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I'm a historian of global capitalism and South Asia, writing about corporations as they are and how they could be. I've looked at India with the eyes of an outsider, drawing on my experiences growing up in 1990s Eastern Europe during a time of political upheaval and shock privatizations as the old communist order crumbled. Having witnessed the rise of a new class of monopolists and oligarchs in its stead, I became interested in the many different ways capitalists exercise power in society over time and around the world, and how we as ordinary citizens relate to them. I'm now interested in thinkers, activists, and entrepreneurs who have tried to experiment with alternatives.
A key aspect of the “India story,” as described on the macro level by Kaur, is entrepreneurship and the ethos of jugaad(innovating by making do). The idea of India as the new Silicon Valley has captured the global imagination, while the creative use of technology promises to solve longstanding social and economic problems within the country. Lilly Irani’s study questions the dominant framework of “entrepreneurial citizenship” among the new middle classes and the centrality of design practice to India’s current development model. This is another stellar example of interdisciplinary scholarship, based on ethnographic fieldwork at a Delhi design studio and drawing on the author’s background in computer science.
A vivid look at how India has developed the idea of entrepreneurial citizens as leaders mobilizing society and how people try to live that promise
Can entrepreneurs develop a nation, serve the poor, and pursue creative freedom, all while generating economic value? In Chasing Innovation, Lilly Irani shows the contradictions that arise as designers, engineers, and businesspeople frame development and governance as opportunities to innovate. Irani documents the rise of "entrepreneurial citizenship" in India over the past seventy years, demonstrating how a global ethos of development through design has come to shape state policy, economic investment, and the middle class…
I'm a historian of global capitalism and South Asia, writing about corporations as they are and how they could be. I've looked at India with the eyes of an outsider, drawing on my experiences growing up in 1990s Eastern Europe during a time of political upheaval and shock privatizations as the old communist order crumbled. Having witnessed the rise of a new class of monopolists and oligarchs in its stead, I became interested in the many different ways capitalists exercise power in society over time and around the world, and how we as ordinary citizens relate to them. I'm now interested in thinkers, activists, and entrepreneurs who have tried to experiment with alternatives.
There is no better book for understanding India’s family businesses in a broader social and political context than this sprawling, powerful novel. Preti Taneja retells and reworks Shakespeare’s King Lear as three sisters (and an illegitimate son) fight over the inheritance of a massive company that makes everything from textiles to cars (echoes of the Tatas, Birlas, and Ambanis, but also of the East India Company as the subcontinent’s original corporate sovereign). Taneja touches on all the big issues, including gender, caste, climate, and Kashmir, without ever being preachy. It is a long and sometimes challenging read, but always rewarding. I may be biased given the subject matter, but this is the century’s Great Indian Novel—a worthy successor to the likes of Midnight’s Children, A Suitable Boy, and Sacred Games.
When a billionaire hotelier and political operator attempts to pit his three daughters against one another, a brutal struggle for primacy begins in this modern-day take on Shakespeare’s King Lear. Set in contemporary India, where rich men are gods while farmers starve and water is fast running out, We That Are Young is a story about power, status, and the love of a megalomaniac father. A searing exploration of human fallibility, Preti Taneja’s remarkable novel reveals the fragility of the human heart—and its inevitable breaking point.
I'm a historian of global capitalism and South Asia, writing about corporations as they are and how they could be. I've looked at India with the eyes of an outsider, drawing on my experiences growing up in 1990s Eastern Europe during a time of political upheaval and shock privatizations as the old communist order crumbled. Having witnessed the rise of a new class of monopolists and oligarchs in its stead, I became interested in the many different ways capitalists exercise power in society over time and around the world, and how we as ordinary citizens relate to them. I'm now interested in thinkers, activists, and entrepreneurs who have tried to experiment with alternatives.
Readers are spoiled for choice when it comes to investigative journalism and narrative non-fiction about contemporary India, but Siddhartha Deb’s collection of essays (titled after F. Scott Fitzgerald) stands out in a crowded field. Though a decade old, it has not lost any of its relevance or punch. Deb profiles a series of unforgettable figures, from a controversial upstart businessman to emigrant engineers, peasant revolutionaries, informal industrial workers, and a waitress who serves the rich and powerful. The book moves seamlessly from the city to the countryside, exposing both the aspirations and the frustrations of capitalism as it is really lived and felt by a wide cross-section of people across India.
A Globe and Mail Best Books of the Year 2011 Title
Siddhartha Deb grew up in a remote town in the northeastern hills of India and made his way to the United States via a fellowship at Columbia. Six years after leaving home, he returned as an undercover reporter for The Guardian, working at a call center in Delhi in 2004, a time when globalization was fast proceeding and Thomas L. Friedman declared the world flat. Deb's experience interviewing the call-center staff led him to undertake this book and travel throughout the subcontinent.
