Economic history is, quite simply, my job: I write about it, I research it, and Iāve been teaching it for ten years at a small liberal arts college in New England. Iāve always felt that the best way to make sense of economic change is not by studying formal laws but by reading what past actors have left behind. Numbers and statistics are indispensable, but they acquire meaning only in relation to ideas and power. In any case, thatās what I take the books on this list to suggest. I think of these booksāand others like themāas trusty companions. Perhaps you will, too.
I wrote
Forging Global Fordism: Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, and the Contest over the Industrial Order
One of my favorite history books of all time. Why did slavery end? This classic masterpiece still has the most compelling explanation: not because our better natures won out but because a sea change in political economyāfrom mercantilism to industrial capitalismāmade slavery obsolete.
In my work as a historian, I still aspire to pull off something resembling Williamsās fearless, elegant, and sobering style of argument.
Slavery helped finance the Industrial Revolution in England. Plantation owners, shipbuilders, and merchants connected with the slave trade accumulated vast fortunes that established banks and heavy industry in Europe and expanded the reach of capitalism worldwide. Eric Williams advanced these powerful ideas in Capitalism and Slavery, published in 1944. Years ahead of its time, his profound critique became the foundation for studies of imperialism and economic development. Binding an economic view of history with strong moral argument, Williams's study of the role of slavery in financing the Industrial Revolution refuted traditional ideas of economic and moral progress and firmly establishedā¦
I turn to this book to remind myself how good economic history should be written: by foregrounding the political stakes and by angling for compelling prose. In Toozeās telling, when Nazi ideological rage met the grim realities of a global Depression, the result was the lethal gamble to conquer Germanyās way out of isolation.
Itās so instructive to watch Tooze adroitly move between narrative registersāabsorbing, emphatic, mordant, even humorousāas he tackles this hair-raising topic. The thorniest subjectsāforeign exchange controls and machine tools, forced labor, and racial warācome to life to awesome and awful effect.
"Masterful . . . [A] painstakingly researched, astonishingly erudite study...Tooze has added his name to the roll call of top-class scholars of Nazism." -Financial Times
An extraordinary mythology has grown up around the Third Reich that hovers over political and moral debate even today. Adam Tooze's controversial book challenges the conventional economic interpretations of that period to explore how Hitler's surprisingly prescient vision--ultimately hindered by Germany's limited resources and his own racial ideology--was to create a German super-state to dominate Europe and compete with what he saw as America's overwhelming power in a soon-to- be globalized world. The Wages ofā¦
What happens when a person is placed into a medically-induced coma?
The brain might be flatlining, but the mind is far from inactive: experiencing alternate lives rich in every detail that spans decades, visiting realms of stunning and majestic beauty, or plummeting to the very depths of Hell while defyingā¦
Welcome to the greatest humanitarian disaster, youāve never heard of. In the late 19th century, as European imperialism forced the worldās peasantries into global markets, a strong El NiƱo cycle made the harvests fail across much of Asia and South America.
Besotted by the idea of free markets, the British colonial lords declined to deliver relief. What resulted were famines so horrific that they dwarfed even the monstrous man-made hungers of the 20th century. I read this book as a jolting memento for our heating times: environmental events become disasters only if we allow them to.
Examining a series of El Nino-induced droughts and the famines that they spawned around the globe in the last third of the 19th century, Mike Davis discloses the intimate, baleful relationship between imperial arrogance and natural incident that combined to produce some of the worst tragedies in human history. Late Victorian Holocausts focuses on three zones of drought and subsequent famine: India, Northern China; and Northeastern Brazil. All were affected by the same global climatic factors that caused massive crop failures, and all experienced brutal famines that decimated local populations. But the effects of drought were magnified in each caseā¦
Quite simply the best survey of 20th-century international political economy out there. I assign it to my students and turn to it whenever I need a brief refresher on things.
How exactly did the classic gold standard collapse? Why again did Latin American countries turn autarkic after World War II? What was the role of foreign direct investment under Bretton Woods? Why did labor suffer in the 1970s, and why did finance boom in the 1980s?
Frieden has the answers, and he presents them in a supple narrative and with a commendably sharp sense of politics.
A wonderful blend of "politics and economics, micro and macro, past and present in an accessible narrative" (The Washington Post), Global Capitalism presents an authoritative history of the twentieth-century global economy. Jeffry A. Frieden's discussion of the financial crisis of 2008 explores its causes, the many warning signals for policymakers and its repercussions: a protracted recovery with accumulating levels of inequality and political turmoil in the European Union and the United States. Frieden also highlights China's dramatic rise as the world's largest manufacturer and trading nation, perhaps the most far-reaching development of the new millennium. Drawing parallels between the currentā¦
Fourteen is a coming-of-age adventure when, at the age of 14, Leslie and her two sisters have to batten down the hatches on their 45-foot sailboat to navigate the Pacific Ocean and French Polynesia, as well as the stormy temper of their larger-than-life Norwegian father.
Pithy and compelling, this is perhaps the single best primer on the economic rise of East Asia.
Studwell pinpoints three recipes that allowed Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, and China to escape poverty and become export powerhouses: first, industrial policy; second, government oversight over lending and capital flows (sometimes called āfinancial repressionā); and thirdāsomething few before him have graspedāegalitarian land reforms that broke up large estates and gave small plots to the many.
Discussions of economic development are often charged with ideology-free markets or government. As this book nonchalantly reveals, thatās a false opposition. In Studwellās telling, development happens when governments get creative with markets: forge them, shape them, unleash them, and rein them in. A bracing lesson for todayās debates.
Until the catastrophic economic crisis of the late 1990s, East Asia was perceived as a monolithic success story. But heady economic growth rates masked the most divided continent in the world - one half the most extraordinary developmental success story ever seen, the other half a paper tiger.
Joe Studwell explores how policies ridiculed by economists created titans in Japan, Korea and Taiwan, and are now behind the rise of China, while the best advice the West could offer sold its allies in South-East Asia down the economic river. The first book to offer an Asia-wide deconstruction of success andā¦
From Henry Fordās populist tracts to Ferdinand Porscheās first drafts of the Volkswagen Beetle, from the assembly lines of Detroit to the tank factories on the Volga.
In the 1920s and 1930s, everybody envied the American automobile industry. To learn its secrets, engineers from Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia flocked to Detroit, where they studied, copied, and sometimes stole the techniques of American automotive mass production (or Fordism). Using these techniques, the two regimes built formidable military-industrial machines, which they then unleashed on each other in World War II. Today, as technology transfers and industrial competition intensify, the lessons endure.
An Italian Feast celebrates the cuisines of the Italian provinces from Como to Palermo. A culinary guide and book of ready reference meant to be the most comprehensive book on Italian cuisine, and it includes over 800 recipes from the 109 provinces of Italy's 20 regions.
It began with a dying husband, and it ended in a dynasty.
It took away her husbandās pain on his deathbed, kept her from losing the family farm, gave her the power to build a thriving business, but itās illegal to grow in every state in the country in 1978.ā¦