- Adam's Fallacy
- Duncan K. Foley
- This book could be called "The Intelligent Person's Guide to Economics." The title expresses Duncan Foley's belief that economics at its most abstract and interesting level is a speculative philosophical discourse, not a deductive or inductive science. Adam's fallacy is the attempt to separate the economic sphere of life, in which the pursuit of self-interest is led by the invisible hand of the market to a socially beneficial outcome, from the rest of social life, in which the pursuit of self-interest is morally problematic and has to be weighed against other ends.
- Hardcover 2006 / Paperback 2008
- American Agriculture in the Twentieth Century
- Bruce L. Gardner
- Looking at U.S. farming over the past century, Gardner searches out explanations for both the remarkable progress and the persistent social problems that have marked the history of American agriculture.
- Hardcover 2002 / Paperback 2006
- Big Business in China
- Sherman Cochran
- Hardcover 1980
- The British Shipbuilding Industry, 1870-1914
- Sidney Pollard
- Paul Robertson
- Hardcover 1979
- Capital Resurgent
- Gérard Duménil
- Dominique Lévy
- Derek Jeffers, Translator
- Economists Duménil and Lévy show that, despite free market platitudes, neoliberalism was a planned effort by financial interests against the postwar Keynesian compromise. The cluster of neoliberal policies--including privatization, liberalization of world trade, and reduction in state welfare benefits--is an expression of the power of finance in the world economy. The authors argue for stabilizing the world economy before we run headlong into economic disaster.
- Hardcover 2004
- Capital Rules
- Rawi Abdelal
- In an intellectual, legal, and political history of financial globalization, Rawi Abdelal shows that global financial markets were not always premised on the idea that capital ought to flow freely across country borders. Contrary to conventional accounts, Abdelal argues that European policy makers promoted the liberal rules that compose the international financial architecture, while U.S. policy makers have tended to embrace unilateral, ad hoc globalization.
- Hardcover 2007
- China during the Great Depression
- Tomoko Shiroyama
- The Great Depression was a global phenomenon: every economy linked to international financial and commodity markets suffered. The aim of this book is not merely to show that China could not escape the consequences of drastic declines in financial flows and trade but also to offer a new perspective for understanding modern Chinese history.
- Hardcover 2008
- Ciudad Real, 1500-1750
- Carla Rahn Phillips
- Hardcover 1979
- Coffee and Power
- Jeffery M. Paige
- In the revolutionary decade between 1979 and 1992, it would have been difficult to find three political systems as different as deathsquad-dominated El Salvador, peaceful social-democratic Costa Rica, and revolutionary Sandinista Nicaragua. Yet when the fighting ended, all three had found a common destination in democracy and free markets. In a landmark book that fuses political economy and cultural analysis, Jeffery Paige shows that both the divergent political histories and their convergent outcome were shaped by a single commodity: coffee. His analysis challenges current theories of dictatorship and democracy, and shows that revolution in Central America is deeply rooted in the histories of the coffee elites.
- Hardcover 1997 / Paperback 1998
- Commerce in Culture
- Cynthia J. Brokaw
- Sibao today is a cluster of impoverished villages in the mountains of western Fujian. But from the late seventeenth through the early twentieth centuries, it was home to a flourishing publishing industry supplying much of south China through itinerant booksellers. Brokaw describes this rural, low-level operation at the end of the imperial period, tracing how Sibao's socio-geographical character shaped and affected its progress.
- Hardcover 2007
- A Culture of Credit
- Rowena Olegario
- In the growing and dynamic economy of nineteenth-century America, businesses sold vast quantities of goods to one another, mostly on credit. This book explains how business people solved the problem of whom to trust--how they determined who was deserving of credit, and for how much. Rowena Olegario traces the way resistance, mutual suspicion, skepticism, and legal challenges were overcome in the relentless quest to make information on business borrowers more accurate and available.
- Hardcover 2006
- Dilemmas of Russian Capitalism
- Thomas C. Owen
- Fedor Chizhov built the first railroad owned entirely by Russian stockholders, created Moscow's first bank and mutual credit society, and launched the first profitable steamship line based in Archangel. In this valuable book, Thomas Owen vividly illuminates the life and world of this seminal figure in early Russian capitalism.
- Hardcover 2005
- The Dismal Science
- Stephen A. Marglin
- Insurance may be an efficient way of organizing resources, but the deep social and human ties that constitute community are weakened by the shift from reciprocity to market relations. This book dissects the ways in which the foundational assumptions of economics justify a world in which individuals are isolated from one another and social connections are impoverished. Marglin presents an account of how this happened and an argument for righting the imbalance that this ideology has fostered.
- Hardcover 2008
- Divided Mastery
- Jonathan D. Martin
- Though few slaves escaped being rented out at some point in their lives, this is the first book to describe the practice, and its effects on both slaves and the peculiar institution. Martin reveals how the unique triangularity of slave hiring created slaves with two masters, thus transforming the customary polarity of master-slave relationships. Drawing upon slaveholders' letters, slave narratives, interviews with former slaves, legislative petitions, and court records, Divided Mastery ultimately reveals that slave hiring's significance was paradoxical.
- Hardcover 2004
- The Economic History of Byzantium
- Edited by Angeliki E. Laiou
- Hardcover 2002 / Paperback 2008
- Economic Sentiments
- Emma Rothschild
- In a brilliant recreation of the epoch between the 1770s and the 1820s, Emma Rothschild reinterprets the ideas of the great revolutionary political economists to show us the true landscape of economic and political thought in their day, with important consequences for our own.
- Hardcover 2001 / Paperback 2002
- The Emergence of Modern Business Enterprise in France, 1800-1930
- Michael Stephen Smith
- In this magisterial study, Michael Smith explains how France left behind small-scale merchant capitalism for the large corporate enterprises that would eventually dominate its domestic economy and project French influence throughout the world. Arguing against the long-standing view that French economic and business development was crippled by missed opportunities and entrepreneurial failures, Smith presents a story of considerable achievement.
- Hardcover 2006
- The End of Globalization
- Harold James
- Signified by an increasingly close economic interconnection that has led to profound political and social change around the world, the process of globalization seems irreversible. In this book, however, Harold James provides a sobering historical perspective, exploring the circumstances in which the globally integrated world of an earlier era broke down under the pressure of unexpected events.
- Hardcover 2001 / Paperback 2002
- Engines of Enterprise
- Peter Temin
- New England's economy has a history as dramatic as any in the world. From an inauspicious beginning--as immigration ground to a halt in the eighteenth century--New England went on to lead the United States in its transformation from an agrarian to an industrial economy. And when the rest of the country caught up in the mid-twentieth century, New England reinvented itself as a leader in the complex economy of the information society. Engines of Enterprise tells this dramatic story in a sequence of narrative essays written by preeminent historians and economists.
- Hardcover 2000 / Paperback 2002
- Enterprise
- Stuart Bruchey
- Paperback 1990 / Hardcover 1990
- Family Capitalism
- Harold James
- In Family Capitalism, Harold James tells how "iron masters" of a classical industrial cast were succeeded by new generations who wanted to shift to information-age systems technologies, and how families and firms wrestled with social and economic changes that occasionally tore them apart. Finally, the author shows how the trajectories of the firms were influenced by political, military, economic, and social events and how these firms illuminate a European model of "relationship capitalism."
- Hardcover 2006
- Favorites of Fortune
- Patrice Higonnet, Editor
- David S. Landes, Editor
- Henry Rosovsky, Editor
- A galaxy of distinguished international economists and historians pit economic history against the shaky assumptions of the classical economic theory of natural growth.
- Hardcover 1991 / Paperback 1998
- From Cotton Mill to Business Empire
- Elisabeth Köll
- The concepts, definitions, and interpretations of property rights, corporate structures, and business practices in contemporary China have historical, institutional, and cultural roots. In tracing the development under founder Zhang Jian (1853-1926) and his successors of the Dasheng Cotton Mill in Nantong, the author documents the growth of regional enterprises as local business empires from the 1890s until the foundation of the People's Republic in 1949.
- Hardcover 2004
- The Greatest Nation of the Earth
- Heather Cox Richardson
- Rejecting the common assumption that domestic legislation during the Civil War was a series of piecemeal reactions to wartime necessities, Heather Cox Richardson argues that Republican party members systematically engineered pathbreaking laws to promote their distinctive theory of political economy.
