2000s. Land investments, globally and in Laos, have violently and unjustly dispossessed peasants and Indigenous peoples of their life-giving land, leading to their immiseration. Yet, targeted communities have rarely accepted the theft of their land outright, often struggling to protect their land rights with varying degrees of success. How can these divergent outcomes of land control be understood? In Socializing Land: Plantations, Dispossession, and Resistance in Laos (U Hawai’i Press, 2025), Dr. Miles Kenney-Lazar addresses these questions by investigating the development of Chinese and Vietnamese pulpwood and rubber plantations on the lands of ethnic minority Brou people in eastern Savannakhet of southern Laos. He argues that land should not be viewed as a “thing” but as a set of social relationships among different groups of people. The characteristics of these ties to land play a critical role in determining if and how its use, access, and ownership change—whether land becomes the property of plantation capitalists or remains in the possession of peasant farmers. Furthermore, the book explores the contradictory role of the state, simultaneously pursuing investment-driven economic growth built upon the coercive expropriation of land while pledging to protect a limited set of peasant land rights. Highlighting the sociality of land demonstrates that land transactions are full of friction and contestation. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The battlefields were not the only places that threatened death during World War I. As conflict raged on and supply lines tightened, the allied powers of France, Britain, and Italy faced a fundamental problem: keeping their soldier and civilian populations safe from starvation. Wheat at War: Allied Economic Cooperation in the Great War (Oxford UP, 2025) describes how, faced with this immense challenge, the Allies devised a multilateral institution--the Wheat Executive--to do what no state could do alone. Rosella Cappella Zielinski and Paul Poast examine the difficult considerations made by the allied powers when ceding authority to an international body that would make decisions for them. Beyond successfully managing wheat shipping and distribution, they argue, the Wheat Executive proved to have significant influence in the evolving landscape of interstate cooperation. As a case study, the Wheat Executive improves our understanding of international institutional design, the importance of commodities during wartime, economic coordination amongst wartime coalition members, and the legacies of international cooperation during the First World War. As one of the first great experiments in supranationalism, the Allies' management of wheat while at war provides lessons about the emergence of international organizations and their contours. Jobie Turner is a military historian who studies logistics in warfare.  His most recent work is Feeding Victory:  Innovative Logistics from Lake George to Khe Sanh, 1755-1968 which discuss the impact of technology on transportation across three centuries of warfare.  Jobie is a retired Colonel in the USAF and a pilot for United Airlines email: here  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Claire Provost, investigative journalist who tracked corporate power across 30 countries, discusses investor‑state dispute systems and the World Bank’s ICSID. She outlines how post‑colonial legal frameworks empowered multinationals, special economic zones, and examples where international claims pressured democratic policy. The conversation highlights why awareness is low and how journalism can better expose these hidden power structures.

Are jobs fair? In The Accidental Equalizer: How Luck Determines Pay after College (U Chicago Press, 2023), Jessi Streib, an associate Professor of Sociology at Duke University, uncovers the remarkable story of the way luck shapes the hiring process for a key strata of business jobs in America. Offering a thesis that is initially counterintuitive but clearly argued, empirically grounded, and ultimately compelling, the book introduces the idea of ‘luckocracy’. ‘Luckocracy’ underpins the functioning of important parts of the graduate labour market, and equalises what would otherwise be significant class differences between college graduates. Rich with details, as well as offering a broad new perspective on education and the labour market, the book is essential reading across the social sciences, as well as for anyone interested in understanding work, fairness, and the importance of luck.Dave O'Brien is Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Manchester. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Not everything about wool is warm and fuzzy. Wool, for millennia the cold climate textile fiber, has a long relationship to war, both in terms of supporting it and causing it. Wool's strategic value in wartime, a position it gained over centuries, and contrived shortages of same in the 20th century, have helped drive consumers' transition to the synthetic fibers that have enabled fast fashion, and as both fiber and cloth are global contemporary pollutants.Fleeced: Unraveling the History of Wool and War (Bloomsbury, 2025) by Professor Trish FitzSimons & Madelyn Shaw argues that the 19th century advent of southern hemisphere large scale sheep pastoralism and northern hemisphere industrialization of the woolen textile industry allowed - at least in part - the huge armies of the 20th century to exist. World War I represented a fundamental shift in the scale of armies and the kind of wars they fought. Demand for wool to outfit the tens of millions of men and women involved in fighting the war or supporting those who did grew way beyond what could be accommodated by any nation's normal supply. The contrived wool shortages of this war had a lasting impact - nations subject to supply chain difficulties began the search for substitutes that led first to the semi-synthetic rayon, and ultimately to the plastic fibers such as polyester and acrylic that dominate today's world of fast fashion. Each chapter of Fleeced begins with a surprising object, document or image that takes us into this fascinating and previously untold history. Change is not necessarily progress. Fleeced explains how competition for wool in wartime helped create our current unsustainable and environmentally disastrous reliance on petrochemical fibers. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Making War Safe for Capitalism: The World Bank, IMF, and the Conflict in Ukraine (Bristol UP, 2025) by Dr. Elliot Dolan-Evans examines the impact of World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) economic restructuring programmes during active conflicts. Using a critical political economy perspective, the book explores how these restructuring efforts affect vulnerable communities’ survival amid violence. Chapters provide a detailed case study of Ukraine during the War in Donbas, analysing the controversial reforms in agriculture, gas and pension sectors. The resulting analysis offers valuable insights into how these reforms have influenced Ukraine’s political economy and the survival of conflict-affected populations since the 2022 Russian invasion. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Most development histories focus on large-scale projects and multi-year plans. But how would we understand development differently if we chose a different starting point? In Village Work: Development and Rural Statecraft in Twentieth-Century Ghana (Ohio UP, 2021), Alice Wiemers exchanges the center for the periphery. Writing outwards from Kpasenpke, a village in northern Ghana, Wiemers shows how the daily labor of rural people, local officials and family networks have all shaped a practice of rural statecraft centered on developmentalism. By insisting on the specificity of the hinterland and interchangeability of its so-called “developers”, Village Work proposes a new framework for approaching Ghana’s twentieth century.Elisa Prosperetti is a Visiting Assistant Professor in African history at Mount Holyoke College. Her research focuses on the connected histories of education and development in postcolonial West Africa. Contact her at: www.elisaprosperetti.net. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the heyday of Islamic art collecting around the turn of the twentieth century, thousands of premodern ceramic objects circulated on the international antiquities market. Invisible Hands: Fabrication, Forgery, and the Art of Islamic Ceramics (Princeton University Press, 2026) tells the story of how traditional craft skills of the Islamic world, often thought to have died out with the advent of industrialization, were redirected toward a thriving new market in the colonial era: the fabrication and fictionalizing of antiquities, especially ceramics.In this stunning work of art history, Dr. Margaret Graves shakes the foundations of the discipline, challenging us to reconsider what is and is not art. She traces how sophisticated fabrications—as modern as they were believed to be medieval—moved within an international network of diggers, dealers, and collectors who took advantage of a largely unregulated marketplace to exchange and amass objects that were fabulous in every sense of the word. She looks at canonical artworks as well as many previously unpublished and rarely seen objects, shedding light on the astonishingly varied ways Islamic ceramics were altered and remade by highly skilled craftspeople to meet the demands of Western collectors. Shifting away from the moralizing stance of past studies on reconstructed Islamic ceramics, Dr. Graves shows how fabrication and forgery became a major site of participation in modern global capitalism and establishes an entirely new paradigm in the history of art.Drawing on a substantive new body of provenance research, archaeology, economic history, and laboratory analysis, Invisible Hands centers previously marginalized objects, reframing the practices of fabrication and forgery as crucial forms of invention and artistic skill worthy of study and admiration. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A provocative book arguing that the workplace is where we learn to live democratically. In The Pandemic Workplace: How We Learned to Be Citizens in the Office (U Chicago Press, 2024) anthropologist Ilana Gershon turns her attention to the US workplace and how it changed—and changed us—during the pandemic. She argues that the unprecedented organizational challenges of the pandemic forced us to radically reexamine our attitudes about work and to think more deeply about how values clash in the workplace. These changes also led us as workers to engage more with the contracts that bind us as we rethought when and how we allow others to tell us what to do. Based on over two hundred interviews, Gershon’s book reveals how negotiating these tensions during the pandemic made the workplace into a laboratory for democratic living—the key place where Americans are learning how to develop effective political strategies and think about the common good. Exploring the explicit and unspoken ways we are governed (and govern others) at work, this accessible book shows how the workplace teaches us to be democratic citizens. Our guest Ilana Gershon is a US focused anthropologist with broad interests in political and legal anthropology, linguistic and media anthropology, science and technology studies, and the anthropology of work She is the Herbert S. Autrey Chair of Anthropology and the Co-Director of the Program in Science and Technology Studies at Rice University. I am joined in this episode by my co-producer Julie Smith, a Master's student in the Department of Communication at Oakland University.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices