Histories of Economic Life

"Shortlisted for the ICAS Book Prize in Social Sciences, International Convention of Asia Scholars" Tariq Omar Ali is assistant professor of history at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. 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 second-most widely consumed fiber in the world, after cotton. While the sack circulated globally, the plant was cultivated almost exclusively by peasant smallholders in a small corner of the world: the Bengal delta. This book examines how jute fibers entangled the delta's peasantry in the rhythms and vicissitudes of global capital. Taking readers from the nineteenth-century high noon of the British Raj to the early years of post-partition Pakistan in the mid-twentieth century, Tariq Omar Ali traces how the global connections wrought by jute transformed every facet of peasant life: practices of work, leisure, domesticity, and sociality; ideas and discourses of justice, ethics, piety, and religiosity; and political commitments and actions. Ali examines how peasant life was structured and restructured with oscillations in global commodity markets, as the nineteenth-century period of peasant consumerism and prosperity gave way to debt and poverty in the twentieth century. A Local History of Global Capital traces how jute bound the Bengal delta's peasantry to turbulent global capital, and how global commodity markets shaped everyday peasant life and determined the difference between prosperity and poverty, survival and starvation. "Ali provides an accessible and highly original study of peasant involvement in jute production and its ramifications for agrarian culture and politics in eastern Bengal. Superbly written and thoroughly researched, A Local History of Global Capital brings a series of fresh insights to the agrarian history of colonial South Asia."-Douglas E. Haynes, author of Small Town Capitalism in Western India: Artisans, Merchants and the Making of the Informal Economy, 1870–1960 "This is a fantastic book. Ali shows how an agrarian society that bears many of the conventional markers of what development theory construes as 'backwardness'-peasant production, overt religiosity, illiteracy-must in fact be understood as squarely located in capitalist modernity."-Andrew Sartori, author of Liberalism in Empire: An Alternative History

"Finalist for the Turku Book Prize, European Society for Environmental History" "Honorable Mention for the DAAD/GSA Prize for the Best Book in History / Social Sciences" Philipp Lehmann is assistant professor of history at University of California, Riverside. How technological advances and colonial fears inspired utopian geoengineering projects during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries 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 Edens looks at how arid environments and an increasing anxiety about climate in the colonial world shaped this upsurge in ideas about climate engineering. From notions about the transformation of deserts into forests to Nazi plans to influence the climates of war-torn areas, Philipp Lehmann puts the early climate change debate in its environmental, intellectual, and political context, and considers the ways this legacy reverberates in the present climate crisis. Lehmann examines some of the most ambitious climate-engineering projects to emerge in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Confronted with the Sahara in the 1870s, the French developed concepts for a flooding project that would lead to the creation of a man-made Sahara Sea. In the 1920s, German architect Herman Sörgel proposed damming the Mediterranean in order to geoengineer an Afro-European continent called "Atlantropa," which would fit the needs of European settlers. Nazi designs were formulated to counteract the desertification of Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Despite ideological and technical differences, these projects all incorporated and developed climate change theories and vocabulary. They also combined expressions of an extreme environmental pessimism with a powerful technological optimism that continue to shape the contemporary moment. Focusing on the intellectual roots, intended effects, and impact of early measures to modify the climate, Desert Edens investigates how the technological imagination can be inspired by pressing fears about the environment and civilization. "An excellent guide to historical plans to remake specific landscapes and influence the world's climate."---B. Lieberman, Choice "Exemplary analysis of imperial and fascist European visions for transforming deserts into climatically appealing landscapes and seascapes for colonial settlement."