- Hardcover 1997
- The History of Foreign Investment in the United States, 1914-1945
- Mira Wilkins
- Wilkins, the foremost authority on foreign investment in the United States, continues her magisterial history in a work covering the critical years 1914-1945. Integrating economic, business, technological, legal, and diplomatic history, this comprehensive study is essential to understanding the internationalization of the American economy, as well as broader global trends.
- Hardcover 2004
- Hollywood's Road to Riches
- David Waterman
- Combining historical and economic analysis, this book shows how, beginning in the 1950s, a largely predictable business has been transformed into a volatile and complex multimedia enterprise now commanding over 80 percent of the world's film business. At the same time, the book asks how the economic forces leading to this success--the forces of audience demand, technology, and high risk--have combined to change the kinds of movies Hollywood produces.
- Hardcover 2005
- Horses at Work
- Ann Norton Greene
- Greene argues for recognition of horses’ critical contribution to the history of American energy and the rise of American industrial power, and a new understanding of the reasons for their replacement as prime movers.
- Hardcover 2008
- Industry and Economic Decline in Seventeenth-Century Venice
- Richard Tilden Rapp
- Rapp explains the paradox of seventeenth-century Venice, a republic that experienced a relative economic decline in commerce and industry with no absolute decline in overall income. In this systematic approach to the subject of economic decline, Rapp focuses on economic factors common to all Venetian enterprise: labor supply and quality, technology and capital employment, foreign demand, and government policy.
- Hardcover 1976
- Inventing the Electronic Century
- Alfred D. Chandler
- Consumer electronics and computers redefined life and work in the twentieth century. In Inventing the Electronic Century, Pulitzer Prize-winning business historian Alfred D. Chandler, Jr. traces their origins and worldwide development. From electronics prime mover RCA in the 1920s to Sony and Matsushita's dramatic rise in the 1970s; from IBM's dominance in computer technology in the 1950s to Microsoft's stunning example of the creation of competitive advantage, this masterful analysis is essential reading for every manager and student of technology.
- Paperback 2005
- Japanese Today
- Edwin O. Reischauer
- Marius B. Jansen
- Japan, like the rest of the world, has undergone enormous changes in the last few years. The impact of the end of the Cold War has combined with a world-wide recession to create a fluid situation in which long-held assumptions about politics and policies no longer hold. A classic, short history of Japan, this book has been brought up to date by Marius Jansen, now our most distinguished interpreter of Japanese history. Jansen gives a lucid account and analysis of the events that have rocked Japan since 1990, taking the story through the election of Murayama as Prime Minister.
- Hardcover 1988 / Paperback
- Lectures on Economic Growth
- Robert E. Lucas
- In this book the Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Lucas collects his writings on economic growth, from his seminalOn the Mechanics of Economic Development to his previously unpublished 1997 Kuznets Lectures.
- Hardcover 2002 / Paperback 2004
- The Making of the State Enterprise System in Modern China
- Morris L. Bian
- When, how, and why did the state enterprise system of modern China take shape? The conventional argument is that China borrowed its economic system and development strategy wholesale from the Soviet Union in the 1950s. In an important new interpretation, Bian shows instead that the basic institutional arrangement of state-owned enterprise--bureaucratic governance, management and incentive mechanisms, and the provision of social services and welfare--developed in China during the war years 1937-1945.
- Hardcover 2005
- Mid-Ch'ing Rice Markets and Trade
- Han-sheng Chuan
- Richard A. Kraus
- Paperback 1975
- A Nation of Counterfeiters
- Stephen Mihm
- Prior to the Civil War, the United States did not have a single, national currency. Counterfeiters flourished amid this anarchy, putting vast quantities of bogus bills into circulation. Their success, Mihm reveals, is more than an entertaining tale of criminal enterprise: it is the story of the rise of a country defined by freewheeling capitalism and little government control. Mihm shows how eventually the older monetary system was dismantled, along with the counterfeit economy it sustained.
- Hardcover 2007
- New Foundations of Cost-Benefit Analysis
- Matthew D. Adler
- Eric A. Posner
- In this book, the authors reconceptualize cost-benefit analysis, arguing that its objective should be overall well-being rather than economic efficiency. This book not only places cost-benefit analysis on a firmer theoretical foundation, but also has many practical implications for how government agencies should undertake cost-benefit studies.
