Showing titles in Economic History

With unparalleled access, and having interviewed hundreds of people – from Amazon executives to competitors to small businesses who rely on its marketplace to survive – Dana Mattioli exposes how Amazon was driven by a competitive edge to dominate every industry it entered, bulldozed all who stood in its way, reshaped the retail landscape, transformed how Wall Street evaluates companies, and altered the very nature of the global economy.

The most urgent story in modern tech begins not in Silicon Valley but two hundred years ago in rural England, when workers known as the Luddites rose up rather than starve at the hands of factory owners who were using automated machines to erase their livelihoods. The Luddites organized guerrilla raids to smash those machines—on punishment of death—and won the support of Lord Byron, enraged the Prince Regent, and inspired the birth of science fiction. This all-but-forgotten class struggle brought nineteenth-century England to its knees.

Xi Jinping rules over 1.4 billion people and the second biggest economy on earth. He commands huge armed forces and runs a technology programme meant to dominate the globe. His ambition is to take the place of the United States and to change the world order. Xi's life story is full of drama: plots, purges, murders, a power struggle and a pandemic. The book, based on new sources, leads the listener from the poor, isolated China of the 1950s to the modern economic and military juggernaut of today.

From the emergence of agriculture to the war in Ukraine, Andrew Leigh weaves a fascinating narrative punctuated by expert insights into major moments in human history–why the invention of the plough led to gender inequality, how certain diseases determined the patterns of colonialism, and even how New York’s robber barons inspired the board game Monopoly.

Default is the riveting story of Argentina's sovereign debt drama, which reveals the obscure inner workings of sovereign debt restructuring. This detailed case study describes the intense fight over the role of the IMF in Argentina's 2005 debt restructuring and the ensuing bitter decade of litigation with holdout creditors, demonstrating that outcomes for sovereign debt are determined by a complex interplay between financial markets, governments, the IMF, the press, and the courts.

In The Price of Time, Edward Chancellor traces the history of interest from its origins in ancient Mesopotamia, through debates about usury in Restoration Britain and John Law's ill-fated Mississippi scheme, to the global credit booms of the twenty-first century. We generally assume that high interest rates are harmful, but Chancellor argues that, whenever money is too easy, financial markets become unstable. He takes the story to the present day, when interest rates have sunk lower than at any time in the five millennia since they were first recorded.

Around the world there are people with power who are cashing in on chaos, exploiting bloodshed and catastrophe to brutally remake our world in their image. They are the shock doctors. Exposing these global profiteers, Naomi Klein discovered information and connections that shocked even her about how comprehensively the shock doctors' beliefs now dominate our world - and how this domination has been achieved. Raking in billions out of the tsunami, plundering Russia, exploiting Iraq - this is the chilling tale of how a few are making a killing while more are getting killed.

Perhaps no company reflects American ingenuity, innovation and industrial fortunes as well as the iconic General Electric Company. Producing storied leaders and almost every product imaginable, GE built a cult of leadership success that hid cracks in its foundation. In this masterful history, William D. Cohan, one of America's most eminent financial journalists, argues that GE's legacy is both a paragon and a cautionary tale through which to understand American business.

Bestselling author Ben Mezrich offers a gripping, beat-by-beat account of how a loosely affiliate group of private investors and internet trolls took down one of the biggest hedge funds on Wall Street, firing the first shot in a revolution that threatens to upend the financial establishment.

More than 200 million years ago, geological forces split apart the continents. Isolated from each other, the two halves of the world developed radically different suites of plants and animals. When Christopher Columbus set foot in the Americas, he ended that separation at a stroke. Driven by the economic goal of establishing trade with China, he accidentally set off an ecological convulsion as European vessels carried thousands of species to new homes across the oceans.

Liberal democracy is in recession and authoritarianism is on the rise. The ties that ought to bind open markets to free and fair elections are being strained and spurned, even in democracy's notional heartlands. Around the world, powerful voices argue that capitalism is better without democracy; others that democracy is better without capitalism. This book is a forceful rejoinder to both views, offering a deep and lucid assessment of why the marriage between capitalism and democracy has grown so strained and making clear why a divorce would be an almost unthinkable calamity.

The never-before-told inside story of how the Premier League became the wildest, richest, most popular entertainment business on the planet. How did English football - once known for its stale pies, bad bookkeeping and hooligans - become a commercial powerhouse and the world's premium popular entertainment? This was a business empire built in only 25 years on ambition, experimentation and gambler's luck.

Here is the epic history of the "iron men in wooden boats" who built an industrial empire through the pursuit of whales. This absorbing history demonstrates that few things can capture the sheer danger and desperation of men on the deep sea as dramatically as whaling. This sweeping social and economic history provides rich and often fantastic accounts of the men themselves, who mutinied, murdered, rioted, deserted, drank, scrimshawed, and recorded their experiences in journals and memoirs.

These Are the Plunderers traces the thirty-year history of corporate takeovers in America and private equity’s increasing dominance. Morgenson and Rosner investigate some of the biggest names in private equity, exposing how they buy companies, load them with debt, and then bleed them of assets and profits. All while prosecutors and regulators stand idly by.

Arguing that the slave trade was at the heart of Britain's economic progress, Eric Williams' landmark 1944 study revealed the connections between capitalism and racism and has influenced generations of historians ever since. Williams traces the rise and fall of the Atlantic slave trade through the 18th and 19th centuries to show how it laid the foundations of the Industrial Revolution, and how racism arose as a means of rationalising an economic decision.

These selections from the many writings of Thomas Sowell over a period of half a century cover social, economic, cultural, legal, educational, and political issues. The sources range from Dr. Sowell’s letters, books, newspaper columns, and articles in both scholarly journals and popular magazines. The topics range from latetalking children to tax cuts for the rich, baseball, race, war, the role of judges, medical care, and the rhetoric of politicians.

When Money Dies is the classic history of what happens when a nations currency depreciates beyond recovery. In 1923, with its currency effectively worthless (the exchange rate in December of that year was one dollar to 4,200,000,000,000 marks), the German republic was all but reduced to a barter economy. Expensive cigars, artworks, and jewels were routinely exchanged for staples such as bread; a cinema ticket could be bought for a lump of coal; and a bottle of paraffin for a silk shirt....

Whether you’re looking to deepen your knowledge of complex banking practices, better understand the history of international finance, or simply learn more about central banking as it relates to your everyday life, this book will give you a comprehensive introduction and solid foundation for future study.

The legendary investor and bestselling author shares his unique template for how debt crises work and principles for dealing with them well. This template allowed his firm, Bridgewater Associates, to antic­ipate 2008’s events and navigate them well while others struggled badly. As he explained in his international best­seller Principles, Ray Dalio believes that almost everything happens over and over again through time, so that by studying patterns one can understand the cause-effect relationships behind events and develop principles for dealing with them well.

At a time when we are faced with fundamental questions about the sustainability of the economic system, Capitalism and Its Critics provides a kaleidoscopic history of the now dominant system of global capitalism, from colonialism and the Industrial Revolution to the ecological crisis and artificial intelligence. John Cassidy adopts a bold new approach: he tells the story through the eyes of the system’s critics.