---Christine Keiner, H-Environment "This impressively conceived and researched study is timely in several senses. Lehmann's insightful historical analysis of European, especially German, responses to the challenges posed by what were perceived as expanding deserts provides illuminating context for current issues surrounding technology, development, and climate change, as well as those surrounding colonialism and decolonization. And it offers a sobering reminder of the hazards of political and intellectual hubris."-Harriet Ritvo, author of The Dawn of Green: Manchester, Thirlmere, and Modern Environmentalism "Lehmann explores the wilder shores of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century techno-optimism, following the fevered dreams of French and German engineers, planners, and ideologues who proposed to geoengineer Africa and Asia to make them climatically appealing to European settlers. An incisive and revealing book at the intersection of intellectual, colonial, and environmental history."-J. R. McNeill, author of Mosquito Empires "Using an extraordinarily wide array of sources, Desert Edens narrates a fascinating tale that deserves to be told. Containing a tapestry of individuals, institutions, master plans, and future imaginaries, this book will resonate with historians of environmental science and environmental history."-Vladimir Janković, author of Confronting the Climate

"A Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year" "Winner of the Gyorgy Ranki Prize, Economic History Association" David Todd is senior lecturer in world history at King's College London. His books include Free Trade and Its Enemies in France, 1814–1851. How France's elites used soft power to pursue their imperial ambitions in the nineteenth century 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 nineteenth century, providing new insights into the mechanisms of imperial collaboration that extended France's power from the Middle East to Latin America and ushered in the modern age of globalization. David Todd shows how French elites pursued a cunning strategy of imperial expansion in which conspicuous commodities such as champagne and silk textiles, together with loans to client states, contributed to a global campaign of seduction. French imperialism was no less brutal than that of the British. But while Britain widened its imperial reach through settler colonialism and the acquisition of far-flung territories, France built a "velvet" empire backed by frequent military interventions and a broadening extraterritorial jurisdiction. Todd demonstrates how France drew vast benefits from these asymmetric, imperial-like relations until a succession of setbacks around the world brought about their unravelling in the 1870s. A Velvet Empire sheds light on France's neglected contribution to the conservative reinvention of modernity and offers a new interpretation of the resurgence of French colonialism on a global scale after 1880. This panoramic book also highlights the crucial role of collaboration among European empires during this period-including archrivals Britain and France-and cooperation with indigenous elites in facilitating imperial expansion and the globalization of capitalism. "[A] necessary reappraisal of French imperialism, a velvet empire indeed."---Francis Ghiles, Arab Weekly "Skillfully organized and enjoyable to read, A Velvet Empire is a must read for historians of modern France and 19th-century colonialism." "A must-read for general readers and scholars interested in the evolution of French imperialism in the XIX century."---Giampaolo Conte, The Journal of European Economic History "A Velvet Empire makes a compelling case for informal empire as a core principle of French global expansion in the mid-nineteenth century . . . It situates an understudied period, long seen as an outlier, within the imperial longue durée, and its deft analysis of the interrelationship between foreign policy, economic actors, and culture will offer a useful road map for scholars exploring similar questions from different perspectives."---Maureen DeNino, Nineteenth-Century French Studies "Challenging the conventional wisdom about empire in the nineteenth century, Todd shows that France engaged not only in conquest-as in Algeria-but in forging commercial relationships with elites in different parts of the world, proving as adept at 'informal empire' as Great Britain. Todd's arguments deserve a wide audience."-Frederick Cooper, author of Citizenship, Inequality, and Difference "Todd invites us to integrate France more decisively into the study of globalization in the nineteenth century, and to take into account its contribution to modern capitalism. This innovative work enriches our apprehension of the multiple possible forms of imperialism."-Quentin Deluermoz, Université Sorbonne Paris Nord "In this impressive and important book, David Todd breathes much-needed life into classic questions about the politics and economics of globalization. Taking cultural forms as seriously as gunboats, he fundamentally recasts our understanding of the nineteenth century while opening new directions in the study of modern imperial and European history."

