New Books in Economic and Business History

China’s remarkable journey from poverty to becoming the world’s second-largest economic power is marked by extraordinary urban growth and consumption capacity of its urban population. Central to this development fervor are multifunctional commercial complexes and shopping malls, now key features of modern urban districts. The concept of shopping malls, originally introduced to China by American architects in the 1980s, has since flourished on an even larger scale than their American counterparts.

American-Designed Shopping Malls in China (Hong Kong University Press, 2026) by Dr. Charlie Qiuli Xue and Dr. Arwen Yingting Chen delves into the origins of shopping mall development in the United States after World War II, tracing how American architects exported this building type into China’s rapidly evolving urban landscapes, particularly in Beijing, Shanghai, Chengdu, Kunming, and Guangzhou. Using primary sources, statistical analyses, and illustrated case studies, the book explores the evolution of shopping malls as a consequence of China’s profound economic, social, and cultural change over the past four decades. The book also highlights the impact of American consumerism on the everyday lives of Chinese people, altering not only consumer patterns but also local architectural practices. This tale of transformation is essential reading for anyone interested in China’s rapid urban development.

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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More than any single institution, the US Federal Reserve drives global financial markets with its decisions and communications. While its interest rates are set by the 12-member Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), for almost a century, the Fed’s underlying philosophy and operations approach have been moulded by one person: the Chair of the Board of Governors.

Over The Chair’s eight episodes, Tim Jones talked to authors of books about the Fed's most consequential chiefs – Marriner Eccles, Bill Martin, Arthur Burns, Paul Volcker, Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke, Janet Yellen and Jerome Powell.

The Powell podcast was meant to be the last. But, after Kevin Warsh took over from Powell on 22 May 2026 and started preparing for his first FOMC meeting as chairman in mid-June, a ninth episode became irresistible. Who is this Republican hawk-turned-dove? As one policymaker among 12, has he over-promised to a volatile president?

To discuss Warsh, Tim is joined by three "Fed watchers" – Claire Jones, Michael Redmond and Catarina Saraiva. Claire, who used to “watch” the European Central Bank for the Financial Times, is now the FT’s US economics editor and has transferred her monitoring skills to the Fed. Catarina is a 17-year veteran at Bloomberg News, reporting exclusively on the Fed and US economics since 2019. Michael has been Medley Advisors' Fed analyst since 2022, having worked as an economist at the US Treasury and the Kansas City Fed.

"I think [Warsh] has upset a lot of people with the criticisms that he's had of the Fed," says Claire Jones. "I think there's just this sense where people are worried because they're thinking: 'What did you have to say in order to get this job? What have you promised to the administration in order to get this job?' So, there's those issues of trust ... However, he is very charming; he’s been at the Fed before; he knows how the game is played. So, I don't think that's necessarily entirely insurmountable".
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Australia has a special place in the history of struggle for a Fair Day's Work.

In giving a history of Australian worker struggles over the length of the working day, Sean Scalmer historicises things that might otherwise seem universal and stable, including time, leisure and productivity. Decades before any attempt by Australian timekeepers to standardise time, Scalmer shows that some of the earliest working-class activism in Australia was focused on the nature of time and the meaning of leisure. For what was the movement for the eight hour day, inspired by British activist Robert Owen, except for a battle over the ownership of time and the virtue of recreation?