I'm a historian of global capitalism and South Asia, writing about corporations as they are and how they could be. I've looked at India with the eyes of an outsider, drawing on my experiences growing up in 1990s Eastern Europe during a time of political upheaval and shock privatizations as the old communist order crumbled. Having witnessed the rise of a new class of monopolists and oligarchs in its stead, I became interested in the many different ways capitalists exercise power in society over time and around the world, and how we as ordinary citizens relate to them. I'm now interested in thinkers, activists, and entrepreneurs who have tried to experiment with alternatives.
We started in the snow-capped peaks of Davos and end in the sun-baked forested hills of Niyamgiri in Odisha, where Adivasis(India’s “tribals” or indigenous groups) are fighting land seizures by multinational mining companies like Vedanta. This remarkable book, co-authored by anthropologist and regional expert Felix Padel (who happens to be Charles Darwin’s grandson) and activist and filmmaker Samarendra Das, shows how such distant spaces are connected. It brings attention to the commodity chain of aluminum, from the bauxite in the ground to the finished industrial and consumer products all around us, and faithfully captures both corporate strategies and indigenous perspectives (a rare feat). Now in its second edition, Out of this Earth continues to inspire a deeper understanding of capitalism as a total system and provides hope to those challenging it.
While we all depend on this earth, do we really understand how nature sustains us, and what we are doing to it through mining? What is the real cost of the unending extraction of minerals for power, for industries, for our food packaging, vehicles, arms and ammunition and this development on local inhabitants and ecosystems? Who benefits from this, and whose lives are destroyed? Out of this Earth answers these questions through a detailed account of the aluminium industry. Focusing on the Khondalite mountains in the eastern Indian state of Odisha, capped by some of the world's best bauxite deposits,…
After receiving my doctorate in Economics at Cambridge University, I embarked on a 35-year sabbatical as a venture capitalist focused on information technology. I learned about the critical role that the American state had played by sponsoring the computer industry. When the "Dotcom Bubble" of the late 1990s grossly overpriced my companies, because I had written my PhD thesis on 1929-1931 when the Bubble of the Roaring Twenties exploded, I had seen the movie before and knew how it ended. I returned to Cambridge determined to tell this saga of innovation at the frontier and the strategic roles played by financial speculation and the state in funding economic transformation."
Jon Levy provides a hugely creative account of American history through the evolution of its distinctive institution, capitalism.
He relates the unstable dynamics of financial markets to the waves of investment in real capital incorporating innovative technologies and never loses sight of the tension between power accumulated and expressed in markets and the distribution of political power, always attentive to how the former can take over control of the latter.
Levy’s work has enriched my own understanding of this contested history.
A leading economic historian traces the evolution of American capitalism from the colonial era to the present—and argues that we’ve reached a turning point that will define the era ahead.
“A monumental achievement, sure to become a classic.”—Zachary D. Carter, author of The Price of Peace
In this ambitious single-volume history of the United States, economic historian Jonathan Levy reveals how capitalism in America has evolved through four distinct ages and how the country’s economic evolution is inseparable from the nature of American life itself. The Age of Commerce spans the colonial era through the outbreak of the Civil War,…
I am a historian based in England, raised in Texas. While undertaking a summertime spoken Latin course at the Vatican in 2001 I found myself in the midst of Italian protests against that year’s G8 summit in Genoa. The strength of the anti-globalization movement, and the violent response from the Carabinieri, sparked an early interest in the historical controversies surrounding globalization and US foreign policy. Ten years later, I had a PhD in History from the University of Texas at Austin and the first draft of what would become my book,The “Conspiracy” of Free Trade.
Recovering histories nearly erased from the archival record is no easy task.
Hudson takes this daunting challenge on here as he traces the hidden ties binding the Gilded Age’s exploitative racial capitalist system with Wall Street’s subsequent imperial practices in the Caribbean. It’s a sordid tale that still resonates today; some of these same financial colonizers of the Caribbean still exist in the guise of Citigroup and Chase.
From the end of the nineteenth century until the onset of the Great Depression, Wall Street embarked on a stunning, unprecedented, and often bloody period of international expansion in the Caribbean. A host of financial entities sought to control banking, trade, and finance in the region. In the process, they not only trampled local sovereignty, grappled with domestic banking regulation, and backed US imperialism-but they also set the model for bad behavior by banks, visible still today. In Bankers and Empire, Peter James Hudson tells the provocative story of this period, taking a close look at both the institutions and…
I have had the unique experience of having been a successful CEO of a global publicly traded semiconductor company, a founder and CEO of an innovative and valuable startup, and now as a teacher and scholar of entrepreneurship and innovation. I’m a Professor of the Practice at Princeton University where I teach and write about being a successful entrepreneur. My three books on the subject are: Startup Leadership: How Savvy Entrepreneurs Turn Their Ideas Into Successful Enterprises; Building on Bedrock: What Sam Walton, Walt Disney, and Other Great Self-Made Entrepreneurs Can Teach Us About Building Valuable Companies;and THE ENTREPRENEURS: The Relentless Quest for Value.