"Winner of the Alice Amsden Book Award, Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics" "Winner of the Murdo J. MacLeod Book Prize, Latin American and Caribbean Section of the Southern Historical Association" "Co-Winner of the EHS First Monograph Prize, Economic History Society" "Co-Winner of the Michael H. Hunt Prize in International History, Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations" "Honorable Mention for the Stuart L. Bernath Book Prize, Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations" "Finalist for the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Book Prize" "Honorable Mention for the Allan Sharlin Memorial Award, Social Science History Association" Amy C. Offner is assistant professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania. The untold story of how welfare and development programs in the United States and Latin America produced the instruments of their own destruction 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 south with the gospel of the New Deal on their lips, but Latin American realities soon revealed unexpected possibilities within the New Deal itself. In Colombia, Latin Americans and U.S. advisors ended up decentralizing the state, privatizing public functions, and launching austere social welfare programs. By the 1960s, they had remade the country's housing projects, river valleys, and universities. They had also generated new lessons for the United States itself. When the Johnson administration launched the War on Poverty, U.S. social movements, business associations, and government agencies all promised to repatriate the lessons of development, and they did so by multiplying the uses of austerity and for-profit contracting within their own welfare state. A decade later, ascendant right-wing movements seeking to dismantle the midcentury state did not need to reach for entirely new ideas: they redeployed policies already at hand. In this groundbreaking book, Amy Offner brings readers to Colombia and back, showing the entanglement of American societies and the contradictory promises of midcentury statebuilding. The untold story of how the road from the New Deal to the Great Society ran through Latin America, Sorting Out the Mixed Economy also offers a surprising new account of the origins of neoliberalism. "The strengths of the book are many, and the originality of the argument and the well-researched chain of events on the micro and meso levels make the book both a page-turner and a real contribution to the discussion on how and why the mixed economy, or the third way, is such a tightrope, both in the Americas and elsewhere."---Martin Andersson, Economic History Review "[A] dazzling, transnational history. . . . [The] insights it provides into the link between decentralized development from 50 years ago and contemporary privatization across the Americas is revelatory."---J. M. Rosenthal, Choice Reviews "Sorting Out the Mixed Economy [is Amy Offner's] epic and field-changing work."---Quinn Slobodian, Dissent Magazine "In telling the story of Lilienthal and other ex–New Deal officials, Amy C. Offner's Sorting Out the Mixed Economy remakes a popular understanding of how today's neoliberalism was built. . . . Offner's book has left us better equipped to understand this past, and to look ahead toward future turbulence."---Pablo Pryluka, Public Books "Sorting Out the Mixed Economy is an ambitious and thought-provoking study that reframes our understanding of both development and neoliberalism and will shape research in many scholarly fields. . . . In terms of the history of relations between the United States and Latin America, Offner inverts one of the field's most important narratives."---Margarita Fajardo, H-LatAm "One of the great virtues of Offner's book is that it eschews a discussion of

"Winner of the J. Willard Hurst Book Prize, Law and Society Association" "Honorable Mention for the Peter Gonville Stein Book Award, American Society for Legal History" "Shortlisted for the Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay NIF Book Prize, New India Foundation" Rohit De is assistant professor of history at Yale University. 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 Court of India, A People's Constitution upends this narrative and shows how the Constitution actually transformed the daily lives of citizens in profound and lasting ways. This remarkable legal process was led by individuals on the margins of society, and Rohit De looks at how drinkers, smugglers, petty vendors, butchers, and prostitutes-all despised minorities-shaped the constitutional culture. The Constitution came alive in the popular imagination so much that ordinary people attributed meaning to its existence, took recourse to it, and argued with it. Focusing on the use of constitutional remedies by citizens against new state regulations seeking to reshape the society and economy, De illustrates how laws and policies were frequently undone or renegotiated from below using the state's own procedures. De examines four important cases that set legal precedents: a Parsi journalist's contestation of new alcohol prohibition laws, Marwari petty traders' challenge to the system of commodity control, Muslim butchers' petition against cow protection laws, and sex workers' battle to protect their right to practice prostitution. Exploring how the Indian Constitution of 1950 enfranchised the largest population in the world, A People's Constitution considers the ways that ordinary citizens produced, through litigation, alternative ethical models of citizenship. "Elegantly written, meticulously researched, and convincingly argued, this is an impressive contribution to understanding Indian democracy and the role of judicial engagement in buttressing it."