New Books in Economic and Business History

What has happened to Britain? As drivers on its roads can attest, it
is the pothole capital of Europe. Once-beautiful towns now feature
peeling paint, weeds, and broken railings. Public services are no longer
fit for purpose. A malaise seems to infect every aspect of British
life: its economy, polity, social order, sense of well-being, domestic
regional relationships, and place in the world. In The Land Where Nothing Works: How Britain Lost the Plot (Princeton
University Press, 2026), the distinguished historian A. G. Hopkins
offers an explanation, tracing Britain’s current problems to decisions
made in the 1980s that abandoned its postwar experiment in social
democracy and mimicked policies of deregulation and privatisation
promoted by the United States.

In 1945, the new Labour
government’s development programme aimed at creating a social democracy
that would benefit all members of society. The counterrevolution
launched by Margaret Thatcher’s government in 1979, which remains in
force today, promoted individualism and deregulation. The transition
from one programme to another was a response to the growth of finance
and services centred on the City of London, and to decolonisation, which
redirected trade to Europe. The expansion of credit led to the
financial crisis of 2008 and the years of austerity that followed, and
fuelled the populist movement that culminated in Brexit. Hopkins argues
that, instead of following the free-market policies of its mentor, the
United States, Britain should draw on its own history of social
democracy and borrow from its neighbours in Europe, where communitarian
principles continue to be upheld.
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Today I'm speaking with Mordecai Kurz, Joan Kenney Professor of Economics Emeritus at Stanford University. We are discussing his latest book, Private Power and Democracy's Decline: How to Make Capitalism Support Democracy (MIT Press, 2026). After its high-water mark several decades ago, democracy's status continues to slide globally. Capitalism and democracy, which once seemed to complement each other, now appear at odds. Free-market policies and monopolistic technologies have enriched many while driving inequalities that harm workers. Many have opined on how to fix the political and economic problems of our day, from an embrace of radical libertarian policy to socialist ownership of the means of production. Mordecai Kurz's extensive study of capitalism and democracy charts a path for balancing economic and political freedom. Since the days of Adam Smith, technology has changed rapidly, necessitating new formulations that take into account the private power centers that exercise control much like monarchies did in the Age of Enlightenment. Despite the imbalance, capitalism still remains a driver of technological progress and innovation. How can we make both capitalism and democracy work for the good of everyone? I'm happy today to get the chance to speak with such an illustrious scholar and to learn a bit more about how to understand this defining puzzle of our age.

Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network.
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In
the bustling market towns and growing cities of medieval England
between 1200 and 1600, public works were the lifelines of urban society.
In Urban Infrastructure in Medieval England: Sustainability and Resilience (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2026), Dr. Roberta J. Magnusson offers
the first comprehensive study of how medieval towns built, financed,
and sustained their defenses, bridges, streets, water systems, and harbors.

Dr.
Magnusson reveals how even modest communities, like the Warwickshire
town of Atherstone, boldly pursued projects that reshaped their futures.
Grants of tolls and taxes funded paving initiatives, bridge repairs,
and fortified walls, while enterprising lords and abbots sponsored
sluices, conduits, and quays. These efforts were not confined to
England's great cities; small towns with limited means also sought
to enhance their competitive edge, even when such investments strained
their resources. Drawing on royal records, municipal archives, and
archaeological evidence, Dr. Magnusson situates these civic undertakings
in their broader social and environmental contexts. She shows how
townsmen adapted traditional obligations of labor
and charity alongside innovative fiscal tools to sustain projects that
could span generations. Yet the balance was fragile. The crises of the
fourteenth century—famine, plague, and the harsher climate of the Little
Ice Age—undermined local resources, leaving many communities to
struggle with maintenance or watch their infrastructures decline.

At
once a history of engineering, economy, and community, this study
illuminates how medieval people conceived of security, health, and
prosperity through the material fabric of their towns. By tracing the
rise, transformation, and survival of these infrastructures, Dr.
Magnusson demonstrates how urban communities navigated centuries of
change while shaping the very landscapes in which they lived.

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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In Shoe Workers in Hannibal, Missouri: The Rise and Fall of Manufacturing in America’s Hometown, 1890–1970 (LSU Press, 2026), Dr. Gregg Andrews examines the history of factory laborers
in a celebrated Mississippi River town. In the late 1890s, shoe
manufacturing transformed Mark Twain’s boyhood home from a steamboat
village to a factory town. By the mid-1920s, the St. Louis–based
International Shoe Company, the world’s largest shoe manufacturer at the
time, controlled all shoe production in Hannibal and continued to do so
until it shut down production lines in the 1960s. The company kept a
tight grip on the town as it battled to keep out unions and maintain labor
at a low cost and in a malleable state. When Hannibal’s shoe workers
claimed their right to organize under the New Deal during the Great
Depression, the shoe corporation was defiant. The company’s stance
sparked mob violence against outside union organizers, nurtured a
company union, pitted unionists against company loyalists, and badly
divided Hannibal. At the same time, the town was engaged in yearlong
festivities to celebrate the centennial of Mark Twain’s birth and the
opening of a museum named in his honor.

Dr.
Andrews’s study of shoe manufacturing and its production workers is
thick in detail and rich with the human stories of those whose lives
were shaped by the rise and fall of the shoe industry in Hannibal.
Andrews captures the shoe workers—white and Black, men and women—in
their own words as they describe their jobs, family struggles, and
battles to unionize.

Dr. Andrews examines the prevailing conditions that led the company to
close its production facilities in Hannibal, leaving shoe workers and
the town to confront the early shock waves of deindustrialization. His
study of an industry that has virtually disappeared in the United States
leaves a record for the families of thousands of American shoe workers
and the citizens of Hannibal to better understand their history and the
role shoe manufacturing played in it.

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.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dan Rood’s In the Shadow of the Great House (W.W.
Norton & Co., 2026) is one of the first contemporary books to focus
on the primary engine of slavery, race, and capitalism in this country:
the plantation. The plantation was invented on the small Atlantic
island of São Tomé in the 1500s, and the island also became the site,
soon enough, of the first slave revolt. The brutal technology was then
perfected in Barbados, where planters worked tens of thousands of
African captives to their deaths in sugar factories. But it was in the
United States, Rood shows, that the plantation found its most powerful
manifestations. In Virginia, Carolina, and then the Deep South,
successive plantation revolutions transformed slavery into a much more
rigid and oppressive institution. Incomparably wealthy planters now
insisted on a rightless, eternally available, “increasing” source of
labor, and in the process reinvented human bondage and stamped it onto a
single race. But the plantation did not die after the Civil War. It
metastasized. From the advent of sharecropping in the late nineteenth
century to the rise of cotton in mid-twentieth century California to
today’s chicken processing plants, the plantation has cast a long shadow
over American life. Rood further documents the “dark retreats” carved
out of plantation life by the enslaved. It was the enslaved who offered
the most clear-eyed understanding of what the plantation behemoths told
us, and still tell us, about our country.
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