In her book Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century (Oxford UP, 2022), Cambridge academic Helen Thompson gets beyond the ephemeral and analyses instead the role of more fundamental drivers of events – including the energy markets and the international monetary system. That’s one way in which her book is distinctive. It’s also a very broad book. While much of academic output has a very narrow focus, this book is unusual in attempting a sweeping overview of what’s happening in the world. What role has energy played in disrupting politics especially since the 1970s? How has the US dominance of the international financial system impacted international relations? And how has the EU influenced democratic development in Europe? Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In The Profits of Nature: Colonial Development and the Quest for Resources in Nineteenth-Century China (Columbia UP, 2020), Peter Lavelle offers a fascinating narrative history of natural resource development in China during the tumultuous 19th-century. Faced with an unprecedented confluence of natural disasters, wars, rebellions, foreign incursions and social problems, Qing Dynasty officials and elites looked to the natural world as a source of wealth, security and power. Lavelle grounds his narrative in the life and career of Zuo Zongtang (1812-1885), who was an avid student of geography and agricultural sciences, in addition to being one the leading statesmen of his generation. In efforts to rebuild livelihoods, relieve demographic pressures, secure government revenues and expand control over borderland regions, Zuo and his contemporaries harnessed long-standing traditions of knowledge and established new connections between China's borderlands and its eastern regions. What emerges from The Profits of Nature is a fresh and richly detailed chapter in late Qing history, written through the nexus of crisis, Qing colonialism and the environment. Zachary Lowell holds an MA in global studies from Humboldt-Universtität zu Berlin. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Private corporations are rarely discussed as playing a role in efforts to curb civil violence, even though they often have strong interests in maintaining stability. Violence often damages the infrastructure necessary to deliver goods to market or may directly target companies. Corporations also have a normative obligation to conduct business in ways that promote peace. While there are historical examples of firm-instigated violence and firms reaping benefits from instability and conflict, there is also evidence that corporations proactively engage in peacebuilding. For example, firms devise programs to promote economic development, offer access to education, and employ former combatants. In The Building and Breaking of Peace: Corporate Activities in Civil War Prevention and Resolution (Oxford UP, 2021), Molly M. Melin develops a theory of the conflicting roles corporations play in both building and preventing peace. Melin shows that corporations engage in peacebuilding when there is a gap in the state's capacity to enforce laws, but they also weigh the opportunity costs of peacebuilding, responding to the need for action when conditions enable them to do so. Firms are uniquely situated in their ability to raise the cost of violence, and proactive firms can increase the years of peace in a country. At the same time, an active private sector can make it harder for states with ongoing conflict to reach an agreement, as they act as an additional veto player in the bargaining process. Including original cross-national data of peacebuilding efforts by firms in Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa from 2000 to 2018, and in-depth case analyses of corporate actions and outcomes in Colombia, Northern Ireland, and Tunisia, Melin shows that corporations help to prevent violence but not resolve it. In examining the corporate motives for peacebuilding and the implications of these activities for preventing violence and conflict resolution, the book builds a more holistic picture of the peace and conflict process. The findings also help explain why armed civil conflicts persist despite the multitude of diverse actors working to end them. Molly M. Melin is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Loyola University Chicago. Her publications on third party interventions in international conflicts, the dynamics of conflict expansion, and peacekeeping operations have appeared in International Studies Quarterly, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Conflict Management and Peace Science, and International Interactions. Lamis Abdelaaty is an assistant professor of political science at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University. She is the author of Discrimination and Delegation: Explaining State Responses to Refugees (Oxford University Press, 2021). Email her comments at [email protected] or tweet to @LAbdelaaty. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For this episode, I met historian and writer Dr. Lydia Pyne. She is author of Postcards: The Rise and Fall of the World’s First Social Network (Reaktion, 2021).. Postcards is a global exploration of postcards as artifacts at the intersection of history, science, technology, art, and culture. Postcards are usually associated with banal holiday pleasantries, but they are made possible by sophisticated industries and institutions, from printers to postal services. When they were invented, postcards established what is now taken for granted in modern times: the ability to send and receive messages around the world easily and inexpensively. Fundamentally they are about creating personal connections—links between people, places, and beliefs. Lydia Pyne examines postcards on a global scale, to understand them as artifacts that are at the intersection of history, science, technology, art, and culture. In doing so, she shows how postcards were the first global social network and also, here in the twenty-first century, how postcards are not yet extinct. Paula De La Cruz-Fernandez is a consultant, historian, and digital editor. Editor New Books Network en español. Edita CEO. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Africa is often portrayed in terms of dictators, starvation, corruption, tribalism, war, disease, poverty and crime. In this podcast Professor James A. Robinson of the University of Chicago who is co-author (with Daron Acemoglu of Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty (Currency, 2013) explains why those stereotypes are often wrong and why he believes Africa has a brighter future than many think. Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

From princes to peasants, musicians to masons, cement plant owners to casual labourers—the State Bank of India (SBI) has been the go-to bank for the people of India. Widely trusted and near-ubiquitous, the SBI has come to symbolise banking across the length and breadth of the Indian nation. This book traces the SBI’s deep connection to India’s economic progress, and the bank’s proactive approach to change and to reinventing itself to meet the evolving needs of a growing nation. In its journey from ‘banking for the classes’ to ‘banking for the masses’, it has continuously striven to blend business goals with social obligations. The SBI of today had its origins in the Presidency banks of the 1800s; the Bank of Bengal, the Bank of Madras and the Bank of Bombay, set up by the British to facilitate trade and the repatriation of remittances to England, were its forebears. In The SBI Story: Two Centuries of Banking (Westland, 2021), Vikrant Pande narrates the compelling circumstances that prompted the founding of the Presidency banks, how they fared back in the day and why they coalesced to emerge as the Imperial Bank in 1921, which in turn was nationalised to form the State Bank of India in 1955. Vikrant Pande spent two decades in the corporate sector, culminating in him being appointed as the provost of India’s first ever vocational education university (TeamLease Skills University) at Vadodara, Gujarat, India. He is now a full-time author and translator, and has published twelve English translations of Marathi bestsellers. His first book, 'In the Footsteps of Rama, Travels with the Ramayana' was released in April 2021. Utsav Saksena is a Research Fellow at the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy (NIPFP), an autonomous institute under the Ministry of Finance, Government of India. He can be reached at [email protected]. Note: opinions expressed in this podcast are personal and do not reflect the official position of the NIPFP or the Ministry of Finance, Government of India. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Can subalterns speak? Now an iconic question from a prominent postcolonial studies scholar Gayatri Spivak, the question interrogates the in-built assumption about the locatable agency in an individual. Postcolonial studies have grappled with the question of legibility and limitations of archives. In her pathbreaking work, An Empire of Touch: Women's Political Labor and the Fabrication of East Bengal (Columbia UP, 2019), Poulomi Saha disrupts the binaries of nation/individual and agency/silence by arguing that women’s labor is a political one that articulate their relational aspirations through the tactile. In this contemporary moment with neoliberalism’s co-optation of ethnonationalism and an increasing disciplinary turn towards ethnicity as culture, Saha emphasizes the urgency of postcolonialism to prioritize political project in literary critiques and understand the connections between global capital and intimate, material life of women’s labor. The book is divided into three parts: “Reading the Body Politic,” “The Fetish of Nationalism,” and “International Basket Case.” In the first section, Saha provides a theoretical framework through her reading of Pritilata Waddedar’s body to disrupt the individualistic idea of agency and signify gendered refusal. In the second part, Saha brings Tagore’s understanding of fetish to rethink non-sovereignty as not a loss but rather an enthrallment that allowed women to express their attachment to desh (home). In the third part, Saha problematizes the power of a name by analyzing the production of discourses around birangona (war heroines) and connect the devaluation of clothes to the larger history of development where women’s labor simultaneously turned into an object of empowerment and erasure. Saha’s rich and insightful book will be an important read for scholars who are interested in development, history of labor, and feminist theories. Poulomi Saha is assistant professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. Her first book, An Empire of Touch, was awarded the 2020 Harry Levin Prize for Outstanding First Book from the American Comparative Literature Association. Da In Ann Choi is a PhD student at UCLA in the Gender Studies department. Her research interests include care labor and migration, reproductive justice, social movement, citizenship theory, and critical empire studies. She can be reached at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Drawing on decades of experience covering the global economy, New York Times' journalist Peter S. Goodman profiles five representative Davos Men-members of the billionaire class-chronicling how their shocking exploitation of the global pandemic has hastened a fifty-year trend of wealth centralization. Alongside this reporting, Goodman delivers textured portraits of those caught in Davos Man's wake, including a former steelworker in the American Midwest, a Bangladeshi migrant in Qatar, a Seattle doctor on the front lines of the fight against COVID, blue-collar workers in the tenements of Buenos Aires, an African immigrant in Sweden, a textile manufacturer in Italy, an Amazon warehouse employee in New York City, and more in his book, Davos Man: How the Billionaires Devoured the World (Custom House, 2022). Peter S. Goodman is the global economic correspondent for The New York Times, based in New York. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Hungry for Revolution: The Politics of Food and the Making of Modern Chile (University of California Press, 2021), Joshua Frens-String explores the modern history and political economy of food in Chile, from World War I to the rise and fall of the Allende socialist regime in the 1970s. Drawing together a diverse cast of characters and weaving together a wide range of sources, Frens-String demonstrates that the struggles to create a more just food system shaped modern Chile and its expansive social welfare state prior to the Pinochet’s coup d’état and the implementation of the Chicago Boys’ economic neoliberalization policies. In addition to the dynamics of class and gender in the consumption politics of Chile, Hungry for Revolution is particularly attentive to the different problematics of feeding the urban working classes and dismantling rural estates, and of creating durable socialist regimes and systems of food justice. Nathan Hopson is an associate professor of Japanese language and history in the University of Bergen's Department of Foreign Languages. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Metrics of Modernity: Art and Development in Postwar Turkey (University of California Press, 2022) is a vivid portrait of the art world of 1950s Turkey in which Sarah-Neel Smith offers a new framework for analyzing global modernisms of the twentieth century: economic development. After World War II, a cohort of influential Turkish modernists built a new art scene in Istanbul and Ankara. The entrepreneurial female gallerist Adalet Cimcoz, the art critic (and future prime minister) Bülent Ecevit, and artists like Aliye Berger, Füreya Koral, and Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu were not only focused on aesthetics. On the canvas, in criticism, and in the gallery, these cultural pioneers also grappled with economic questions—attempting to transform their country from a “developing nation” into a major player in the global markets of the postwar period. Smith’s book publishes landmark works of Turkish modernism for the first time, along with an innovative array of sources—from gossip columns to economic theory—to reveal the art world as a key site for the articulation of Turkish nationhood at midcentury. Reuben Silverman is a PhD candidate at University of California, San Diego Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today I talked to Carl Rhodes about his book Woke Capitalism: How Corporate Morality is Sabotaging Democracy (Policy Press, 2021). When Milton Friedman published Capitalism and Freedom in 1962, whose freedom was he referring to? When you know the answer is corporations, you can begin to understand both what neoliberalism was all about and why today Woke Capitalism may not be so much a harbinger of socialism as it is a way to distract the conversation from real economic reforms. That’s indeed the take of Carl Rhodes, whose book explores the plutocracy that America and otherwise democratic countries are at risk of becoming if they haven’t gotten there already. Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address famously included the pledge that government “of the people, by the people, and for the people” shall not perish. Rhodes is warning, in effect, that the world of George Orwell’s Animal Farm in which some pigs are more equal than others may be now dangerously closer to the truth. Carl Rhodes is Professor of Organization Studies at the University of Technology Sydney. There he researches the ethical and democratic dimensions of business and work. Carl regularly writes for the mainstream and independent press alike on issues related to ethics, policy, and the economy. Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of nine books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). His new book is Blah, Blah, Blah: A Snarky Guide to Office Lingo. To check out his related “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Utopian Genderscapes: Rhetorics of Women's Work in the Early Industrial Age (Southern Illinois UP, 2021) focuses on three prominent yet understudied intentional communities—Brook Farm, Harmony Society, and the Oneida Community—who in response to industrialization experimented with radical social reform in the antebellum United States. Foremost among the avenues of reform was the place and substance of women’s work. Author Michelle C. Smith seeks in the communities’ rhetorics of teleology, choice, and exceptionalism the lived consequences of the communities' lofty goals for women members. This feminist history captures the utopian reconfiguration of women’s bodies, spaces, objects, and discourses and delivers a needed intervention into how rhetorical gendering interacts with other race and class identities. The attention to each community’s material practices reveals a gendered ecology, which in many ways squared unevenly with utopian claims. Nevertheless, this volume argues that this utopian moment inaugurated many of the norms and practices of labor that continue to structure women’s lives and opportunities today: the rise of the factory, the shift of labor from home spaces to workplaces, the invention of housework, the role of birth control and childcare, the question of wages, and the feminization of particular kinds of labor. An impressive and diverse array of archival and material research grounds each chapter’s examination of women’s professional, domestic, or reproductive labor in a particular community. Fleeting though they may seem, the practices and lives of those intentional women, Smith argues, pattern contemporary divisions of work along the vibrant and contentious lines of gender, race, and class and stage the continued search for what is possible. Jeannette Cockroft is an associate professor of history and political science at Schreiner University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Economic sanctions dominate the landscape of world politics today. First developed in the early twentieth century as a way of exploiting the flows of globalization to defend liberal internationalism, their appeal is that they function as an alternative to war. This view, however, ignores the dark paradox at their core: designed to prevent war, economic sanctions are modeled on devastating techniques of warfare. Tracing the use of economic sanctions from the blockades of World War I to the policing of colonial empires and the interwar confrontation with fascism, Nicholas Mulder uses extensive archival research in a political, economic, legal, and military history that reveals how a coercive wartime tool was adopted as an instrument of peacekeeping by the League of Nations. The Economic Weapon: The Rise of Sanctions as a Tool of Modern War (Yale University Press, 2022) casts an overdue light on why sanctions are widely considered a form of war, and why their unintended consequences are so tremendous. Mathias Fuelling is a doctoral candidate in History at Temple University, working on a political history of Czechoslovakia in the immediate post-WWII years. He can be found on Twitter at https://twitter.com/bucephalus424 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Political Economy of Collective Action, Inequality, and Development (Stanford UP, 2020) examines how a society that is trapped in stagnation might initiate and sustain economic and political development. In this context, progress requires the reform of existing arrangements, along with the complementary evolution of informal institutions. It involves enhancing state capacity, balancing broad avenues for political input, and limiting concentrated private and public power. This juggling act can only be accomplished by resolving collective-action problems (CAPs), which arise when individuals pursue interests that generate undesirable outcomes for society at large. Merging and extending key perspectives on CAPs, inequality, and development, this book constructs a flexible framework to investigate these complex issues. By probing four basic hypotheses related to knowledge production, distribution, power, and innovation, William D. Ferguson offers an analytical