This is a book of 35 short chapters that each describe a slice of America’s development from a new country into the leader of the capitalist world… which is actually a story about entrepreneurship. Srinvasan’s style is very engaging, and the book is a page-turner. Each chapter describes the development of a market or new way of doing business, like “railroads,” “steel,” “banking,” and “advertising.” Once you’ve finished reading this book, you cannot help but marvel at what entrepreneurs have accomplished.
An absorbing and original narrative history of American capitalism
NAMED A BEST BOOK OF 2017 BY THE ECONOMIST
From the days of the Mayflower and the Virginia Company, America has been a place for people to dream, invent, build, tinker, and bet the farm in pursuit of a better life. Americana takes us on a four-hundred-year journey of this spirit of innovation and ambition through a series of Next Big Things -- the inventions, techniques, and industries that drove American history forward: from the telegraph, the railroad, guns, radio, and banking to flight, suburbia, and sneakers, culminating with the Internet…
As a reader, I want to be thrown into the heady world of revolution, to learn how everyday people made history, to see what they saw and feel what they felt. And I want a book that challenges mainstream narratives of the past. Radical history does this through gripping storytelling and revealing hidden histories of power. As a writer that tries to shine a light on lesser-known aspects of New Zealand’s past, these five books are both my ‘how-to’ and inspiration. I love to share the stories of people who are often left out of history but nonetheless made it. And being an archivist means questions of power and memory are always lurking.
If The Many-Headed Hydra revealed a hidden history of the revolutionary Atlantic,Caliban and the Witch totally upended my understanding of witches, gender, and the rise of capitalism. A landmark text that sent shockwaves across the history field, Silvia Federici’s writing on the role of unwaged and reproductive labour in the making of the modern world is unrivaled. In a testament to its power and reach, Penguin released a new edition in 2021. A book to give to every socialist dude-bro or those who doubt the importance of gender to profit and power.
'A groundbreaking work . . . Federici has become a crucial figure for . . . a new generation of feminists' Rachel Kushner, author of The Mars Room
A cult classic since its publication in the early years of this century, Caliban and the Witch is Silvia Federici's history of the body in the transition to capitalism. Moving from the peasant revolts of the late Middle Ages through the European witch-hunts, the rise of scientific rationalism and the colonisation of the Americas, it gives a panoramic account of the often horrific violence with which the unruly human material of pre-capitalist…
I started studying Judaism as an adult in 1982, and in the 40 or so years that have passed since then I’ve read voraciously on the subject and have discussed it at length with Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform rabbis from Boston to Tampa. I’ve come to see over that time that Judaism’s objective is to shape conscientious, caring human beings who will bring light and compassion to the earth in spite of all the forces that want to keep trouble and insensitivity there. The books that I’ve listed are among the best in communicating the Jewish vision for the planet. I think you’ll learn much from them.
This may seem an unusual choice – and its title is entirely misleading – but what Sanders describes is what the U.S. might look like if it translated Biblical values into policy and law.
Sanders’s real subject is justice – social, economic, racial, and environmental. He describes a compassionate society in which all have access to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and in which no one is condemned to suffer because of the accidents of birth.
Significantly, Sanders backs up all his suggestions with explanations of how they could be translated into reality. Read this even if you didn’t vote for him!
'Bernie Sanders has changed US politics forever' Owen Jones
It's OK to be angry about capitalism. It's OK to want something better. Bernie Sanders takes on the 1% and speaks blunt truths about a system that is fuelled by uncontrolled greed, and rigged against ordinary people. Where a handful of oligarchs have never had it so good, with more money than they could spend in a thousand lifetimes, and the vast majority struggle to survive. Where a decent standard of living for all seems like an impossible…
Microeconomics is a turnoff to most readers. Not without reason. Many books in this field are dull rewrites of other books and opaque. In particular, it is not clear how the behavior of individual consumers and producers adds to the performance—good or bad—of an economy. The books listed here helped me to sharpen my own mind and to make my writing lucid.
In this series of essays, Ayn Rand presents her stand on the persecution of big business, the causes of war, the default of conservatism, and the evils of altruism.
The foundations of capitalism are being battered by a flood of altruism, which is the cause of the modern world's collapse. This is the view of Ayn Rand, a view so radically opposed to prevailing attitudes that it constitutes a major philosophic revolution. Here is a challenging new look at modern society by one of the most provocative intellectuals on the American scene.
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