- Hardcover 2006
- Organizing Control
- Jeffrey Fear
- In a pioneering work, Jeffrey Fear overturns the dominant understanding of German management as "backward" relative to the U.S. and uncovers an autonomous and sophisticated German managerial tradition. Beginning with founder August Thyssen--the Andrew Carnegie of Germany--Fear traces the evolution of management inside the Thyssen-Konzern and the Vereinigte Stahlwerke (United Steel Works) between 1871 and 1934.
- Hardcover 2005
- The Origins of Europe's New Stock Markets
- Elliot Posner
- Posner explores the causes of Europe’s emergence as a global financial power, addressing classic and new questions about the origins of markets and their relationship to politics and bureaucracy.
- Hardcover 2009
- Out of Smalle Beginnings
- Margery Somers Foster
- Harvard College in the seventeenth century was one of America's largest and most continuous economic enterprises. Its financing is a record of resourceful extemporization. This is the first recorded notice of the institution which was to become Harvard University, and significantly, Margery Somers Foster comments, "it is a notice concerned with finance."
- Hardcover 1962
- Outsiders?
- Economic and Social Progress in Latin America, 2008 Report
- Edited by Gustavo Márquez
- Despite decades of reform and global integration, many people in Latin America claim they are worse off. This book argues that democratization, macroeconomic stabilization, and globalization have disrupted the traditional labor-market-based paths of integration based on public and formal employment and made those left behind more vulnerable to the traditional forces of discrimination and exclusion.
- Paperback 2008
- Plantation Enterprise in Colonial South Carolina
- S. Max Edelson
- This impressive scholarly debut deftly reinterprets one of America's oldest symbols--the southern slave plantation. S. Max Edelson examines the relationships between planters, slaves, and the natural world they colonized to create the Carolina Lowcountry. With a bold interdisciplinary approach, Plantation Enterprise reconstructs the environmental, economic, and cultural changes that made the Carolina Lowcountry one of the most prosperous and repressive regions in the Atlantic world.
- Hardcover 2006
- The Progressive Assault on Laissez Faire
- Barbara H. Fried
- This book examines the first great law and economics movement in the early part of the twentieth century through the work of one of its most original thinkers, Robert Hale. Today, Hale is best known among contemporary legal academics and philosophers for his groundbreaking writings on coercion and consent in market relations. The bulk of his writing, however, consisted of a critique of natural property rights.
- Hardcover 1998 / Paperback 2001
- The Promise of Private Pensions
- Steven A. Sass
- In this new institutional history, Steven Sass explores the rise and growth of the financial support system that today commands trillions of dollars of investment capital and supports hundreds of thousands of older Americans. Sass traces the U.S. pension system through to the present day, exploring how our modern corporate economy is confronting the challenges of an aging population.
- Hardcover 1997
- Prophet of Innovation
- Thomas K. McCraw
- The destruction of businesses, fortunes, products, and careers is the price of progress toward a better material life. No one understood this economic principle better than Schumpeter, who made his mark as the prophet of incessant change. Drawing on all of Schumpeter's writings, including many intimate diaries and letters never before used, this biography paints the full portrait of a magnetic figure who aspired to become the world's greatest economist, lover, and horseman--and admitted to failure only with the horses.
- Hardcover 2007
- Pull
- Pamela Walker Laird
- In retelling success stories from Benjamin Franklin to Andrew Carnegie to Bill Gates, Laird goes beyond personality, upbringing, and social skills to reveal the critical common key--access to circles that control and distribute opportunity and information. She contrasts how Americans have prospered--or not--with how we have talked about prospering.
- Hardcover 2006 / Paperback 2007
- The Race between Education and Technology
- Claudia Goldin
- Lawrence F. Katz
- This book provides a careful historical analysis of the co-evolution of educational attainment and the wage structure in the United States through the twentieth century. During the first eight decades of the twentieth century, the increase of educated workers was higher than the demand for them. This boosted income for most people and lowered inequality. However, the reverse has been true since about 1980. The authors discuss the complex reasons for this educational slow-down and what might be done to ameliorate it.