---A. Ahmad, Choice Reviews "It is a book that must be read not only by lawyers and (wo)men of law, but by every citizen who seeks to understand the Constitutional underpinnings of our republic. "---Sanjay Hegde and Pranjal Kishore, Economic and Political Weekly "This book offers genuinely original insights into the transformation of India's Constitution into a living reality of social and economic life. Its emphasis on the role of ordinary citizens, and civil society organizations, provides a fascinating perspective ignored in standard accounts focusing on the statecraft of political elites in New Delhi."-Bruce Ackerman, Yale University "The study of India's Constitution, perhaps one of the most important documents of the twentieth century, has long been neglected. In A People's Constitution, De shows how it generated forms of democratic behavior among the nation's less elite subjects-an important idea, given that India is the world's largest democracy. No other work so lucidly explains the Indian Constitution, and this informative and original book will be widely read."-Durba Ghosh, Cornell University "Rich and deeply researched, this groundbreaking legal history will speak to readers in many fields and countries. De shows how ordinary citizens played a disproportionate role in giving meaning to India's Constitution, how it became a vehicle for arguing about unresolved tensions among the many groups constituting the new nation, and why constitutionalism became such an important part of modern Indian society. I learned a great deal from this wonderful book."-Kenneth W. Mack, Harvard University "This wonderful book fills a critical gap in the history of India's Constitution and is destined to be a classic. A fabulous, rich, and humorous account of how ordinary people interpreted and shaped the

"Winner of the Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History, American Philosophical Society" "Winner of the Jordan Schnitzer Book Award in Medieval and Early Modern Jewish History and Culture, Association for Jewish Studies" Francesca Trivellato is professor in the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. She is the author of The Familiarity of Strangers: The Sephardic Diaspora, Livorno, and Cross-Cultural Trade in the Early Modern Period. How an antisemitic legend gave voice to widespread fears surrounding the expansion of private credit in Western capitalism 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 legend about Jews and money that reflected the anxieties surrounding the rise of impersonal credit markets. By the close of the Middle Ages, new and sophisticated credit instruments made it easier for European merchants to move funds across the globe. Bills of exchange were by far the most arcane of these financial innovations. Intangible and written in a cryptic language, they fueled world trade but also lured naive investors into risky businesses. Francesca Trivellato recounts how the invention of these abstruse credit contracts was falsely attributed to Jews, and how this story gave voice to deep-seated fears about the unseen perils of the new paper economy. She locates the legend's earliest version in a seventeenth-century handbook on maritime law and traces its legacy all the way to the work of the founders of modern social theory-from Marx to Weber and Sombart. Deftly weaving together economic, legal, social, cultural, and intellectual history, Trivellato vividly describes how Christian writers drew on the story to define and redefine what constituted the proper boundaries of credit in a modern world increasingly dominated by finance. "[Trivellato] deftly demonstrates how dangerous such stories [about credit] can be-and how widespread their effects."---Rebecca L. Spang, Times Literary Supplement "Extraordinary. . . . Trivellato's excellent book shows the power and the necessity of credible history to fight ever corrosive and dangerous legends alive and thriving in our own technologically-advanced yet troubled times."---Jacob Soll, New Republic "Part history, part mystery . . . . [A] tour de force history of economic thought that gives deep insight into the evolution of thought towards (and mainly against) Jews . . . . The Promise and Peril of Credit was a true pleasure to read. For anyone interested in the history of early modern economic thought or Jewish economic history, this book is a must read."---Jared Rubin, The Journal of Economic History "Trivellato's close, convincing analysis makes for stimulating reading."---Thomas Max Safley, Economic History Review "Trivellato's The Promise and Peril of Credit bristles with intelligence, insight, and ingenuity: it is one of the most sophisticated, thoughtful, and thought-provoking books I have read (and enjoyed reading) in recent years."---Lars Fischer, Jewish Historical Studies "[An] important and potentially field-changing [book]. . . . Trivellato's work has much contemporary resonance."---Flora Cassen, Jewish Quarterly Review "The Promise and Peril of Credit masterfully traces changing European attitudes to finance and commerce in the early modern and modern periods."---Francesca Bregoli, Journal of Modern History "A meticulous survey of the early modern commercial and economic literature. . . . The Promise and Peril of Credit is a book as erudite as it is sweeping. With ease and elegance, the author crosses not only language barriers, but also the trans-temporal divide between early modern and modern times. . . . Trivellato adds important nuance to our understanding of anti-Judaism."---Daniel Jütte, Eighteenth-Century Studies "

