New Books in Economic and Business History

Can publishing change the world? In Dispatches from the Avant-Garage: The Alternative Press Rebecca Kosick (Wayne State UP, 2026), an Associate Professor in Comparative Poetry and Poetics at the University of Bristol, tells the story of The Alternative Press. Beginning in Detroit in the late 1960s, initially based in the house of Ann and Ken Mikolowski, the press created a rich and eclectic set of artworks. The story of The Alternative Press is also the story of US art and radical politics from the 1970s into the 1990s, with lessons for art and politics today. Drawing on a huge amount of archival work, interviews, and visual reproductions to analyse both the form and content of The Alternative Press’s activity, the book will be essential reading for arts and humanities scholars, as well as for anyone interested in the history of radical art and culture in the USA.
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Mesrob Vartavarian has written a wonderful book. Privileged Minorities: A History of Wealth Concentration on South Africa (Ohio UP, 2026) argues that the rise of privileged minorities – small, exclusive groups that dominate political and economic life – parallels the development of successful anticolonial movements. Vartavarian traces how distinct sociocultural groups in South Africa navigated and negotiated these advantages from the Dutch colonial era through the rise and decline of the ruling African National Congress (ANC). He then demonstrates why ANC elites have not dismantled minority privilege, and how challenges from marginalised groups have served to reshape entrenched advantages by incorporating new actors into existing structures. These dynamics have produced composite systems of accumulation that have deepened socio-economic inequality. Privileged Minorities offers a compelling framework for understanding how structural advantage persists and evolves, even in the wake of promised liberation from political and economic elites.

Mesrob Vartavarian recommends two books for further learning at the end of our interview. They are: Anthony Butler (2025). Presidential Power, Jacana Media; and Jeffrey A. Winters (2012). Oligarchy, Cambridge University Press.
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Engineering Global Socialism: Ownership, Non-Alignment, and Corporate Culture in a Bosnian Company (Indiana UP, 2026) chronicles the journey of the Bosnian global corporation Energoinvest and its workers from its Yugoslav socialist ideals through decades of dissolution, reconstruction, and post-socialist transformation.

Author Anna Calori provides a company-centric window into the business history of socialist globalization during periods of national development, destruction, and rebuilding. Contrary to popular perceptions of "centralized" socialist states, Energoinvest actively shaped trade relations with the Global South, driven by a socialist corporate culture that encouraged competition as well as collective decision-making. Even after Yugoslavia's disintegration in 1992 ended its dreams of a socialist path to globalization, these core characteristics shaped Energoinvest's adaptation to capitalist transformations and made it a key player in the struggle for Bosnia's post-war economic reconstruction. Through oral histories and archival research, Calori reveals how Energoinvest's workers paired the promise of a new model of global integration with their own visions of a working world in which they set the rules of engagement—and how, upon its sale to mostly foreign owners, the marginalization and ethnic homogenization of employee shareholders mirrored changes around citizenship in Bosnia. Now, in the twenty-first century, Energoinvest offers new promises of a post-industrial future, but its often hazy parameters leave workers to rely on the memory of "what could have been" to make sense of change.

Tracing the long trajectory of a Yugoslav enterprise through decades of large-scale social change, Engineering Global Socialism presents a historical and sociological moment in which workers' ideas about social and corporate enterprise offered the possibility of a more democratic path to globalization.

Anna Calori is Lecturer in Contemporary Economic History at the School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Glasgow.

Filippo De Chirico is a Ph.D. Candidate in Energy History at Roma Tre University. His research focuses on the history of the Italian natural gas sector.
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From the mid-nineteenth century through the dust bowl years of the Great Depression, a new kind of migrant worker became a familiar sight in communities across America. The Hobo: A History of America's First Climate Migrants (Princeton UP, 2026) by Dr. Robert Suits traces the journeys of these homeless men and women, showing how hobo work was an adaptation to energy transitions and a harsh and unpredictable climate, and how the hobo played a central role in the histories of industrialization and westward expansion.Challenging common depictions of the hobo as a world-weary, bearded man in ragged clothes, Dr. Suits reveals how these wandering laborers were often fastidious and heartbreakingly young. Forever on the move due to economic hardship and climate disaster, they chased harvests and took seasonal jobs in industries like logging and mining. Too often they couldn’t find employment at all. Suits describes the difficult, dangerous, and highly unstable jobs they worked while shedding light on the hobo life and philosophy, from their techniques for stowing away on railroads to their unique blend of socialist, anarchist, and anti-work thought. He traces the emergence of the hobo to the advent of steam and the need for manual laborers in places where this new technology couldn’t reach and describes how a growing reliance on the internal combustion engine brought an end to hobo work.Drawing on oral histories, environmental data, and cutting-edge digital methods, The Hobo paints an unforgettable portrait of an eclectic group of wandering radicals, troublemakers, poets, and writers, demonstrating how their experiences upend some of our basic assumptions about how environments and technologies shape society.

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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Commercial seafaring, both dangerous and with large amounts of capital at stake, was the source of the risk-management institutions that still undergird the global economy today. A key institution of early modern risk management was General Average, a procedure used to redistribute extraordinary costs arising from a maritime venture between all financially interested parties. For example, should one merchant’s cargo be jettisoned to lighten a ship in a storm, the loss would be shared pro rata by the shipper and all the cargo-owners. A risk-sharing practice, different from the risk-shifting of marine insurance which became established relatively late, General Average is still in widespread use.

In Managing Maritime Risk in Early Modern Europe: General Average in Law and Practice in Seventeenth-Century Tuscany (Boydell Press, 2025), Jake Dyble explores how General Average worked. It reveals the gap between General Average in law and how it worked on the ground. It shows how General Average partitioned a wide array of business costs, thereby performing a significant role in structuring maritime commerce, managing risk and promoting shipping and trade. In addition, the book discusses how far General Average was a feature of a supposedly ancient, universal, customary maritime law, and contributes to debates about the evolution of institutions in economic development.

Dr Jake Dyble is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Padova, Italy.

This interview is conducted by Dr Lewis Wade, a Humboldt Research Fellow at the University of Bamberg. He is the author of the prize-winning Privilege, Economy and State in Old Regime France and can be found on Bluesky @wadehistory.bsky.social.
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