The length of the working day and the challenges of work–life balance are pressing issues for many people, as well as lively matters of public controversy. While the winning of the eight-hour day is celebrated as a past industrial achievement, contemporary discussions of working hours often overlook its rich history. Tracing 150 years of campaigns for rights and for the fair distribution of productivity gains, historian Sean Scalmer shows how these movements successfully reduced the length of the standard working week from 60 to 38 hours per week, and how economic, social and political shifts since the early 1980s have stalled this long-term progress. Today, industrial laws provide inadequate protection for excessive hours, and women increasingly shoulder long hours of paid work with the bulk of unpaid domestic labour. This has produced a social crisis for all Australians, but is yet to inspire adequate political action. As debate over our working lives intensifies amid ongoing political, economic and technological challenges, Scalmer’s labour of love on the history of work and play affords us a way to understand the past so we can win back our time—collectively.
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Jeremy Yellen’s The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere: When Total Empire Met Total War (Cornell University Press, 2019) is a challenging transnational exploration of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, Japan’s ambitious, confused, and much maligned attempt to create a new bloc order in East and Southeast Asia during World War II. Yellen’s book is welcome both as the first book-length treatment of the Sphere in English and for also being innovative in both approach and analysis. The book is divided into two parts, each addressing one of the “two Pacific Wars,” as Yellen puts it: a “war of empires” and “an anticolonial war… for independence.” The first half of the book treats the Japanese “high policy” of the Sphere. Here, Yellen not only provides—through the Coprosperity Sphere—a provocative new reading of the Tripartite Pact and the imbrication of Japan’s regional and global geopolitical strategies, but also outlines an important timeline of how Japanese conceptualizations of the Sphere evolved with the changing economic, political, and military expediencies of the Pacific War. Though ideas about the Sphere as a regional order of hierarchical solidarity with Japan at its apex, a “grand strategy of opportunism” rooted in the “sphere-of-influence diplomacy” and “cooperative imperialism” of Japan’s bombastic and enigmatic foreign minister, Matsuoka Yōsuke, Yellen shows that plans for the Sphere only became specific and concrete when Japan’s war situation descended into increasing desperation from 1942 on. The second half of the book shifts gears to examine responses to the Sphere in the Philippines and Burma. Yellen shows that for local nationalist elites like Burma’s first prime minister Ba Maw, whether Japanese rhetoric about the creation of more-or-less liberal international order within the Sphere for the top-echelon nations like Burma and the Philippines was genuine or self-serving, “even sham independence brought opportunity.” By focusing on these pragmatic nationalists (“patriotic collaborators”) Yellen contributes to a growing body of literature on empire that refuses to be pigeonholed by binaries of virtuous resistance and traitorous collaboration.
This podcast was recorded as a lecture/dialogue for a live audience at Nagoya University.
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Lithium Extraction in Chile: Ontological, Ecological and Economic Dimensions (Routledge, 2025) is a new book from Dr Daniela Soto-Hernández, a Social Anthropologist currently working as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Sussex. In this book, published with Routledge, Dr Soto-Hernández uses ethnographic methods during her intensive fieldwork in Chile, specifically in and around the Atacama Desert, to take a relational view on lithium mining in the region.

Chile is the largest and oldest producer of lithium in South America and the second largest in the world, accounting for nearly 32% of the global supply in 2022. Dr Soto-Hernández’s book, Lithium Extraction in Chile, is a crucial and new way of seeking to understand not only lithium, but the worlds that are created around the resource; inclusive of sacred, indigenous relations, the ubiquitous role of water, the discursive and practical dimensions of lithium production, and the social tensions manifest throughout these processes. Dr Soto-Hernández first explores the ways in which the Chilean Atacama Desert has been constructed as a ‘desolate-scape’ through mechanisms and relations of coloniality and capitalism, to render the territory as lifeless and only appropriate for extraction. Then, and by using the rich fieldwork central to the book, Dr Soto-Hernández puts forward the notion of ‘desertscape’ to express the ways of living for indigenous peoples in the territories of the Atacama Desert, such as for the Lickanantay peoples. This paints a direct contrast to the colonised view of the desert as a ‘desolate-scape’, which serves capital, and instead expresses the abundance, world-making, and life-giving properties of the landscape as ‘desertscape’. This relational view of the Atacama Desert, inclusive of non-people, people, and the sacred, is then used to understand the role of lithium, brine, and water extraction in this crucial territory, with implications for a truly transformative energy transition.

Elliot Dolan-Evans is a sessional lecturer and tutor in law at Monash University and RMIT. His research investigates the political economy of global capitalism, forms of international governance, and questions of war and peace. His first book, Making War Safe for Capitalism: The World Bank, IMF and the Conflict in Ukraine, is now out with Bristol University Press.
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