Aditya Balasubramanian is lecturer in economic history at the Australian National University. The unknown history of economic conservatism in India after independence 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 Free Economy shows how economic conservatism emerged and was disseminated in a postcolonial society consistent with the logic of democracy. Twelve years after the British left India, a Swatantra ("Freedom") Party came to life. It encouraged Indians to break with the Indian National Congress Party, which spearheaded the anticolonial nationalist movement and now dominated Indian democracy. Rejecting Congress's heavy-industrial developmental state and the accompanying rhetoric of socialism, Swatantra promised "free economy" through its project of opposition politics. As it circulated across various genres, "free economy" took on meanings that varied by region and language, caste and class, and won diverse advocates. These articulations, informed by but distinct from neoliberalism, came chiefly from communities in southern and western India as they embraced new forms of entrepreneurial activity. At their core, they connoted anticommunism, unfettered private economic activity, decentralized development, and the defense of private property. Opposition politics encompassed ideas and practice. Swatantra's leaders imagined a conservative alternative to a progressive dominant party in a two-party system. They communicated ideas and mobilized people around such issues as inflation, taxation, and property. And they made creative use of India's institutions to bring checks and balances to the political system. Democracy's persistence in India is uncommon among postcolonial societies. By excavating a perspective of how Indians made and understood their own democracy and economy, Aditya Balasubramanian broadens our picture of neoliberalism, democracy, and the postcolonial world. "Recommended and long overdue."---Tyler Cowen, Marginal Revolution "One of the most comprehensive accounts of opposition politics as carried by key individuals and organisations, their initiatives, and its impact. . . . Within economics, economic history and history of economic thought are two separate disciplines. [Toward a Free Economy] traverses both and goes beyond in its effort to tell the story of India's opposition in its early days. The book lays down a fertile ground for future researchers to further explore."---Kumar Anand, The Hindu "Exhaustively researched."---Archis Mohan, Business Standard "An instant classic."---Sanjeet Kashyap, Australian Outlook "[A] meticulously researched documentation of a very special, albeit short, period of India's political history. . . . [Toward a Free Economy] is a book of economic and social history which shows future possibilities, but the highly researched and eminently readable document will surely be the source of many more literary enterprises."---Sujit Bhar, The Asian Age "Given the continued relevance of free-market policies in India, the importance of uncovering the underlying ideological constituency that promotes such policies becomes apparent. . . . [Balasubramanian's] singular achievement lies in highlighting their regionally-grounded economic interests and the transnational linkages with the global civil society network of free traders and anti-communists." "[A]n intellectual tour-de-force. . . . [Toward a Free Economy] deftly navigates the nuances and complexities in the history of the Swatantra party and revises our understanding of the neoliberal project."---Raheel Bashir, Global Intellectual History "Toward a Free Economy is a brilliant history of economic ideas in independent India. It provides a new view of the origins of conservatism in Indian politics, libertarian rat

"Co-Winner of the Giovanni Sartori Best Book Award, Qualitative Methods Section of the American Political Science Association" "Honorable Mention, Charles Taylor Book Award, American Political Science Association" "Honorable Mention for the Allan Sharlin Memorial Award, Social Science History Association" Diana S. Kim is assistant professor of political science at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. A history of opium's dramatic fall from favor in colonial Southeast Asia 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 tax on a peculiar vice of their non-European subjects. Yet between the 1890s and the 1940s, colonial states began to ban opium, upsetting the very foundations of overseas rule-how did this happen? Empires of Vice traces the history of this dramatic reversal, revealing the colonial legacies that set the stage for the region's drug problems today. Diana Kim challenges the conventional wisdom about opium prohibition-that it came about because doctors awoke to the dangers of drug addiction or that it was a response to moral crusaders-uncovering a more complex story deep within the colonial bureaucracy. Drawing on a wealth of archival evidence across Southeast Asia and Europe, she shows how prohibition was made possible by the pivotal contributions of seemingly weak bureaucratic officials. Comparing British and French experiences across today's Burma, Cambodia, Laos, Malaysia, Singapore, and Vietnam, Kim examines how the everyday work of local administrators delegitimized the taxing of opium, which in turn made major anti-opium reforms possible. Empires of Vice reveals the inner life of colonial bureaucracy, illuminating how European rulers reconfigured their opium-entangled foundations of governance and shaped Southeast Asia's political economy of illicit drugs and the punitive state. " Kim's argument adds a valuable dimension and a perspective from the colonies most affected in a period which has been less written about by historians. . . . [Kim] adds to our understanding of how fundamental changes in response to the consumption of opiates came about."