foundation for comparing and evaluating approaches to development policy. Navigating the theoretical terrain that lies between simplistic hierarchies of causality and idiosyncratic case studies, this book promises an analytical lens for examining the interactions between inequality and development. Scholars and researchers across economic development and political economy will find it to be a highly useful guide. Marshall Poe is the founder and editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Big money NCAA basketball had its origins in a many-sided conflict of visions and agendas. On one side stood large schools focused on a commercialized game that privileged wins and profits. Opposing them was a tenuous alliance of liberal arts colleges, historically black colleges, and regional state universities, and the competing interests of the NAIA, each with distinct interests of their own. Kurt Edward Kemper tells the dramatic story of the clashes that shook college basketball at mid-century--and how the repercussions continue to influence college sports to the present day. Taking readers inside the competing factions, he details why historically black colleges and regional schools came to embrace commercialization. As he shows, the NCAA's strategy of co-opting its opponents gave each group just enough just enough to play along--while the victory of the big-time athletics model handed the organization the power to seize control of college sports. An innovative history of an overlooked era, Before March Madness: The Wars for the Soul of College Basketball (U Illinois Press, 2020) looks at how promises, power, and money laid the groundwork for an American sports institution. Kelly McFall is Professor of History and Director of the Honors Program at Newman University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In her recent book on the Jewish community of Modena in Italy, Federica Francesconi tells a tale of contradictions. Segregated to the city’s ghetto in the 17th century, the Jewish merchants of the city nonetheless possessed an enormous presence in its economic, governmental and cultural milieu. By the start of the 19th century, these merchants even took center stage in Modena’s political scene following Napoleon’s conquest of Italy and the subsequent abolition of the ghettos themselves. How did this transformation occur? In what ways had life in the Modena – and in the Modenese ghetto – prepared these Jewish merchants to perform such leadership roles and to advocate fluently for the values of the French Enlightenment? To answer these questions, Francesconi tracks the development of the Modenese Jewish community since the arrival of her protagonists in the city in the middle of the 16th century, describing the techniques that merchant family members employed to stay abreast of – and innovate on – Modenese, Italian and European intellectual trends. The reader is not only privy to the economic activities of these figures, but also sees how they acted – for centuries – as cultural intermediaries for the rulers of the Este Duchy, who sought their advice on purchases of art, books and pieces of material culture. The book thus features Jews that do not fit neatly on the dichotomy between assimilation/conversion and communal isolation, but instead embodied aspects of both the ghetto society they dominated and the broader city setting with which they continually engaged. As the narrative progresses, the archival material that Francesconi has uncovered also gives readers glimpses into the rich social life of an Early Modern Jewish community in the midst of gradual change. The merchants’ personal worship sites became synagogues for the whole ghetto. Their personal libraries – stocked with Kabbalistic masterpieces – were the sites of communal activity. Excluded from official leadership, Modenese Jewish women nonetheless found avenues to participate in shaping their own religious practices and the moral priorities of the community at large. Itself a series of cordoned off houses and living spaces, the ghetto was both “domestic” and a venue that fostered a nascent “civil society”; a “laboratory” that gave the Jewish merchants of Modena their first experiences with governmental practices.  At once an intellectual, socio-economic, religious and cultural history, Invisible Enlighteners: The Jewish Merchants of Modena, from the Renaissance to the Emancipation (U Pennsylvania Press, 2021) is not only a microhistory of Jewish life over the course of three centuries. It is, moreover, a model for understanding how Jews navigated, interpreted and even co-opted the policies of state institutions that emerged for the first time in the Early Modern period. James Benjamin Nadel is a Ph.D. student in the Department of History at Columbia University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Cogs and Monsters: What Economics Is, and What It Should Be (Princeton UP, 2021), Diane Coyle explores the enormous problems—but also opportunities—facing economics today if it is to respond effectively to these dizzying changes and help policymakers solve the world’s crises, from pandemic recovery and inequality to slow growth and the climate emergency. Mainstream economics, Coyle says, still assumes people are “cogs”—self-interested, calculating, independent agents interacting in defined contexts. But the digital economy is much more characterized by “monsters”—untethered, snowballing, and socially influenced unknowns. Coyle argues that economic policy is fundamentally normative, as any policy decision will imply political trade-offs. She argues for a more diverse methodological and conceptually inform analysis while reflecting on broader issues of today such as ethics and the challenges of the digital economy. This book has been recognized as the Financial Times Best Economics Book of the Year 2021 and a CapX Book of the Year, 2021. Bernardo Batiz-Lazo is currently straddling between Newcastle and Mexico City. You can find him on twitter on issues related to business history of banking, fintech, payments and other mussings. Not always in that order. @BatizLazo Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On this episode I spoke to Dr. Susie Porter, Professor in History and in Gender Studies at the University of Utah. She is the author Working Women in Mexico City: Public Discourses and Material Conditions, 1879-1931 published in 2003, and in today's podcast we will be talking about her more recent book From Angel to Office Worker: Middle-Class Identity and Female Consciousness in Mexico, 1890–1950, which is part of The Mexican Experience Series of the University of Nebraska Press. In late nineteenth-century Mexico a woman’s presence in the home was a marker of middle-class identity. However, as economic conditions declined during the Mexican Revolution and jobs traditionally held by women disappeared, a growing number of women began to look for work outside the domestic sphere. As these “angels of the home” began to take office jobs, middle-class identity became more porous. To understand how office workers shaped middle-class identities in Mexico, From Angel to Office Worker examines the material conditions of women’s work and analyzes how women themselves reconfigured public debates over their employment. At the heart of the women’s movement was a labor movement led by secretaries and office workers whose demands included respect for seniority, equal pay for equal work, and resources to support working mothers, both married and unmarried. Office workers also developed a critique of gender inequality and sexual exploitation both within and outside the workplace. From Angel to Office Worker is a major contribution to modern Mexican history as historians begin to ask new questions about the relationships between labor, politics, and the cultural and public spheres. Your host, Paula De La Cruz-Fernandez is a consultant, historian, and digital editor. Editor New Books Network en español. Edita CEO. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It’s time for The Blues! In Bitten by the Blues: The Alligator Records Story (University of Chicago Press, 2018), Alligator Records president and founder Bruce Iglauer and his co-author, Patrick Roberts of Northern Illinois University, tell the tale of fifty years of Chicago Blues. From Delta-born guitar expressionists like Hound Dog Taylor to modern vocalists like Shemekia Copeland, from the South Side to the Norway fjords, Alligator Records has seen it all. David Hamilton Golland is professor of history and immediate past president of the faculty senate at Governors State University in Chicago's southland. @DHGolland. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

One of the world's largest sellers of footwear, the Bata Company of Zlín, Moravia has a remarkable history that touches on crucial aspects of what made the world modern. In the twilight of the Habsburg Empire, the company Americanized its production model while also trying to Americanize its workforce. It promised a technocratic form of governance in the chaos of postwar Czechoslovakia, and during the Roaring Twenties, it became synonymous with rationalization across Europe and thus a flashpoint for a continent-wide debate. While other companies contracted in response to the Great Depression, Bata did the opposite, becoming the first shoe company to unlock the potential of globalization. As Bata expanded worldwide, it became an example of corporate national indifference, where company personnel were trained to be able to slip into and out of national identifications with ease. Such indifference, however, was seriously challenged by the geopolitical crisis of the 1930s, and by the cusp of the Second World War, Bata management had turned nationalist, even fascist. Zachary Austin Doleshal's book In the Kingdom of Shoes: Bata, Zlín, Globalization, 1894-1945 (U Toronto Press, 2021) unravels the way the Bata project swept away tradition and enmeshed the lives of thousands of people around the world in the industrial production of shoes. Using a rich array of archival materials from two continents, the book answers how Bata's rise to the world's largest producer of shoes challenged the nation-state, democracy, and Americanization. Leslie Waters is a historian of modern Central and Eastern Europe and assistant professor at The University of Texas at El Paso. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

