New Books in Economic and Business History

Can trade unions be reconceptualised as human rights organisations? This study explores the untapped potential of labour movements in human rights advocacy, drawing on extensive interviews with representatives of union confederations worldwide.
In Trade Unions as Human Rights Organisations: Approaches to and Experiences of Human Rights Advocacy (Bristol UP, 2026), Dr. Matthew Evans provides both theoretical foundations and empirical evidence for viewing trade unions through a human rights lens, examining existing partnerships with NGOs and identifying opportunities for enhanced collaboration. Through detailed analysis of concrete political campaigns, this book reveals how union-based advocacy networks operate in practice.
Essential reading for scholars of labour relations, human rights and political advocacy, this innovative work opens new pathways for understanding and strengthening human rights movements globally.
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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The uplands of northwest of Vietnam have in recent decades been massively transformed by hydropower schemes, rubber plantations and mining projects. The effects of all on the people and places in this region are, as Nga Dao discusses in this episode of New Books in Southeast Asian Studies on The Everyday Politics of Resources: Lives and Landscapes in Northwest Vietnam, diverse and multilayered. Bringing a political ecology lens to over three decades of accumulated knowledge and fieldwork in the region, Nga describes and interprets the politics of resource extraction to show how the Vietnamese state paradoxically excludes through inclusion; and, how some of its subjects succeed at adapting and thriving in the changed conditions while others fail. She is not starry eyed; the story she tells is precautionary, and the book makes for sobering reading. But it is also celebratory of the everyday cultural politics whose resources upland people draw upon to survive, to be heard, to get redress and sometimes to flourish or prosper.
Nga recommends Extractive Bargains edited by Bowles and Andrews, and Thea Riofrancos’s Extraction.
Like this interview? You might also be interested in Tania Murray Li talking about Plantation Life, or for other episodes on Vietnam, Ben Kerkvliet on Speaking Out in Vietnam and Pamela McElwee on Forests Are Gold.

Neither this interview nor its summary were synthesised by a machine.

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The modern market-based economy generates wealth, but it lags on well-being; it has mastered efficiency, but struggles with equity; it boasts size, but falls short on sustainability. In other words, our economy delivers performance but neglects progress (i.e., well-being, equity, and sustainability). Many rightly call for tighter regulation, higher (“true”) prices, and longer-term incentives. Others appeal to corporate purpose, shared value, and stakeholder-centricity.

Beyond regulation and the practice of business, we must attend as well to education and the theory of business. In particular, we must look at business theory's core assumptions, whose weaknesses are long known. In an applied field such as business, where theory tends to be normative, flawed assumptions could act as a “wedge” cleaving apart performance and progress.

In Core Assumptions in Business Theory: A Wedge Between Performance and Progress (Oxford UP, 2025), Subramanian Rangan brings together eminent social scientists and philosophers to explore core assumptions in each of the major fields of business-including economics, strategy, marketing, operations, decision science, leadership, governance, technology, and finance. This structured field-by-field reflection reveals and expands the bounds of our rationality. Core Assumptions in Business Theory proposes a revised profit function that integrates harm, outlines how economic actors may draw on moral philosophy to enact Pareto-equity (and not just Pareto-efficiency), suggests a two-stage rationality approach that can attend to well-being, and recasts marketing as consumer education and not merely demand promotion.

With an emphasis on education rather than regulation of economic power, this volume argues that moral reasoning and moral roles can fruitfully supplement prudential reasoning and functional responsibilities. Such an evolution will enable our economy to be both modern and moral.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read on the Oxford Academic platform and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.

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Ed Freeman’s influential ideas on stakeholder theory, business ethics, humanities, and capitalism became foundational in the management field and turned around the mainstream thinking about business. Stakeholder theory developed by Freeman and others posits that business is not as much about profits, but rather about creating value for its stakeholders, including employees, customers, communities, financiers, and suppliers. The relationship between a company and its stakeholders is the essence of business and should be of utmost attention to its managers. Managers should avoid resorting to trade-offs by prioritizing one stakeholder group (e.g., shareholders) over the others and strive to run their companies in the interests of all stakeholders. The idea of pursuing the interests of all stakeholders became revolutionary in management and went far beyond management. R. Edward Freeman’s Selected Works on Stakeholder Theory and Business Ethics (Springer, 2023) is a collection of Ed Freeman’s most influential and important works on stakeholder theory as well as business ethics, humanities, and capitalism.

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Neither capitalism nor central planning, this is the future for socialism.
Capitalism isn’t working. But is there a plausible alternative? The Blueprint: How Socialism Can Work in the Real World (Verso, 2026) lays one out: a system where workers control every lever of production, and competitive markets and state planning coexist side by side. Drawing on the history of socialist experiments and the economic debate over planning and markets, The Blueprint confronts the hardest questions about what went wrong in the past—and why it can go right in the future. The result is a socialism worthy of the twenty-first century.
Mike Beggs is senior lecturer in political economy at the University of Sydney. His research focuses on the history of macroeconomic and monetary thinking and policy.
Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.

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