Histories of Economic Life¹³

Jeremy Adelman, Sunil Amrith, Emma Rothschild, and Francesca Trivellato, Series Editors

This series presents the work of a new generation of scholars writing the history of economic life as shaped by ideas, concepts, expectations, and sentiments. Featured titles traverse the history of economic thought and lived experience in widely different social circumstances, trying to illuminate the experiences of individuals and groups.

Toward a Free Economy: Swatantra and Opposition Politics in Democratic India Aditya Balasubramanian
Neoliberalism is routinely characterized as an antidemocratic, expert-driven project aimed at insulating markets from politics, devised in the North Atlantic and projected on the rest of the world. Revising this understanding, Toward a...
No Return: Jews, Christian Usurers, and the Spread of Mass Expulsion in Medieval Europe Rowan Dorin
Beginning in the twelfth century, Jewish moneylenders increasingly found themselves in the crosshairs of European authorities, who denounced the evils of usury as they expelled Jews from their lands. Yet Jews were not alone in supplying...
Desert Edens: Colonial Climate Engineering in the Age of Anxiety Philipp Lehmann
From the 1870s to the mid-twentieth century, European explorers, climatologists, colonial officials, and planners were avidly interested in large-scale projects that might actively alter the climate. Uncovering this history, Desert...
Pirates and Publishers: A Social History of Copyright in Modern China Fei-Hsien Wang
In Pirates and Publishers, Fei-Hsien Wang reveals the unknown social and cultural history of copyright in China from the 1890s through the 1950s, a time of profound sociopolitical changes. Wang draws on a vast range of previously...
Making It Count: Statistics and Statecraft in the Early People's Republic of China Arunabh Ghosh
In 1949, at the end of a long period of wars, one of the biggest challenges facing leaders of the new People’s Republic of China was how much they did not know. The government of one of the world’s largest nations was committed to...
Empires of Vice: The Rise of Opium Prohibition across Southeast Asia Diana S. Kim
During the late nineteenth century, opium was integral to European colonial rule in Southeast Asia. The taxation of opium was a major source of revenue for British and French colonizers, who also derived moral authority from imposing a...
The Promise and Peril of Credit: What a Forgotten Legend about Jews and Finance Tells Us about the Making of European Commercial Society Francesca Trivellato
The Promise and Peril of Credit takes an incisive look at pivotal episodes in the West’s centuries-long struggle to define the place of private finance in the social and political order. It does so through the lens of a persistent...
Sorting Out the Mixed Economy: The Rise and Fall of Welfare and Developmental States in the Americas Amy C. Offner
In the years after 1945, a flood of U.S. advisors swept into Latin America with dreams of building a new economic order and lifting the Third World out of poverty. These businessmen, economists, community workers, and architects went...
Distant Shores: Colonial Encounters on China's Maritime Frontier Melissa Macauley
China has conventionally been considered a land empire whose lack of maritime and colonial reach contributed to its economic decline after the mid-eighteenth century. Distant Shores challenges this view, showing that the economic...
A Velvet Empire: French Informal Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century David Todd
After Napoleon's downfall in 1815, France embraced a mostly informal style of empire, one that emphasized economic and cultural influence rather than military conquest. A Velvet Empire is a global history of French imperialism in the...
Red Meat Republic: A Hoof-to-Table History of How Beef Changed America Joshua Specht
By the late nineteenth century, Americans rich and poor had come to expect high-quality fresh beef with almost every meal. Beef production in the United States had gone from small-scale, localized operations to a highly centralized...
A People's Constitution: The Everyday Life of Law in the Indian Republic Rohit De
It has long been contended that the Indian Constitution of 1950, a document in English created by elite consensus, has had little influence on India’s greater population. Drawing upon the previously unexplored records of the Supreme...
A Local History of Global Capital: Jute and Peasant Life in the Bengal Delta Tariq Omar Ali
Before the advent of synthetic fibers and cargo containers, jute sacks were the preferred packaging material of global trade, transporting the world's grain, cotton, sugar, tobacco, coffee, wool, guano, and bacon. Jute was the...