---Virginia Berridge, Addiction "Empires of Vice is well researched, with sources ranging from government records and meeting minutes to personal papers from state and private archives. It is written in an accessible style and will be of value to scholars of Southeast Asia, drugs history, and colonialism."---Eric Colvard, Journal of British Studies " Empires of Vice is an important book that underscores the critical role of low-level bureaucrats in transforming the state. . . . [Diana Kim's] work is deeply rooted in the central contributions and concerns of a broad set of literatures, but also, by shifting the object of empirical analysis to a different region, a later time period than predominant literature, and by looking closely at the anxieties of overlooked actors, Empires of Vice grows its own wings."---Katrina Quisumbing King, American Journal of Sociology "An original account of the shift towards opium prohibition that occurred across colonial South East Asia . . . . Kim's work will be of interest to scholars of drug history, the history and politics of South East Asia and those interested in the development of the colonial state."---Ashley Wright, South East Asia Research "Deeply researched and closely argued. . . . Empires of Vice makes important contributions to the historiography of opium regulation, the comparative history of empire, and the development of state making and governance in Southeast Asia."---Andrew J. Rotter, American Historical Review "[Empires of Vice] present[s] an engaging study that disproves the notion of monolithic colonial regimes and adds welcome nuances to our understanding of narcotics

Rowan Dorin is Assistant Professor of History at Stanford University. A groundbreaking new history of the shared legacy of expulsion among Jews and Christian moneylenders in late medieval Europe 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 coin and credit to needy borrowers. Across much of Western Europe, foreign Christians likewise engaged in professional moneylending, and they too faced repeated threats of expulsion from the communities in which they settled. No Return examines how mass expulsion became a pervasive feature of European law and politics-with tragic consequences that have reverberated down to the present. Drawing on unpublished archival evidence ranging from fiscal ledgers and legal opinions to sermons and student notebooks, Rowan Dorin traces how an association between usury and expulsion entrenched itself in Latin Christendom from the twelfth century onward. Showing how ideas and practices of expulsion were imitated and repurposed in different contexts, he offers a provocative reconsideration of the dynamics of persecution in late medieval society. Uncovering the protean and contagious nature of expulsion, No Return is a panoramic work of history that offers new perspectives on Jewish-Christian relations, the circulation of norms and ideas in the age before print, and the intersection of law, religion, and economic life in premodern Europe. "Brilliant, illuminating. . . . this is a book that will be studied for a long time to come."---David d'Avray, Reviews in History "This solid work of historical analysis will long remain an important contribution to the history of medieval expulsions . . . [and] it is an exemplar of how to critically think about and use sources." "Original [and] scholarly."---Jamin Andreas Hübner, EH.Net "Insightful, original, and based on an exhaustive mastery of archival sources, No Return places the history of expulsions within the landscape of emerging technologies of power that transformed European society from the twelfth century onward. This is a compelling, profound, and brilliant book."-Teofilo F. Ruiz, author of A King Travels: Festive Traditions in Late Medieval and Early Modern Spain "Rowan Dorin has given us an eye-opening account of how Christian and Jewish moneylenders were condemned in medieval times for taking interest and increasingly punished by expulsion-even while rulers were dependent on their services. In the conflict between money and morality, money usually came out on top. No Return is a masterpiece of legal and historical scholarship and speaks to issues of our own day."-Natalie Zemon Davis, author of Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth-Century Muslim between Worlds "A fascinating and elegantly researched study of an important topic. Dorin traces how the equation between usury, Jews, and expulsion came to provide a narrative that enabled the waves of expulsions in early modern Spain."-Martha C. Howell, author of Commerce before Capitalism in Europe, 1300–1600 "A significant new way of thinking about expulsions in late medieval history. In this well-argued and erudite book, Dorin shows how the connection between usury and expulsion should be seen not only as relevant to Jewish expulsion but as part of a larger development of the period."-Adam Shear, author of The Kuzari and the Shaping of Jewish Identity, 1167–1900