One in four American workers says their workplace is a "dictatorship." Yet that number almost certainly would be higher if we recognized employers for what they are-private governments with sweeping authoritarian power over our lives. Many employers minutely regulate workers' speech, clothing, and manners on the job, and employers often extend their authority to the off-duty lives of workers, who can be fired for their political speech, recreational activities, diet, and almost anything else employers care to govern. In Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don't Talk about It) (Princeton UP, 2019), Elizabeth Anderson examines why, despite all this, we continue to talk as if free markets make workers free, and she proposes a better way to think about the workplace, opening up space for discovering how workers can enjoy real freedom. Elizabeth Anderson is Arthur F. Thurnau Professor and John Dewey Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy and Women's Studies at the University of Michigan and specializes in political philosophy, ethics, and feminist philosophy. She is the author of The Imperative of Integration, and Value in Ethics and Economics. Tom Discenna is Professor of Communication at Oakland University whose work examines issues of academic labor and communicative labor more broadly. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The average person produces about four hundred pounds of excrement a year. More than seven billion people live on this planet. Holy crap! Because of the diseases it spreads, we have learned to distance ourselves from our waste, but the long line of engineering marvels we've created to do so--from Roman sewage systems and medieval latrines to the immense, computerized treatment plants we use today--has also done considerable damage to the earth's ecology. Now scientists tell us: we've been wasting our waste. When recycled correctly, this resource, cheap and widely available, can be converted into a sustainable energy source, act as an organic fertilizer, provide effective medicinal therapy for antibiotic-resistant bacterial infection, and much more. In The Other Dark Matter: The Science and Business of Turning Waste Into Wealth and Health (U Chicago Press, 2021), Lina Zeldovich documents the massive redistribution of nutrients and sanitation inequities across the globe. She profiles the pioneers of poop upcycling, from startups in African villages to innovators in American cities that convert sewage into fertilizer, biogas, crude oil, and even life-saving medicine. She breaks taboos surrounding sewage disposal and shows how hygienic waste repurposing can help battle climate change, reduce acid rain, and eliminate toxic algal blooms. Ultimately, she implores us to use our innate organic power for the greater good. Don't just sit there and let it go to waste. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When I was a teenager, I spent entirely too much time at the Pontiac Silverdome watching the Detroit Pistons play basketball. In all the games I watched, it never occurred to me to wonder why a professional basketball team was playing in a cavernous, multi-purpose stadium entirely unsuited to basketball. Frank Andre Guridy begins his wonderful book The Sports Revolution: How Texas Changed the Culture of American Athletics (U Texas Press, 2021) by examining the Houston Astrodome as both a result of and a contributor to dramatic changes in sports and society in the United States. Guridy is recognizes that the games we watch and the athletes who play them are valuable in and of themselves and the book is full of lyrical descriptions of games and athletes. But he is mostly interested in the ways sports reflected and formed American society. He argues that the economic and social forces reshaping America in the 1960s and 70s provided the context for a change in the ways sports were played, produced and consumed and that Texas served as an incubator for these changes. His book is always insightful and interesting. But his examination of the intersection of race and economics in the emergence of the NBA's San Antonio Spurs is particularly strong, as is a chapter examining the emergence of the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders as a national phenomenon. In a world where sports is again undergoing a transformation, The Sports Revolution offers a valuable lens through which to view both the dramatic changes of the 1970s and those so prominent in today's society. Kelly McFall is Professor of History and Director of the Honors Program at Newman University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode I spoke to Professor Peter Cappelli about his new book The Future of the Office: Work from Home, Remote Work, and the Hard Choices We All Face (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021). The COVID-19 pandemic forced an unprecedented experiment that reshaped white-collar work and turned remote work into a kind of "new normal." Now comes the hard part. Many employees want to continue that normal and keep working remotely, and most at least want the ability to work occasionally from home. But for employers, the benefits of employees working from home or hybrid approaches are not so obvious. What should both groups do? In a prescient new book, Cappelli lays out the facts in an effort to provide both employees and employers with a vision of their futures. Cappelli unveils the surprising tradeoffs both may have to accept to get what they want. Cappelli illustrates the challenges we face in drawing lessons from the pandemic and deciding what to do moving forward. Do we allow some workers to be permanently remote? Do we let others choose when to work from home? Do we get rid of their offices? What else has to change, depending on the approach we choose? His research reveals there is no consensus among business leaders. Even the most high-profile and forward-thinking companies are taking divergent approaches: Facebook, Twitter, and other tech companies say many employees can work remotely on a permanent basis. Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, and others say it is important for everyone to come back to the office. Ford is redoing its office space so that most employees can work from home at least part of the time, and GM is planning to let local managers work out arrangements on an ad-hoc basis.  As Cappelli examines, earlier research on other types of remote work, including telecommuting offers some guidance as to what to expect when some people will be in the office and others work at home, and also what happened when employers tried to take back offices. Neither worked as expected. In a call to action for both employers and employees, Cappelli explores how we should think about the choices going forward as well as who wins and who loses. As he implores, we have to choose soon. Peter Cappelli is the George W. Taylor Professor of Management at The Wharton School of Business and Director of Wharton’s Center for Human Resources. He teaches awesome sounding courses like How to be the boss and Managing and motivating. Some of his areas of research are human resource practices, public policy related to employment, talent, and performance management. He publishes in journals like theAcademy of Management Journal and Harvard Business Review and op-eds in many magazines like The New Yorker or the Atlantic magazine. Paula De La Cruz-Fernandez is a consultant, historian, and digital editor. Editor New Books Network en español. Edita CEO. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Police put Eric Garner in a fatal chokehold for selling cigarettes on a New York City street corner. George Floyd was killed by police outside a store in Minneapolis known as “the best place to buy menthols.” Black smokers overwhelmingly prefer menthol brands such as Kool, Salem, and Newport. All of this is no coincidence. The disproportionate Black deaths and cries of “I can’t breathe” that ring out in our era — because of police violence, COVID-19, or menthol smoking — are intimately connected to a post-1960s history of race and exploitation. In Pushing Cool: Big Tobacco, Racial Marketing, and the Untold Story of the Menthol Cigarette (U Chicago Press, 2021), Keith Wailoo tells the intricate and poignant story of menthol cigarettes for the first time. He pulls back the curtain to reveal the hidden persuaders who shaped menthol buying habits and racial markets across America: the world of tobacco marketers, consultants, psychologists, and social scientists, as well as Black lawmakers and civic groups including the NAACP. Today most Black smokers buy menthols, and calls to prohibit their circulation hinge on a history of the industry’s targeted racial marketing. In 2009, when Congress banned flavored cigarettes as criminal enticements to encourage youth smoking, menthol cigarettes were also slated to be banned. Through a detailed study of internal tobacco industry documents, Wailoo exposes why they weren’t and how they remain so popular with Black smokers. James West is a historian of race, media and business in the modern United States and Black diaspora. Author of "Ebony Magazine and Lerone Bennett Jr.: Popular Black History in Postwar America" (Illinois, 2020), "A House for the Struggle: The Black Press and the Built Environment in Chicago" (Illinois, 2022), "Our Kind of Historian: The Work and Activism of Lerone Bennett Jr. (Massachusetts, 2022). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Despite efforts to abolish slavery throughout Africa in the nineteenth century, the coercive labor systems that constitute "modern slavery" have continued to the present day. To understand why, Robin Phylisia Chapdelaine explores child trafficking, pawning, and marriages in Nigeria's Bight of Biafra, and the ways in which British colonial authorities and Igbo, Ibibio, Efik, and Ijaw populations mobilized children's labor during the early twentieth century. Drawing on a wealth of primary sources that include oral interviews, British and Nigerian archival materials, newspaper holdings, and missionary and anthropological accounts, Chapdelaine argues that slavery's endurance can only be understood when we fully examine "the social economy of a child"—the broader commercial, domestic, and reproductive contexts in which children are economic vehicles. The Persistence of Slavery: An Economic History of Child Trafficking in Nigeria (U Massachusetts Press, 2021) provides an invaluable investigation into the origins of modern slavery and early efforts to combat it, locating this practice in the political, social, and economic changes that occurred as a result of British colonialism and its lingering effects, which perpetuate child trafficking in Nigeria today. Robin P. Chapdelaine is Assistant Professor of History at Duquesne University. Thomas Zuber is a PhD Candidate in History at Columbia University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Nearly a century old, the grand façade of Bombay House is hard to miss in the historic business district of Mumbai. This is the iconic global headquarters of the Tata Group. Founded in 1868, the Tatas – India’s largest business conglomerate – have been a persistent and dominant presence in the economic and business life of the country. Their businesses range from salt to software, tea to automobiles, and hotels to telecommunications. Originally from Navsari, Gujarat, the Tata family are Parsis, members of a tiny ethno-religious community of Indian Zoroastrians. After getting their start in the cotton and opium trades, the Tatas ascended to commanding heights in the Indian economy by the time of independence in 1947. Over the course of its 150-year history, Tata spun textiles, forged steel, generated hydroelectric power, and took to the skies. The Tatas became notable for their extensive philanthropy and for their unique business model, with trusts owning majority shares in the business. They also faced challenges – from restive workers fighting for their rights and from political leaders who sought to curb the corporation's power. Mircea Raianu’s Tata: The Global Corporation That Built Indian Capitalism (Harvard University Press, 2021) tells an eye-opening portrait of global capitalism spanning 150 years, through the history of the Tata corporation. Raianu’s sweeping history tracks the fortunes of a family-run business that was born during the high noon of the British Empire and went on to capture the world’s attention with the headline-making acquisition of luxury car manufacturer Jaguar Land Rover. The growth of Tata was a complex process shaped by world historical forces: the eclipse of imperial free trade, the intertwined rise of nationalism and the developmental state, and finally the return of globalization and market liberalization. Today Tata is the leading light of one of the world’s major economies, selling steel, chemicals, food, financial services, and nearly everything else, while operating philanthropic institutions that channel expert knowledge in fields such as engineering and medicine. Based on painstaking research in the company’s archive, Tata elucidates how a titan of industry was created and what lessons its story may hold for the future of global capitalism. Mircea Raianu is an assistant professor of history at the University of Maryland. He specializes in the history of modern South Asia, with research and teaching interests in capitalism and economic life broadly constructed. Shatrunjay Mall is a PhD candidate at the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He works on transnational Asian history, and his dissertation explores intellectual, political, and cultural intersections and affinities that emerged between Indian anti-colonialism and imperial Japan in the twentieth century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the 1960s and 1970s, New York City was beset by a host of fiscal and social crises wrought by white flight, federal and state disinvestment, and a declining tax base. The city faced rising crime, dilapidated parks and transit, skyrocketing budget deficits, deteriorating public services, and a dysfunctional and eviscerated municipal bureaucracy. By the mid-1970s, the situation was so dire that financial institutions refused to underwrite municipal bonds and the city faced bankruptcy. The response was a shift towards privatization and neoliberalization – a process that scholars have traditionally associated with political and financial elites.  But Benjamin Holtzman’s The Long Crisis: New York City and the Path to Neoliberalism (Oxford University Press, 2021) shows that neoliberalization was also forged at the grassroots level by ordinary New Yorkers trying to remake and repair their damaged city. Holtzman traces how block associations, nonprofits, and professional organizations turned to private market-based solutions to address problems that the city government seemed unable or unwilling to solve. In a process that Holtzman calls “popular marketization,” New York residents reclaimed buildings that landlords had abandoned, formed neighborhood watch programs to deter crime in the absence of effective city policing, and created new nonprofit organizations to rejuvenate defunded parks. These initatives were not necessarily driven by ideological commitments to marketization, Holtzman argues, but were often experimental and improvisational attempts to restore services that New Yorkers had come to expect from a once robust public sector. Ben Zdencanovic is a postdoctoral associate at the Jackson Institute for Global Affairs at Yale University. He is a historian of the twentieth-century United States and the world, international politics, and political economy, and he has a particular interest in the emerging subfield of the history of social and economic human rights. Zdencanovic is currently working his first book, Island of Enterprise: The End of the New Deal and the Rise of U.S. Global Power in a World of Welfare, 1940 – 1955. Follow him on Twitter at https://twitter.com/ben_zdencanovic. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Uber's April 2016 launch in Buenos Aires plunged the Argentine capital into a frenzied hysteria that engulfed courts of law, taxi drivers, bureaucrats, the press, the general public, and Argentina's president himself. Economist and anthropologist Juan M. del Nido, who had arrived in the city six months earlier to research the taxi industry, suddenly found himself documenting the unprecedented upheaval in real time. Taxis Vs. Uber: Courts, Markets and Technology in Buenos Aires (Stanford UP, 2021) examines the ensuing conflict from the perspective of the city's globalist, culturally liberal middle class, showing how notions like monopoly, efficiency, innovation, competition, and freedom fueled claims that were often exaggerated, inconsistent, unverifiable, or plainly false, but that shaped the experience of the conflict such that taxi drivers' stakes in it were no longer merely disputed but progressively written off, pathologized, and explained away. This first book-length study of the lead-up to and immediate aftermath of the arrival of a major platform economy to a metropolitan capital considers how the clash between Uber and the traditional taxi industry played out in courtrooms, in the press, and on the street. Looking to court cases, the politics of taxi licenses, social media campaigns, telecommunications infrastructure, public protests, and Uber's own promotional materials, del Nido examines the emergence of "post-political reasoning": an increasingly common way in which societies neutralize disagreement, shaping how we understand what we can even legitimately argue about and how. Sneha Annavarapu is Assistant Professor of Urban Studies at Yale-NUS College. To know more about Sneha's work, please visit www.snehanna.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Salton Sea is a kaleidoscope. To some people, it's a waste land, a place of death only suitable for a dumping ground. For others, it's a clarion call, a warning for what humanity faces in our anthropogenically climate changed future. For still others, it's simply home. In The Settler Sea: California's Salton Sea and the Consequences of Colonialism (U Nebraska Press, 2021) Dr. Traci Brynne Voyles, associate professor of women's and gender studies at the University of Oklahoma, argues that the this place has defied people's expectations and attempts at control for hundreds of years, and that the key to understanding the Salton Sea (and indeed, all environments) is to recognize that they never just mean one thing. Part environmental history, part work of environmental justice studies, The Settler Sea tackles topics as diverse as damming, geology, and the history of birding in southern California - it is a book as wide ranging and hard to pin down as contentious sea at its center. Dr. Stephen R. Hausmann is an assistant professor of history at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Up to Heaven and Down to Hell (Princeton UP, 2021) is a vivid and sometimes heartbreaking account of what happens when one of the most momentous decisions about the well-being of our communities and our planet--whether or not to extract shale gas and oil from the very land beneath our feet--is largely a private choice that millions of ordinary people make without the public's consent. The United States is the only country in the world where property rights commonly extend up to heaven and down to hell, which means that landowners have the exclusive right to lease their subsurface mineral estates to petroleum companies. Colin Jerolmack spent eight months living with rural communities outside of Williamsport as they confronted the tension between property rights and the commonwealth. In this deeply intimate book, he reveals how the decision to lease brings financial rewards but can also cause irreparable harm to neighbors, to communal resources like air