- Hardcover 2008
- Readings in Chinese Literary Thought
- Stephen Owen
- This dual-language compilation of seven complete major works and many shorter pieces from the Confucian period through the Ch'ing dynasty will be indispensable to students of Chinese literature as well as theorists and scholars of other languages.
- Paperback 1996 / Hardcover
- Regional Advantage
- AnnaLee Saxenian
- Why is it that business in California's Silicon Valley flourished while along Route 128 in Massachusetts declined in the 90s? The answer, Saxenian suggests, has to do with the fact that despite similar histories and technologies, Silicon Valley developed a decentralized but cooperative industrial system while Route 128 came to be dominated by independent, self-sufficient corporations. The result of more than one hundred interviews, this compelling analysis highlights the importance of local sources of competitive advantage in a volatile world economy.
- Paperback 1996 / Hardcover
- A Requiem for Karl Marx
- Frank E. Manuel
- As Karl Marx the icon has fallen along with so many communist regimes, we are left with the mystery of Karl Marx the man, the complexities of a life that has profoundly affected millions. A Requiem for Karl Marx is Frank Manuel's searching meditation on that life, a learned and elegantly written engagement with the man and his work.
- Paperback 1997 / Hardcover 1998
- Scale and Scope
- Alfred D. Chandler
- Scale and Scope is Alfred Chandler's first major work since his Pulitzer prize-winning The Visible Hand. Representing ten years of research into the history of the managerial business system, this book concentrates on patterns of growth and competitiveness in the U.S., Germany, and Great Britain, tracing the evolution of large firms into multinational giants and orienting the late twentieth century's most important developments. This edition includes the entire hardcover edition with the exception of the Appendix Tables.
- Hardcover 1990 / Paperback
- The Second Information Revolution
- Gerald W. Brock
- Thanks to inexpensive computers and data communications, the speed and volume of human communication are exponentially greater than they were even a quarter-century ago. Not since the advent of the telephone and telegraph in the nineteenth century has information technology changed daily life so radically. We are in the midst of what Gerald Brock calls a second information revolution. Brock traces the complex history of this revolution, from its roots in World War II through the bursting bubble of the Internet economy.
- Hardcover 2003
- Shaping the Industrial Century
- Alfred D. Chandler
- The dean of business historians continues his masterful chronicle of the transforming revolutions of the twentieth century. He argues that only with consistent attention to research and development and an emphasis on long-term corporate strategies could firms remain successful over time. He details these processes for nearly every major chemical and pharmaceutical firm, demonstrating why some companies forged ahead while others failed.
- Hardcover 2005
- Surviving Large Losses
- Philip T. Hoffman
- Gilles Postel-Vinay
- Jean-Laurent Rosenthal
- When financial institutions collapse, new ones take their place, shaping markets for generations to come. This book explains why financial crises occur, why their effects last so long, and what political and economic conditions can help countries both rich and poor survive, and even prosper, in the aftermath. Although there is no panacea for such crises, the authors argue that it is possible to strengthen existing financial institutions, encourage economic growth, and limit the harm that future catastrophes can do.
- Hardcover 2007
- Trust in Troubled Times
- Brett Sheehan
- This timely book traces the development of banking and paper money in republican Tianjin in order to explore the creation of social trust in financial institutions. Framing the study around Bian Baimei, a conscientious branch manager of the Bank of China, Brett Sheehan analyzes the actions of bankers, officials, and local elites as they tried to overcome political and financial crises and instill trust in the banking system. Trust in Troubled Times is a valuable new perspective on the economic, social, and political history of modern China.
- Hardcover 2003
- Understanding Business Contracts in China, 1949-1963
- Richard M. Pfeffer
- Hardcover 1973
- The Wages of Affluence
- Andrew Gordon
- Andrew Gordon goes to the core of the Japanese enterprise system, the workplace, and reveals a complex history of contest and confrontation. The Japanese model produced a dynamic economy which owed as much to coercion as to happy consensus. Beginning with the Occupation reforms and their influence on the workplace, Gordon traces worker activism and protest in the 1950s and '60s, and how they gave way to management victory in the 1960s and '70s.
- Hardcover 1998 / Paperback 2001