"Winner of the Bentley Book Prize, World History Association" Melissa Macauley is associate professor of history at Northwestern University. She is the author of Social Power and Legal Culture: Litigation Masters in Late Imperial China. A pioneering history that transforms our understanding of the colonial era and China's place in it 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 expansion of southeastern Chinese rivaled the colonial ambitions of Europeans overseas. In a story that dawns with the Industrial Revolution and culminates in the Great Depression, Melissa Macauley explains how sojourners from an ungovernable corner of China emerged among the commercial masters of the South China Sea. She focuses on Chaozhou, a region in the great maritime province of Guangdong, whose people shared a repertoire of ritual, cultural, and economic practices. Macauley traces how Chaozhouese at home and abroad reaped many of the benefits of an overseas colonial system without establishing formal governing authority. Their power was sustained instead through a mosaic of familial, fraternal, and commercial relationships spread across the ports of Bangkok, Singapore, Saigon, Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Swatow. The picture that emerges is not one of Chinese divergence from European modernity but rather of a convergence in colonial sites that were critical to modern development and accelerating levels of capital accumulation. A magisterial work of scholarship, Distant Shores reveals how the transoceanic migration of Chaozhouese laborers and merchants across a far-flung maritime world linked the Chinese homeland to an ever-expanding frontier of settlement and economic extraction. "[A] deeply researched study. . . . Distant Shores succeeds in its objective to further nuance the conventional narrative of China's decline throughout the long 19th century by shifting the gaze to the southeastern littoral."---Yorim Spoelder, Asian Review of Books "[An] excellent study. . . . This compelling work not only provides a fresh look at the rationale behind the first Opium War, but also importantly deconstructs the rhetoric of the widely accepted fundamental divergence of Europe and China supposed to have developed starting in the eighteenth century."---Bart Dessein, Journal of the European Association for Chinese Studies "Macauley illuminates the entangled histories of the seafaring Chaozhouese and mainland Southeast Asia with analytical clarity and lavish detail. Distant Shores demonstrates why we cannot fully grasp the regional and the global without the perspective of the local."-Prasenjit Duara, Duke University "This important and compelling book dramatically revises the narratives of Chinese decline during the height of European imperialism. Macauley shows how maritime Chaozhou overcame competition from putatively more powerful European competitors, in the process gaining access to vital land and resources that sustained the Chaozhou homeland."-Steven B. Miles, Washington University in St. Louis "This riveting drama of the intrepid migrants of the Chaozhou diaspora includes violence, piracy, opium, and the making of great fortunes. It is also a brilliant transnational economic and social history of the disasters and triumphs of these shock troops of Chinese colonial expansion, who still undergird Chinese dominance in Southeast Asia. Macauley tells her story with verve, color, and deep insight. Fascinating and profound!"-Peter Perdue, Yale University "Macauley has written a richly detailed and theoretically important study of the Chaozhou Chinese. She expertly traces the threads of the overseas experience and rejoins them with historical events on Chinese soil to create a much-needed analysis of the evolution of the economy and power structures of this importan

The importance of collective behavior in early medieval Europe By the fifth and sixth centuries, the bread and circuses and triumphal processions of the Roman Empire had given way to a quieter world. And yet, as Shane Bobrycki argues, the influence and importance of the crowd did not disappear in early medieval Europe. In The Crowd in the Early Middle Ages, Bobrycki shows that although demographic change may have dispersed the urban multitudes of Greco-Roman civilization, collective behavior retained its social importance even when crowds were scarce. Most historians have seen early medieval Europe as a world without crowds. In fact, Bobrycki argues, early medieval European sources are full of crowds-although perhaps not the sort historians have trained themselves to look for. Harvests, markets, festivals, religious rites, and political assemblies were among the gatherings used to regulate resources and demonstrate legitimacy. Indeed, the refusal to assemble and other forms of "slantwise" assembly became a weapon of the powerless. Bobrycki investigates what happened when demographic realities shifted, but culture, religion, and politics remained bound by the past. The history of crowds during the five hundred years between the age of circuses and the age of crusades, Bobrycki shows, tells an important story-one of systemic and scalar change in economic and social life and of reorganization in the world of ideas and norms. Shane Bobrycki is assistant professor of history at the University of Iowa. "The Crowd in the Early Middle Ages is a delight: compellingly original and brilliantly researched, with lively prose and lucid analysis that reconnect the reader with the joy of learning. Bobrycki ranges widely in revising our understanding of 'gatherings.' Theories from multiple disciplines and centuries are tested, along with familiar historiographical approaches, against an impressive array of early medieval sources both textual and material. Bobrycki's command of demography and philology, in the end, yield a new, deeply humane, perspective on the transition from ancient to medieval Europe."