New Books in Economic and Business History

Photographer Peter Aaron and acclaimed wine writer Jane Anson join the New Books Network to discuss Bordeaux Chronicle (Vendome Press, 2026), a visual and historical portrait of one of the world's most celebrated wine regions, told through photographs taken 55 years apart.
In 1969, at just 23, Aaron traveled through Bordeaux on a Vespa with his Nikon camera, commissioned by legendary wine merchant Alexis Lichine to photograph 64 wine estates for an encyclopedia that was never published. His photographs, largely unseen for decades, captured a Bordeaux far removed from today's glamorous châteaux and state-of-the-art wineries: modest cellars, vineyard laborers, family-run estates, and centuries-old traditions. In 2024, Aaron returned to photograph many of those same properties, offering a fascinating then-and-now portrait of the region.
Aaron recalls his introduction to wine through his father, Sam Aaron of New York's famed Sherry-Lehmann, his teenage experience working at Château Haut-Brion, and the encounters that shaped his original journey. He also reflects on returning half a century later and reconnecting with people and places he first photographed as a young man.
Anson, who has lived in Bordeaux since 2003, brings her deep knowledge of the region's wines, history, and families to the conversation. Together, they trace Bordeaux's rise as a global center of fine wine, luxury, and architectural ambition, touching on advances in winemaking, evolving ownership, environmental practices, and opportunities for women, while considering what has been gained - and lost - along the way.
The interview also delves into the collaboration behind Bordeaux Chronicle, which pairs Aaron's photographic archive with Anson's historical perspective. More than a wine book, it offers a compelling look at the people, places, and traditions that have shaped Bordeaux across generations, and the enduring character of a region where past and present remain closely intertwined.
Interview by Laura Goldberg, longtime food blogger here.

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Youth workers are essential to the fabric of society. Schools, families, and many of our social institutions rely heavily on their work, yet their contributions often go unrecognized. Laboring in the Shadows: Precarity and Promise in Black Youth Work (Stanford UP, 2026) explores the critical role of Black youth workers, especially in the lives of vulnerable youth, and the challenges they face in their unstable, underappreciated position. Bianca J. Baldridge situates the experiences of Black youth workers within the broader context of anti-Blackness and historical inequities. Drawing on rich interview data from across the United States, Baldridge offers a nuanced analysis of how the precarity of this work—marked by high turnover rates, low wages, and housing insecurity—compounds the challenges these workers face. She highlights how Black youth workers resist these structural harms by adopting and implementing innovative pedagogical practices alongside practices of "freedom dreaming" and joy as forms of resistance and pathways to agency for youth despite their precarious roles. Positioning Black youth workers within a broader network of informal care workers in the United States, Baldridge underscores the significance, fragility, precarity, and power of these dedicated professionals, their essential work, and the possibilities they create for youth.

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Writing in a time of heightened political anxiety–and when accusations of nationalism, authoritarianism, and proto-fascism have increasingly divided Americans into factions– the authors use their influential performance studies-based 'tourist as actor' framework to unpack the ways that Disney parks and their guests co-create performance of implicit Americanness in the 21st century. Disney Parks and the Construction of American Identity: Tourism, Performance, Anxiety (Lexington Books, 2024) argues that the roles that guests choose to perform-- accepting, declining, negotiating, or overwriting scripts offered to them by the Disney theme park experience-- ultimately reveals much about the nature of the contemporary United States. Focusing primarily on Walt Disney World in Florida, and using case studies on music, geography and ecology, sports, families, and politics, these chapters illuminate the always complicated and often contradictory presentations and performances of America within Disney parks in the deeply contested twenty-first century.
Jennifer A. Kokai is director of the School of Theatre and Dance and the Endowed Chair of the Holloway and the Brit at the University of South Florida.
Tom Robson is assistant teaching professor in Purdue University's Cornerstone Integrated Liberal Arts program.
Peter C. Kunze is an assistant professor of communication at Tulane University.

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Jeremy Adelman’s The Capitalist Era: The Making—and Unmaking—of the Global Mind (Princeton University Press, 2026) puts the world’s current unwinding in much-needed historical perspective. Combining political, economic, intellectual, and environmental history, the book tells the epic story of the forces that, since the late eighteenth century, have transformed the world into a single but fractured survival unit that is integrated by exchange and flow, yet divided by suspicion and fear. It is a story of hopes for universal peace, panic over planetary destruction, and debates, policies, and media that have shaped how people view one another across distances and borders.

The Capitalist Era chronicles how global integration compelled people from different parts of the world to reckon with what it means to need each other for resources or recognition without knowing one another, and it describes the confrontations and experiments that have shaped the world through periods of integration and disintegration over the past two centuries. Rejecting simplistic determinisms about inevitable peace or inescapable doom, this book illuminates the brittle unity of today’s world.
The author, Jeremy Adelman, is the Henry Charles Lea Professor Emeritus of History at Princeton University and the Director of the Global History Lab at Cambridge University.
The host, Elisa Prosperetti, is an Assistant Professor of African and global history at NIE/NTU in Singapore. She is the author of An Anticolonial Development: Race, Schooling, and Emancipation in Twentieth-Century West Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2026).

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The twelfth century was a pivotal time in Japan’s history. It witnessed intense factionalism at the imperial court in Kyoto, Japan’s first national civil war, and above all the rise of warriors to national prominence, culminating with the establishment of Japan’s first warrior government, the Kamakura Shogunate. This dramatic power shift has understandably dominated historical debates. However, focusing almost exclusively on military and political narratives led scholarship to overlook the extraordinary economic transformation that unfolded in parallel.

Beginning in the mid-twelfth century, Japan transformed from a rice economy to one based on cash coins imported from China. For the next three centuries, transactions, tax collections, and even fines were expressed in terms of copper coins, which in turn spurred the emergence of trade cities, new classes of merchants and artisans, and the establishment of guilds. And yet not a single coin was issued in Japan. This “minting-less” monetization seemingly stood in sharp contrast to developments in medieval Europe, where monetization went hand in hand with rulers who struck their own coins.

In The Disease of Money: Japan’s Monetization in the Early Middle Ages (U Hawai’i Press, 2026), Dr. Mikael Adolphson offers an analysis of this initial import of Chinese coins and its subsequent monetization through three lenses. First, he provides a contextual and macroeconomic explanation by looking at the context of East Asian trade, where the political and economic developments in Song China also played an especially vital role. Second, the matter of agency behind the import of and demand for coins is dealt with in depth, revealing that several groups played key roles, but above all that Chinese merchants were the most influential agents. Finally, in an effort to put Japan’s medieval monetization into a disciplinary perspective, a comparison is made with Scandinavia around the same time. It shows that while Japan took a different route to its monetization, there were also comparable situations in Europe.

By moving beyond the warrior-centric view, The Disease of Money uncovers a richer, more complex portrait of medieval Japan—one of innovation, adaptation, and global economic connectivity.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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