Economic History

NEW YORK TIMES AND WALL STREET JOURNAL BESTSELLER From two winners of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, “who have demonstrated the importance of societal institutions for a country’s prosperity” “A wildly ambitious work that hopscotches through history and around the world...

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

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....

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....

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....

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.

In March 2006, the world’s richest men sipped champagne in an opulent New York hotel. They were preparing to compete in a poker tournament with ­million-dollar stakes. At the card table that night was Peter Muller, who managed a fabulously successful hedge fund called PDT. With him was Ken...

Here, anthropologist David Graeber presents a stunning reversal of conventional wisdom: He shows that before there was money, there was debt....

Rajan shows how the individual choices that collectively brought about the economic meltdown were rational responses to a flawed global financial order....

Odd Arne Westad and Chen Jian chronicle how an impoverished and terrorized China experienced radical political changes in the long 1970s and how ordinary people broke free from the beliefs that had shaped their lives during Mao’s Cultural Revolution.

In this thoroughly revised edition following the latest crises to hit international markets, economist Robert Z. Aliber introduces the concept that global financial crises in recent years are not independent events, but symptomatic of an inherent instability in the international system....

From Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, to Adam Smith and John Maynard Keynes, to the top economic thought leaders of today, The Economics Book is the essential audio reference for students and anyone else with an interest in how economies work. An easy-to-follow style, succinct quotations, and...

A lively, inviting account of the history of economics, told through events from ancient to modern times and the ideas of great thinkers in the field....

The epic successor to one of the most important books of the century: at once a retelling of global history, a scathing critique of contemporary politics, and a bold proposal for a new and fairer economic system....

From the Samuel Johnson Prize-winning author of Mao's Great Famine comes a timely and compelling account of China in the wake of Chairman Mao....

Most Americans — and people worldwide — understand that despite our remarkable technological advances, something is deeply wrong with the direction of our country and world.

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...

The Wealth of Nations, first published in 1776, is the first book of modern political economy and still provides the foundation for the study of that discipline....

In the century after the Civil War, an economic revolution improved the American standard of living in ways previously unimaginable. This book provides an in-depth account of this era....

The bigger picture of the ongoing financial crisis has now started to evolve. Easy Money captures this big picture. The history of money and the financial system as it has evolved over the centuries stand at the heart of this endeavor....

Sacred Economics traces the history of money from ancient gift economies to modern capitalism, revealing how the money system has contributed to alienation, competition, and scarcity, destroyed community, and necessitated endless growth. Today, these trends have reached their extreme—but in...

What happens when the bottlenecks that stand between supply and demand in our culture go away and everything becomes available to everyone? "The Long Tail" is a powerful new force in our economy: the rise of the niche. As the cost of reaching consumers drops dramatically, our markets are...

China's Economy: What Everyone Needs to Know is a concise introduction to the most astonishing economic growth story of the last three decades. In the 1980s, China was an impoverished backwater. Today it is the world's second biggest economy....

The New York Times bestseller hailed as "the best business book of 2010" (Huffington Post). As soon as the financial crisis erupted, the finger-pointing began. Should the blame fall on Wall Street, Main Street, or Pennsylvania Avenue? On greedy traders, misguided regulators, sleazy subprime...

This is the third book in the Easy Money trilogy which discusses how what the world now calls the global financial crisis evolved in the aftermath of the real estate bubble bursting in the United States and other parts of the world....

From the collapse of empires to the rise of fiat currency, Satoshi’s Gift traces the arc of monetary history with clarity and conviction—revealing how the global financial system became fragile, manipulated, and unsustainable. In this timely and provocative book, Michael Hollomon Jr. unpacks the economic, political, and technological forces that led to Bitcoin’s creation—and makes the case that it may be our last, best chance to reclaim financial sovereignty in a world addicted to debt, inflation, and centralized control.

The English East India Company was the mother of the modern multinational. Its trading empire encircled the globe, importing Asian luxuries such as spices, textiles and teas. But it also conquered much of India with its private army and broke open China's markets with opium. The Company’s practices shocked its contemporaries and still reverberate today. This expanded edition explores how the four forces of scale, technology, finance and regulation drove its spectacular rise and fall.

The classic history of the political and economic devastation wrought by runaway inflation in Weimar Germany—“brilliant” (Guardian) In 1923, with its currency effectively worthless (the exchange rate in December of that year was one dollar to 4,200,000,000,000 marks), the German republic...

Weaving together insights from history, economics, sociology, and philosophy, The Permanent Problem offers a synoptic overview of our fateful present moment and a provocative glimpse at what may lie ahead.

De la charrue au tout numérique en passant par le krach écologique et le nouveau capitalisme financier, Daniel Cohen replonge dans les grandes étapes de l'histoire de l'économie et de la société. Revisitant son oeuvre, il propose une réflexion sur la croissance économique, devenue la religion du monde moderne.

What if money—the foundation of modern life—suddenly lost its power? What Remains When Money Disappears takes listeners on a thought-provoking journey through the history and possible future of economies without currency.

This is sequel to another volume by Andy Blunden, The Capital/Logic Debate. In this book, the author provides a systematic presentation of the Hegelian structure of the three volumes of Capital. It is shown that Capital contains three distinct layers of structure, originating from Marx’s reading of Hegel’s Logic and his Philosophy of Right. Capital reflects Marx’s critique of the Political Economists, his unique appropriation of economic history and an application of the method outlined by Hegel in his Logic and applied to his Encyclopaedia.

In Meaningful Economics, Bart J. Wilson challenges economics to directly engage human beings as we really are, not as economists ideally assume. Wilson argues that economic science is as much about purposes and human values as it is about incentives. Moreover, he shows how the outcomes of our decisions (costs and benefits) and the origins of our decisions (motives and goals) can be understood in an integrated way.

« Une lecture qui donne à réfléchir... Peu d'ouvrages retracent, de manière cohérente, une histoire économique aussi vaste que celle parcourue par M. Dalio. Plus inhabituel encore, M. Dalio a réussi à en tirer des paramètres que l'on peut appliquer pour comprendre la situation actuelle. » - Andrew Ross Sorkin, The New York Times.

In the early decades of the sixteenth century, mariners from across Europe forged a vast seasonal fishery along the coasts of the northwest Atlantic. Long before there was Newfoundland or Canada, Europeans called this floating colony Terra Nova, and they laid the foundation for a history of extracting food and fuel that extended into the twentieth century. Once one of the largest European colonies in the Atlantic basin, Terra Nova has never before been considered in its historical entirety or in a wider Atlantic context.