-Maureen C. Miller, University of California, Berkeley "This is a fascinating study on a distinct chapter of crowd history in the early Middle Ages. Bobrycki uses a variety of sources to demonstrate how shifts in population scale led to a reinterpretation of 'the crowd' after the dissolution of the Western Roman Empire, and how societies in the post-Roman successor states creatively adopted and adapted the meaning and roles of collective agency from the Roman imperial past to a post-imperial Christian present. In doing so, the study explores both key features of early medieval crowd history and how this history set the stage for notions, representations, and functions of collectives (such as parliaments) that would shape Western societies far beyond the medieval period."-Helmut Reimitz, Princeton University "Bobrycki asks productive questions about something that has barely been touched on as a subject for the early Middle Ages in Western Europe: how big were crowds? which regions and types of gathering had the biggest ones? and what impact did this have on the possibilities and perceptions of collective action? These are simple questions, but extremely difficult to answer. Bobrycki brings a wonderfully eclectic set of sources to bear on these issues, and in so doing fleshes out the look and feel of gatherings, political and otherwise, their qualitative dimensions as well as their quantitative ones, with brisk style and sparkling intelligence."-Alice Rio, King's College London "This book is excellent: intelligent and attractively written-it leads the reader on and in-and convincing. Bobrycki has turned a tricky subject into a straightforward one. Anyone interested in political interaction in early medieval Latin Europe will have to read it."-Chris Wickham, author of Framing t

"Winner of the Theodore Saloutos Memorial Award, Agricultural History Society" "Honorable Mention for the Vincent P. DeSantis Book Prize, Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era" "Co-Winner of the Silver Medal in Business Commentary, Axiom Business Book Awards" "One Smithsonian's Ten Best Books About Food of 2019" Joshua Specht is assistant professor of history at the University of Notre Dame. Twitter @joshspecht How beef conquered America and gave rise to the modern industrial food complex 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 industry spanning the country, with cattle bred on ranches in the rural West, slaughtered in Chicago, and consumed in the nation's rapidly growing cities. Red Meat Republic tells the remarkable story of the violent conflict over who would reap the benefits of this new industry and who would bear its heavy costs. Joshua Specht puts people at the heart of his story-the big cattle ranchers who helped to drive the nation's westward expansion, the meatpackers who created a radically new kind of industrialized slaughterhouse, and the stockyard workers who were subjected to the shocking and unsanitary conditions described by Upton Sinclair in his novel The Jungle. Specht brings to life a turbulent era marked by Indian wars, Chicago labor unrest, and food riots in the streets of New York. He shows how the enduring success of the cattle-beef complex-centralized, low cost, and meatpacker dominated-was a consequence of the meatpackers' ability to make their interests overlap with those of a hungry public, while the interests of struggling ranchers, desperate workers, and bankrupt butchers took a backseat. America-and the American table-would never be the same again. A compelling and unfailingly enjoyable read, Red Meat Republic reveals the complex history of exploitation and innovation behind the food we consume today. "Specht's story of how the meatpackers exploited unskilled labour, bankrupted local butchers and seized power from the railroads holds warnings for today."---Brooke Masters, Financial Times "Explaining how Americans came to eat so much beef and to pay so little for it turns out to be an especially gargantuan enterprise, which Specht pulls off with aplomb, in accessible and sprightly prose."---Samuel Moyn, New Republic "A fascinating cultural exploration."---Rebecca Onion, History Today "Specht tells the little-known story of how Americans became beef-eaters. From cattle ranches in the rural West to slaughterhouses in Chicago, the environmental and business historian charts the path of meat and, in doing so, delivers what is really a tale of people and power. . . . By following the meat industry through centuries of conflict, this book puts a new, troubling lens on American history."---Andrea Michelson, Smithsonian "In a signal contribution to a growing scholarship on the history of food, Specht's Red Meat Republic carefully traces the emergence of the modern beef industry, following the story from cow path to slaughterhouse. A troubling, fascinating read."-Jill Lepore, author of These Truths: A History of the United States "This book reveals how Americans became beef eaters, and it is not a story you know. Joshua Specht shows how this dramatic change in America's diet was grounded in a history of violence and social struggle, one that saw meatpackers prevailing over ranchers and butchers and becoming the feeders of the rapidly expanding republic."-Pekka Hämäläinen, author of The Comanche Empire "Specht's evocation of specific places-from the plains and the varied sites of industrial labor to the shops where meat was bought and the tables at which it was eaten-persuasively grounds his story in American culture. This is an impressive and compelling