Economic History

Brilliant and engagingly written, Why Nations Fail answers the question that has stumped the experts for centuries.....

If you asked most people what forces led to today’s unprecedented income inequality and financial crashes, no one would say the Federal Reserve. For most of its history, the Fed has enjoyed the fawning adoration of the press....

Titan is the first full-length biography based on unrestricted access to Rockefeller’s exceptionally rich trove of papers. A landmark publication full of startling revelations, the book indelibly alters our image of this most enigmatic capitalist....

Big tech has replaced capitalism's twin pillars—markets and profit—with its platforms and rents. With every click and scroll, we labor like serfs to increase its power....

The bestselling author of No Logo shows how the global "free market" has exploited crises and shock for three decades, from Chile to Iraq....

Ray Dalio, the legendary investor and #1 New York Times bestselling author of Principles—whose books have sold more than five million copies worldwide—shares his unique template for how debt crises work and principles for dealing with them well....

Borders draw one map of the world; money draws another. A journalist’s riveting account exposes a parallel universe that has become a haven for the rich and powerful.

Called by H.L. Mencken, "one of the few economists in history who could really write," Henry Hazlitt achieved lasting fame for this brilliant but concise work....

Alexander Hamilton has become a global celebrity. Millions know his name and imagine knowing the man. But what did he really want for the country? What risks did he run in pursuing those vaulting ambitions? Who tried to stop him? How did they fight?

A real-life thriller about the most tumultuous period in America's financial history by an acclaimed New York Times reporter....

In Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty analyzes a unique collection of data from 20 countries, ranging as far back as the 18th century, to uncover key economic and social patterns....

An explosive, deeply reported exposé of McKinsey & Company, the international consulting firm that advises corporations and governments, that highlights the often drastic impact of its work on employees and citizens around the world....

The definitive volume on Enron's amazing rise and scandalous fall, from an award-winning team of Fortune investigative reporters....

Life is getting better at an accelerating rate. The pessimists insist that we will reach a turning point and things will get worse. But they have been saying this for 200 years....

Harvard-trained economist Andrew Leigh presents a new way to understand the human story. From the dawn of agriculture to AI, here is story of how ingenuity, greed, and desire for betterment have, to an astonishing degree, determined our past, present, and future.

In this magisterial book, historian Sunil Amrith twins the stories of environment and Empire, of genocide and eco-cide, of an extraordinary expansion of human freedom and its planetary costs.

Originally publishing in 1944, The Road to Serfdom was seen as heretical for its passionate warning against the dangers of state control over the means of production....

Richard H. Thaler has spent his career studying the radical notion that the central agents in the economy are humans - predictable, error-prone individuals....

A searing portrait of the racial dynamics that lie inescapably at the heart of our nation, told through the turbulent history of the city of St. Louis....

It’s easy to look at the state of the world around us and feel hopeless. We live in an era marked by war, climate crisis, political polarization, and acute inequality—and yet many of us feel powerless to do anything about these profound issues....

Mehrsa Baradaran challenges the long-standing notion that black banking and community self-help is the solution to the racial wealth gap....

Through the last 150 years of American history, Ijeoma Oluo exposes the devastating consequences of white male supremacy on women, people of color, and white men themselves....

In this unique exploration of the role of risk in our society, Peter Bernstein argues that the notion of bringing risk under control is one of the central ideas that distinguishes modern times from the distant past.

More than 200 million years ago, geological forces split apart the continents. Isolated from each other, the two halves of the world developed radically different suites of plants and animals....

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....

This introduction to the economic history of the global economy and the process of globalization since 1850 tracks and explains changes in international trade, migration, and capital flows. All key indicators of globalization rose between 1850 and 1914 during the first wave of globalization. Between 1918 and 1939 the global economy stagnated, suffering a momentous collapse during the Great Depression. After World War II, the global economy re-emerged and integration deepened.

An authoritative, insightful, and highly engaging history of the twentieth-century global economy, updated with a new chapter on the early decades of the new century. Global Capitalism guides the listener from the globalization of the early twentieth century and its swift collapse in the crises of 1914–45, to the return to global integration at the end of the century, and the subsequent retreat in the wake of the financial crisis of 2008.

Wage-Labour and Capital & Value, Price, and Profit by Karl Marx is a compelling introduction to Marxist economic theory, combining two of his most influential works. In Wage-Labour and Capital, Marx explores the relationship between labor and capital, illuminating how the commodification of labor under capitalism generates profit for capitalists at the expense of workers. In Value, Price, and Profit, Marx delves deeper into the mechanisms of capitalist economies, discussing the labor theory of value, the creation of surplus value, and the inherent exploitation of wage labor.

Nationalismus, Sozialismus oder Kapitalismus – diese Begriffe gehören zu den am heftigsten diskutierten Ideen in der Politik. Ihre eigentliche Bedeutung ist jedoch verloren gegangen. Die Wörter werden meist genutzt, um produktive Diskussionen zu kippen. Das Ergebnis sind Missverständnisse und Polarisierung.

This is the definitive and singular account of an epic theme park mania that roiled East Asia for three decades. Beginning in the 1990s, Japan, Korea, and China were gripped by a feverish pursuit of theme park grandeur. Over the next 30 years, developers and visionaries across East Asia built, dreamed, and destroyed some of the largest, most fantastical wonderlands ever conceived. Japan: an overview of its theme park mania, which began in the late 1980s in the aftermath of the nation's stock market and property bubble.