and water, and even to oneself. Up to Heaven and Down to Hell casts America's ideas about freedom and property rights in a troubling new light, revealing how your personal choices can undermine your neighbors' liberty, and how the exercise of individual rights can bring unintended environmental consequences for us all. Sebastián Rojas Cabal is a Ph.D. student in the Sociology Department at Princeton University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Societies all over the world are getting older, the result of the fact that we are living longer and having fewer children. At some point in the near future, much of the developed world will have at least twenty percent of their national populations over the age of sixty-five. Bradley Schurman calls this the Super Age. Today, Italy, Japan, and Germany have already reached the Super Age, and another ten countries will have gone over the tipping point in 2021. Thirty-five countries will be part of this club by the end of the decade. This seismic shift in the world population can portend a period of tremendous growth--or leave swaths of us behind. In The Super Age: Decoding Our Demographic Destiny (Harper Business, 2022), Schurman explains how changing demographics will affect government and business and touch all of our lives. Fewer people working and paying income taxes, due to outdated employment and retirement practices, could mean less money feeding popular programs such as Social Security and Medicare--with greater numbers relying on them. The forced retirement or redundancy of older workers could impact business by creating a shortage of workers, which would likely drive wages up and result in inflation. Corporations, too, must rethink marketing strategies--older consumers are already purchasing the majority of new cars, and they are a growing and vitally important market for health technologies and housing. Architects and designers must re-create homes and communities that are more inclusive of people of all ages and abilities. If we aren't prepared for the changes to come, Schurman warns, we face economic stagnation, increased isolation of at-risk populations, and accelerated decline of rural communities. Instead, we can plan now to harness the benefits of the Super Age: extended and healthier lives, more generational cooperation at work and home, and new markets and products to explore. The choice is ours to make. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What can years of ethnographic engagement with rural Indonesia teach us about capitalism, development, and resistance? On this episode of Ethnographic Marginalia, our guest is Dr. Tania Li, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto. Tania tells us about three decades of research on development programs, local activism, and class formation in rural Indonesia. She talks about her own frustrations as a development practitioner led her to study development programs for the book The Will to Improve. She then describes how research over 20 years on how families’ lives changed with the introduction of capitalist relations in rural Indonesian highlands led to her next book, Land’s End. Finally, she explains the collaborative methodology behind her new book Plantation Life: Corporate Occupation in Indonesia's Oil Palm Zone (Duke UP, 2021), co-authored with Pujo Semedi. She talks about the insights that emerged from their different perspectives and positionality, how they used the project to inspire a whole generation of Indonesian anthropologists, and their joint efforts to avoid a colonial dynamic in their writing process. Alex Diamond is a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at the University of Texas, Austin. Sneha Annavarapu is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Heroic science. Chaotic politics. Billionaire entrepreneurs. Award-winning journalist Brendan Borrell brings the defining story of our times alive through compulsively readable, first-time reporting on the players leading the fight against a vicious virus. The First Shots: The Epic Rivalries and Heroic Science Behind the Race to the Coronavirus Vaccine (Mariner Books, 2021), soon to be the subject of an HBO limited series with superstar director and producer Adam McKay (Succession, Vice, The Big Short), draws on exclusive, high-level access to weave together the intense vaccine-race conflicts among hard-driving, heroic scientists and the epic rivalries among Washington power players that shaped 18 months of fear, resolve, and triumph. From infectious disease expert Michael Callahan, an American doctor secretly on the ground in Wuhan in January 2020 to gauge the terrifying ravages of Disease X; to Robert (Dr. Bob) Kadlec, one of Operation Warp Speed’s architects, whose audacious plans for the American people run straight into the buzz saw of the Trump White House factions; to Stéphane Bancel of upstart Moderna Therapeutics going toe-to-toe with pharma behemoth Pfizer, The First Shots lays bare, in a way we have not seen, the full stunning story behind the medical science “moon shot” of our lifetimes. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Tracing the dramatic conflicts both inside organized medicine and between the medical profession and the larger society over quality, equality, and economy in health care, Peter A. Swenson illuminates the history of American medical politics from the late nineteenth century to the present. Disorder: A History of Reform, Reaction, and Money in American Medicine (Yale UP, 2021) chronicles the role of medical reformers in the progressive movement around the beginning of the twentieth century and the American Medical Association’s dramatic turn to conservatism later. Addressing topics such as public health, medical education, pharmaceutical regulation, and health-care access, Swenson paints a disturbing picture of the entanglements of medicine, politics, and profit seeking that explain why the United States remains the only economically advanced democracy without universal health care. Swenson does, however, see a potentially brighter future as a vanguard of physicians push once again for progressive reforms and the adoption of inclusive, effective, and affordable practices. Stephen Pimpare is director of the Public Service & Nonprofit Leadership program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

During World War I, the British Empire enlisted half a million young men, predominantly from the countryside of Egypt, in the Egyptian Labor Corps (ELC) and put them to work handling military logistics in Europe and the Middle East. British authorities reneged on their promise not to draw Egyptians into the war, and, as Kyle Anderson shows, the ELC was seen by many in Egypt as a form of slavery. The Egyptian Labor Corps: Race, Space, and Place in the First World War (U Texas Press, 2021) tells the forgotten story of these young men, culminating in the essential part they came to play in the 1919 Egyptian Revolution.  Combining sources from archives in four countries, Anderson explores Britain’s role in Egypt during this period and how the ELC came to be, as well as the experiences and hardships these men endured. As he examines the ways they coped—through music, theater, drugs, religion, strikes, and mutiny—he illustrates how Egyptian nationalists, seeing their countrymen in a state akin to slavery, began to grasp that they had been racialized as “people of color.” Documenting the history of the ELC and its work during the First World War, The Egyptian Labor Corps also provides a fascinating reinterpretation of the 1919 revolution through the lens of critical race theory. Christopher S. Rose is a social historian of medicine focusing on Egypt and the Eastern Mediterranean in the 19th and 20th century. He currently teaches History at St. Edward's University in Austin, Texas and Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio, Texas. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This collection of articles, edited by Matthew Romaniello, Alison Smith,  Tricia Starks, takes up the history of material culture over the past several centuries of Russian history. Widely diverse objects such as maps, textiles, building materials, cigarette cases,fish guts (yes...), samovars, samizdat, and even the T-34 tank are viewed in light of their role in Russian society. Hence the collection's striking and unusual title: The Life Cycle of Russian Things: From Fish Guts to Faberge, 1600 to the Present (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022).   Daniel Peris is Senior Vice President at Federated Hermes in Pittsburgh. He can be reached at [email protected] or via Twitter @HistoryInvestor. His History and Investing blog and Keep Calm & Carry On Investing podcast are at https://strategicdividendinves... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Nature′s Evil: A Cultural History of Natural Resources (Polity Press, 2021), Alexander Etkind views the history of humankind through the prism of natural resources – how we acquire them, use them, value them, trade them, exploit them. History needs a cast of characters, and in this story the leading actors are peat and hemp, grain and iron, fur and oil, each with its own tale to tell. The uneven spread of available resources was the prime mover for trade, which in turn led to the accumulation of wealth, the growth of inequality and the proliferation of evil. Different sorts of raw material have different political implications and give rise to different social institutions. When a country switches its reliance from one commodity to another, this often leads to wars and revolutions. But none of these crises goes to waste – they all lead to dramatic changes in the relations between matter, labour and the state. Our world is the result of a fragile pact between people and nature. As we stand on the verge of climate catastrophe, nature has joined us in our struggle to distinguish between good and evil. And since we have failed to change the world, now is the moment to understand how it works. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Following World War II the American government and philanthropic foundations fundamentally remade American universities into sites for producing knowledge about the world as a collection of distinct nation-states. As neoliberal reforms took hold in the 1980s, visions of the world made popular within area studies and international studies found themselves challenged by ideas and educational policies that originated in business schools and international financial institutions. Academics within these institutions reimagined the world instead as a single global market and higher education as a commodity to be bought and sold. By the 1990s, American universities embraced this language of globalization, and globalization eventually became the organizing logic of higher education.  In Making the World Global: U.S. Universities and the Production of the Global Imaginary (Duke UP, 2019), Isaac A. Kamola examines how the relationships among universities, the American state, philanthropic organizations, and international financial institutions created the conditions that made it possible to imagine the world as global. Examining the Center for International Studies, Harvard Business School, the World Bank, the Social Science Research Council, and NYU, Kamola demonstrates that how we imagine the world is always symptomatic of the material relations within which knowledge is produced. Dr. Kamola is currently an Associate Professor of Political Science and President of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) chapter at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. Sara Katz is a postdoctoral associate in the history department at Duke University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Diaspora’s Homeland: Modern China in the Age of Global Migration (Duke University Press, 2018) by Shelly Chan provides a broad historical study of how the mass migration of more than twenty million Chinese overseas influenced China’s politics, economics, and culture. Chan develops the concept of “diaspora moments” – a series of recurring disjunctions in which migrant temporalities come into tension with local, national, and global ones – to map the multiple historical geographies in which the Chinese homeland and diaspora emerge. Chan describes several distinct moments, including the lifting of the Qing emigration ban in 1893 and the legacy of indentured Chinese migration to the Americas, intellectual debates in the 1920s and 1930s about whether Chinese emigration in the South China Seas (Nanyang) and Southeast Asia constituted colonization and whether Confucianism should be the basis for a modern Chinese identity. She also looks at the intersection of gender, returns to China of displaced Chinese from Southeast Asia, and Communist campaigns in the 1950s and 1960s. Adopting a transnational frame, Chan narrates Chinese history through a reconceptualization of diaspora to show how mass migration helped establish China as a nation-state within a global system. Shelly Chan is an associate professor of history at the University of California, Santa Cruz, specializing in modern China and the Chinese diaspora. Shatrunjay Mall is a PhD candidate at the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He works on transnational Asian history, and his dissertation explores intellectual, political, and cultural intersections and affinities that emerged between Indian anti-colonialism and imperial Japan in the twentieth century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Inspired by Chicago’s successful 1893 World Columbian Exposition, the cities of Portland, Seattle, San Diego, and San Francisco all held fairs between 1905 and 1915. From the start of the Lewis and Clark Exposition to the close of the Panama-California Exposition a decade later, millions of Americans visited exhibits, watched live demonstrations and performances, and wandered amusement zones. Millions more thumbed through brochures or read news articles. Fair publicity directors embraced the emerging science of consumer marketing. Conceived to attract new citizens, showcase communities, and highlight farming and industrial opportunities, the four expositions’ promotional campaigns and vendor and exhibit choices offer a unique opportunity to examine western leaders’ perceptions of their city and region, as well as their future goals and how they both fed and tried to mitigate misconceptions of a wild, wooly West. They also expose biased attitudes toward Native Americans, Mexican Americans, Filipinos, and others. Boosting a New West: Pacific Coast Expositions, 1905–1916 (Washington State University Press, 2020) explores the fairs’ cultural and social meaning by focusing on and comparing the promotions that surrounded them. It details their origins and describes why each city chose to host, conveying the expected economic, social, and cultural benefits. It also shows how organizers articulated their significance to urban, regional, and national audiences, and how they attempted to shape a new western identity. John C. Putman is a Professor of History at San Diego State University Troy A. Hallsell is the 341st Missile Wing Historian at Malmstrom AFB, MT. The ideas expressed in this podcast do not represent the 341st Missile Wing, United States Air Force, or the Department of Defense. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Once you understand that markets require public institutions of governance and regulation in order to function well, and further, you accept that nations may have different preferences over the shape that those institutions and regulations should take, you have started to tell a story that leads you to radically different endings. – Dani Rodrik, The Globalization Paradox (2011) Influenced by Dani Rodrik’s research and teaching at Harvard’s Kennedy School, Yeling Tan, Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Oregon, and non-resident scholar at UCSD’s 21st Century China Center, has written a book that brings together her interest and expertise in China’s political economy: Disaggregrating China, Inc.: State Strategies in the Liberal Economic Order (Cornell University Press, 2021). As you will hear, Professor Tan is interested in the dynamics of international and domestic politics with a focus on the tensions involving policy change within political economies. The development and the role of institutions especially with regard to China, given its political structure and economic governance, has provided just such an intriguing case for Tan who has been immersed in PRC-related study since graduate school. The book frames the story of China’s WTO entry and assesses its impact on the country’s complex and sprawling structures of economic governance with the kind of inspiration that makes well-written and researched economic history as compelling as it is empirically rigorous. Professor Tan’s analysis and argument fits within the interdisciplinary sphere most aptly described as political economy as she systematically ‘disaggregates’ China’s institutional response as a one-party state to the globalizing effects of WTO engagement. Her book draws upon a rich research literature including the post-Mao reform and opening period to frame her research questions before moving into her own theory, methods, and findings – a unique contribution to the field filling the lack of studies focused on external institutional influences on the political economy of China. As such, she moves us beyond the caricatured and monolithic simplifications underlying the bipartisan, ideologically driven interpretations reassessing the outcome of China’s WTO entry and subsequent trade policy. To liberally paraphrase a key source of her intellectual inspiration, Rodrik’s The Globalization Paradox: acknowledging the role of public institutions and the various value preferences of nations to help shape well-performing markets will lead you, as with Tan’s story, to the start of an understanding of the relationship of markets and institutions with a radically different ending in the China context. Yeling Tan is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Oregon. Keith Krueger lectures at the SILC Business School in Shanghai University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Economy Studies project emerged from the worldwide movement to modernise economics education, spurred on by the global financial crisis of 2008, the climate crisis, and the COVID-19 pandemic. It envisions a wide variety of economics graduates and specialists, equipped with a broad toolkit, enabling them to collectively understand and help tackle the issues the world faces today. Economy Studies: A Guide to Rethinking Economics Education (Amsterdam University Press, 2021) is a practical guide for (re-)designing economics courses and programs. Based on a clear conceptual framework and ten flexible building blocks, this book offers refreshing ideas and practical suggestions to stimulate student engagement and critical thinking across a wide range of courses. Sam de Muijnck is chief economist at the Dutch independent think tank Our New Economy. Earlier, he was the chair of the Future Generations Think Tank, as well as that of the Dutch branch of the international student movement, ‘Rethinking Economics’. He completed his undergraduate economics degree at the Radboud University in Nijmegen, and then pursued an interdisciplinary research master’s at the University of Amsterdam. Joris Tieleman completed his PhD from the Institute for Housing and Urban Development Studies, Erasmus University Rotterdam. He previously worked as a staff research journalist for the Volkskrant (a Dutch daily), and co-founded the Dutch branch of Rethinking Economics. Utsav Saksena is a Research Fellow at the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy (NIPFP), an autonomous institute under the Ministry of Finance, Government of India. He can be reached at [email protected]. Note: opinions expressed in this podcast are purely personal and do not reflect the official position of NIPFP or the Ministry of Finance, Government of India. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I spoke with Dr. Carlo D’Ippoliti, Professor of Economics at the Department of statistical sciences, Sapienza University of Rome. We talked about Democratizing the Economics Debate; Pluralism and Research Evaluation. This was published in 2020 by Routledge.  It is a great book, almost a manifesto for better economics, divided into three parts: 1 How economics should be; 2 What economics is; 3 What economics could become. The book speaks to colleagues but it is perfectly accessible to students and non specialists too. It is a book about the profession of the economist, its social relevance and responsibility. It is a book about pluralism and the impact of economics on democracy and policy making. It is a book about the metrics that we use to assess the quality of research and the dynamics that dominate the field, from careers to the tyranny of top mainstream journals. More than a decade since the global financial crisis, economics does not exhibit signs of significant change. Mainstream economists act on an idealized image of science, which includes the convergence of all perspectives into a single supposed scientific truth.  Democratizing the Economics Debate shows that this idealized image both provides an inadequate description of what science should be and misrepresents the recent past and current state of economics. Economics has always been characterized by a plurality of competing perspectives and research paradigms, however, there is evidence of a worrying global involution in the last 40 years. Even as the production of economics publications has exploded, the economics debate is becoming less plural and increasingly hierarchical. Among several causes, the tendency to conformism has been exacerbated in recent years with the use of formal schemes of research quality evaluation. This book documents how such schemes now cover more than half of all economists worldwide and reviews the impact of biased methods of research evaluation on the stunting of levels of pluralism in economics.  The book will be of interest to anyone who worries for the state of the democratic debate. As experts who intervene in the public debate, economists must assure society that they are working in the best possible way, which includes fostering a wide and fair scientific debate. It is this test of social legitimacy that economics currently fails. This contribution perfectly complements two other books that Carlo has recently edited with his colleagues: 'The Routledge Handbook of Heterodox Economics' (Routledge International Handbooks) and 'Classical Economics Today, Essays in Honor of Alessandro Roncaglia' (Anthem Other Canon Economics). Andrea Bernardi is Senior Lecturer in Employment and Organization Studies at Oxford Brookes University in the UK. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Timothy Yang’s A Medicated Empire: The Pharmaceutical Industry and Modern Japan (Cornell 2021) is a case study of Hoshi Pharmaceutical, a Japanese drug company that exemplified the push for a modern “culture of self-medication.” The history of Hoshi is tightly intertwined with state promotion of Western biomedicine beginning in the late nineteenth century, but also reveals tensions between pharmaceutical manufacturers’ self-promotion “as a humanitarian endeavor for greater social good” and their profit motive. As the title suggests, A Medicated Empire also expands our understanding of the production and consumption of drugs―licit and illicit―in the Japanese empire, exploring topics including how companies like Hoshi exploited national-defense concerns to secure lucrative government support in times of crisis on the one hand, and the differential marketing and regulation of pharmaceuticals such as opium to Japanese and colonial subjects. In the latter sections of the book, these elements are central to the story of Hoshi’s fall and rise: the opium scandal which crippled and bankrupted the company in the early 1930s and its resurrection and profiteering as Japan geared up for war later in the decade. Throughout, Yang is sensitive to the tensions between state-led national strengthening, corporate profit motives, and the desires of individuals to optimize their health, and also to the imperial context in which the particular story of Hoshi played out. This book will of course be of interest to historians of Japan, STS, and business, among others, but as we discuss in the podcast, many of its core issues―trust in pharma, government interventions in public health, etc.—are more salient today than ever. Nathan Hopson is an associate professor of Japanese language and history in the University of Bergen's Department of Foreign Languages. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today I talked to Thom Hartmann about his new book The Hidden History of American Healthcare: Why Sickness Bankrupts You and Makes Others Insanely Rich (Berrett-Koehler, 2021). To hear Thom Hartmann tell it, the battle over whether healthcare should be seen as a right or a privilege has two phases in American history. From the 1880’s to the 1980’s the idea of universal American healthcare was opposed due to racist bias, i.e., to provide it would favor aiding African-Americans, too. Then from the Reagan Revolution to today, greed has taken over because the current system favors industry insiders benefitting while the average American pays more for less than is true elsewhere in the so-called Developed World. Get ready for plenty of surprises here, starting with the fact that the debate about healthcare got launched by three Germans: Karl Marx, Otto von Bismarck, and a person named Frederick Ludwig Hoffman. Never heard of the third guy? Well, at a time when Prudential Insurance was the biggest player in its sector Hoffman provided the platform for denying the healthcare that Bismarck had decided was a way to counter the appeal of Marxism. Thom Hartmann is a four-time winner of the Project Censored Award, a New York Times bestselling authority of 32 books, and America’s #1 progressive talk radio show host. Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of nine books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). His new book is Blah, Blah, Blah: A Snarky Guide to Office Politics. To check out his related “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Generous welfare states are losing their key characteristics, not least in Sweden, where privatisation of funding has proceeded privatisation of provision, beginning in the 1990s. Supplementary exclusionary sources of welfare in healthcare, education, and social care, have proliferated throughout European welfare states under the neoliberal agenda that has dominated debate across the developed world. Rather than full privatisation, we see semi-private solutions, in which the citizen becomes the consumer, but remains subsidised by the state in their pursuit of private welfare, via tax breaks that benefit the richest in society most, rather than those with the greatest need. At the same time, private providers have been able to free-ride on the state, for example by hiring like doctors and teachers trained on state-funded courses, whilst the divided welfare state erodes the more generous, universal system by undermining the trust in it and the willingness of people to contribute to it. Ultimately, it replaces one view of social policy as an investment, something that generates wealth and contributes to the future, with another, of social policy as a cost, that takes up resources rather than generates them. John Lapidus' The Quest for a Divided Welfare State: Sweden in the Era of Privatization (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) charts the development of this process in Sweden, beginning with the privatisation of provision, such as private hospitals and tutoring, and how it lays the groundwork for private funding, which puts pressure on existing generous and universal welfare systems sustained by the public sector. In our discussion, we identify the methods through which neoliberal advocates promote privatisation, and how ongoing privatisation becomes self-reinforcing to nullify opponents, win over ambivalent actors, and dominate the debate in the political sphere. We end on an optimistic note, looking at the education sector and discussing what we can learn from debates in this area to promote and restore equality throughout the welfare state. John is currently a Research Fellow at the School of Business, Economics and Law within the University of Gothenberg in Sweden, where he earnt his PhD in 2015. Prior to John’s academic career, he spent several years as a journalist, and also spent time working in Nicaragua for the Swedish-Nicaragua Friendship Association, an international NGO that helps communities build self-help organisations and tackle poverty. Leo Nasskau is an expert on the future of work and interviews authors writing about public policy and political economy — particularly how capitalism can be reformed to deliver sustainable prosperity for all. To join the discussion about this book, visit leonasskau.co.uk, and to give Leo anonymous feedback, go to bit.ly/Feedback-Leo. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

John and Elizabeth continue their conversation with Daniel Souleles, anthropologist at the Copenhagen Business School and author of Songs of Profit, Songs of Loss: Private Equity, Wealth, and Inequality (Lincoln : University of Nebraska Press 2019). Dan’s work fits into a newish approach in anthropology of researching people with greater power and influence than the researchers themselves. That's sometimes called "studying up" and Dan and Elizabeth (who's writing a book about gold, after all!) have both thought a lot about it. Read the transcript here. Read Aneil Tripathy's RTB piece about actuarial time scales and how they shape the sort of anthropology that both he and Souleles practice. Elizabeth Ferry is Professor of Anthropology at Brandeis University. Email: [email protected]. John Plotz is Barbara Mandel Professor of the Humanities at Brandeis University and co-founder of the Brandeis Educational Justice Initiative. Email: [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices