Avinash Dixit is an emeritus university professor of economics at Princeton. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and was President of the American Economic Association for the year 2008.
A brilliant sweep through the millennia of commerce around the world. If you think globalization happened over the last quarter-century, you are wrong by about 5000 years. Find out how and why.
A sweeping narrative history of world trade—from Sumer in 3000 BC to the firestorm over globalization today—that brilliantly explores trade’s colorful and contentious past and provides fresh insights into social, political, cultural, and economic history, as well as a timely assessment of trade’s future.
Adam Smith wrote that man has an intrinsic “propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another.” But how did trade evolve to the point where we don’t think twice about biting into an apple from the other side of the world?
In A Splendid Exchange, William J. Bernstein tells the extraordinary story of global…
I was born in North Dakota and raised outside of Minneapolis in the 1980s and 1990s, a period marked by the ascendance of global trade and finance. I got hooked on reading, thinking, and talking about the politics of international economic relations in college. Sufficiently hooked, I guess, that I applied to graduate school to try and make it my vocation. My research and teaching to this point have focused on how key political and ideational forces in domestic and world politics – namely, international organizations, shared economic beliefs, social conventions, and material interests – shape the governance of globalized markets and the crafting of countries’ foreign economic policies.
Reading this book in graduate school was revelatory. It was mostly ignored upon publication. But in the subsequent eighty years Hirschman’s insights have become part of the bedrock of my field of international political economy.
The key idea is that countries seeking to enhance and expand their power can use “liberal” commercial strategies to induce economic and political dependency in smaller, weaker partners. It’s dangerous, in other words, to simply assume that more extensive trade and investment flows between countries will engender a more stable, peaceful international system.
Uncontrolled trade can aggravate tensions and facilitate international disorder. Hirschman arrives at a bold idea: surrendering national authority to follow global rules and institutions is the only way to counteract the harmful effects of massive power and wealth inequalities in world politics.
This study begins with a brief survey of economic thought on the relationship between foreign trade and national power, from the Mercantilists on. Chapter II attempts a systematic theoretical approach to the subject. It first makes clear the fundamental basis of the possible use of foreign trade as an instrument of national power policy. Using well-known concepts of economic analysis, it proceeds to show under what conditions and by means of what policies this instrument is likely to attain its highest efficiency. The principles of power policy thus deduced theoretically are then compared with the actual practices followed by German…
I am a professor of history at Western University in London, Ontario, Canada. I have written about the history of international organizations, international trade, the British Commonwealth, and Canada in the world. Although these topics have taken me in different directions, I have always examined the political currents that run through them. Politics emerge in relation to ideology, policymaking, leadership, norms, values, interests, identity, international relations, and global governance. I have been especially interested in connecting economics and politics. Many scholars write about trade policies, organizations, and negotiations as though they are technical and narrowly economic when they are agents, instruments, and expressions of international politics.
This book explains why Mexico has been important to the governance of the global economy.
Mexican officials and economists promoted a post-colonial and development conception of the global economy based on equality, inclusion, and redistribution. Thornton writes about the entire architecture of the global economy, of which international trade was an important part.
Her work explains the significance of a politics of resistance that shaped and was suppressed by the global economic order. She notes that scholarship that excludes or minimizes global South countries perpetuates their marginalization.
One of The Chronicle of Higher Education's Best Scholarly Books of 2021
Revolution in Development uncovers the surprising influence of postrevolutionary Mexico on the twentieth century's most important international economic institutions. Drawing on extensive archival research in Mexico, the United States, and Great Britain, Christy Thornton meticulously traces how Mexican officials repeatedly rallied Third World leaders to campaign for representation in global organizations and redistribution through multilateral institutions. By decentering the United States and Europe in the history of global economic governance, Revolution in Development shows how Mexican economists, diplomats, and politicians fought for more than five decades to reform…
My name is Mayssoun Sukarieh. I teach in London( King’s College) and I live in many places, physically at different times of the year, and mentally all the time. This made me fascinated on how ideas translate in different places according to contexts, and what people do with ideas they hear, create, or adopt. I am passionate about the study of power, whether studying elites- but in relation to their effects on other classes, or power of ideas and thoughts specifically ones that are connected to capitalism as an ideology.
In this important study, Abu-Lughod presents a groundbreaking reinterpretation of global economic evolution, arguing that the modern world economy had its roots not in the sixteenth century, as is widely supposed, but in the thirteenth-century economy—a system far different from the European world system which emerged from it.
Using the city as the working unit of analysis, Before European Hegemony provides a new paradigm for understanding the evolution of world systems by tracing the rise of a system that, at its peak in the opening decades of the 14th century, involved a vast region stretching between northwest Europe and China.
Writing in a clear and lively style, Abu-Lughod explores the reasons for the eventual decay of this system and the rise of European hegemony.
In this important study, Janet Abu-Lughod presents a groundbreaking reinterpretation of global economic evolution and provides a new paradigm for understanding the evolution of world systems by tracing the rise of a system that, at its peak in the opening decades of the fourteenth century, involved a vast region stretching between northwest Europe and China. Writing in a clear and lively style, Abu-Lughod explores the reasons for the eventual decay of this system and the rise of European hegemony. She concludes with a provocative analysis of our current world economy, suggesting that we may be moving towards a pluralistic world…
I am a retired professor of History and International Political Economy. Unraveling knotted masses of string was a relaxing, enjoyable activity for me while growing up. As a historian, I continue to pick apart entangled matters, particularly about capitalism as a complex system. Networks give structure to complex systems, and I find networked merchants in the modern era (ca. 1500- 1945) especially fascinating to study. Who were they? How did they create opportunities and work across borders and cultures? How did they work around adversities? How did they both perpetuate and diversify their networks? How did they link to and collaborate with one another? How do networks evolve?
Which group of merchants in Britain played an exceptionally important role in catapulting that nation to the forefront of the global economy during the 18th century and beyond? Until you have read this book, your first thought probably would not be “Germans,” but it was. How did they do that? Through networking, of course.
I like this book because the author has brushed away the gloss-over of time to reveal how a group that was a statistical minority in Britain (migrant German merchants) made a big impact on their host society—and the world at large.
The "forgotten majority" of German merchants in London between the end of the Hanseatic League and the end of the Napoleonic Wars became the largest mercantile Christian immigrant group in the eighteenth century. Using previously neglected and little used evidence, this book assesses the causes of their migration, the establishment of their businesses in the capital, and the global reach of the enterprises. As the acquisition of British nationality was the admission ticket to Britain's commercial empire, it investigates the commercial function of British naturalization policy in the early modern period, while also considering the risks of failure and chance…
A teen girl emailed to tell me how one of my books brought her back from atheism to falling in love with God and her Catholic faith. I also fell in love with my faith in my teen years, though the waters of life were still a challenge to navigate. Responsibilities, fun, and the culture can often blind us to what truly makes us happy—a relationship with God—but faith-filled fiction can remind us of this. I love to read and write young adult stories that entertain, capture the imagination, and that spark faith. I hope you enjoy the books on this list.
This is an incredibly fun mystery with a great combination of action, adventure, and growing tension. The main characters are well-developed, likable, and positive role models. Eve is romantic, talkative, and doesn’t try to be like everyone else. Nick is level-headed, resourceful, and charming. Plus, he comes from a big and very interesting family.
As a history lover, I enjoyed the tidbits about the Civil War and the “virtual tour” of Washington D.C., visiting museums, monuments, cemeteries, and other historical places with the characters as they tried to solve this unique mystery. Several wonderful messages are weaved through this story, too, like trusting in God even when we can’t understand His plan and realizing that the smaller missions from God are just as important as the bigger missions.
Teen Eve Donahue’s lonely existence changes in an instant when visions of a mysterious stranger haunt her. Certain God is calling her for a mission, she bravely says yes and begins her quest to meet this young man. Thousands of miles away,
Nick Hammond has been dealing with his own unusual experience, an unwavering certainty to convince his father to run for political office. When these two unlikely teens finally meet, their belief that God has called them to work together sets them on a journey of faith to untangle a web of deception involving international trade agreements, lost confederate…
It would be economical with the truth
to say that this is a short book or an easy one, but putting the work in pays
off handsomely. It is the true story of the rise of the East India Company, but
is also nothing short of the painful truth about economics.
For it looks at the
ways a small, predatory organisation grew and grew until it commanded armies,
directed princes and lorded it over some of the finest lands and cultured
peoples of the world.
Dalrymple bravely tells a tale of colonialism and
imperialism by boardroom and management, and for profit rather than glory, and
it should serve as a warning to heed those bearing gifts whilst brandishing
ledgers and account books.
THE TOP 5 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S BEST BOOKS OF 2019 LONGLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION 2019 A FINANCIAL TIMES, OBSERVER, DAILY TELEGRAPH, WALL STREET JOURNAL AND TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR
'Dalrymple is a superb historian with a visceral understanding of India ... A book of beauty' - Gerard DeGroot, The Times
In August 1765 the East India Company defeated the young Mughal emperor and forced him to establish in his richest provinces a new administration run by English merchants who collected taxes through means of a ruthless private army - what we…
As a historian, I’ve always been fascinated by the mutual influence of power and economics. I’ve written about the political-economic origins of revolution, war, and the search for world peace. I believe that to understand the sweeping geopolitical transformations that have shaped recent centuries—imperialism, the world wars, decolonization, or the fall of the Soviet Union—we need to consider the deep pulse of economics. The books that really grab me open up the worldviews of people in the past, explain how they believed economics and geopolitics shaped one another, and show how these assumptions impelled their actions in the world.
The “company-states” of the book’s title include the East India companies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and their peers in other regions, like the Hudson’s Bay Company. These corporations enjoyed many of the powers of states: they hired troops, armed ships, waged war, and signed treaties with foreign rulers. Some came to govern empires. The authors explain how these hybrid geopolitical actors—part capitalist businesses, part polities—came to acquire a key role in global politics, and why they subsequently lost it. Modern multinationals can be geopolitical actors too, we imagine, but Phillips and Sharman show how different the capitalist order of the past was from the world we live in today.
How chartered company-states spearheaded European expansion and helped create the world's first genuinely global order From Spanish conquistadors to British colonialists, the prevailing story of European empire-building has focused on the rival ambitions of competing states. But as Outsourcing Empires shows, from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, company-states'not sovereign states'drove European expansion, building the world's first genuinely international system. Company-states were hybrid ventures: pioneering multinational trading firms run for profit, with founding charters that granted them sovereign powers of war, peace, and rule. Those like the English and Dutch East India Companies carved out corporate empires in Asia, while…
I’m a nerd about all things museums and archives, which I teach and write about. I was trained as an anthropologist, and got really interested in using anthropology’s methods (namely ethnography) to do long-term, embedded, deep-dive fieldwork in bureaucratic settings, like big museums. I love reading books by journalists, economists, historians, and others who do ethnography and really embed themselves in different communities, places, and cultures.
This was the first book I read that was kind of an embedded object biography back when I was an undergraduate student in my second-ever anthropology class. I was totally hooked on the genre. This book follows t-shirts, from where cotton is picked, to where t-shirts are manufactured, printed, sold and distributed, to their disposal—including second lives on the used clothing market. “Who made your t-shirt?” as a great first starting question.
The keys to global business success, as taught by a T-shirt's journey
The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy is a critically-acclaimed narrative that illuminates the globalization debates and reveals the key factors to success in global business. Tracing a T-shirt's life story from a Texas cotton field to a Chinese factory and back to a U.S. storefront before arriving at the used clothing market in Africa, the book uncovers the political and economic forces at work in the global economy. Along the way, this fascinating exploration addresses a wealth of compelling questions about politics, trade, economics, ethics,…
One of the oldest questions is: why are some countries rich and some countries poor? Adam Smith famously answered that it was the division of labor (specialization) and trade in his book The Wealth of Nations. The more you study trade, however, the more complicated the answer becomes. I have been grappling with this question since the 1990s, as a student, and I still do not have a simple answer like Adam Smith. However, I think I have come up with a framework to understand how the economic history of the world developed and I have been teaching that global history in college as a professor since the 2010s.
In ReOrient, A.G. Frank argues that this current situation in which the West is at the center of the world is a mere blip in terms of global history. Historically Asia was always the richer part of the globe and once again, in the near future, Asia will be the richest part of the globe again.
Andre Gunder Frank asks us to re-orient our views away from Eurocentrism - to see the rise of the West as a mere blip in what was, and is again becoming, an Asia-centered world. In a bold challenge to received historiography and social theory he turns on its head the world according to Marx, Weber, and other theorists, including Polanyi, Rostow, Braudel, and Wallerstein. Frank explains the Rise of the West in world economic and demographic terms that relate it in a single historical sweep to the decline of the East around 1800. European states, he says, used the silver…
