A Five Books Best Economics Book of the Year
A Politico Great Weekend Read

“Absolutely compelling.”
—Diane Coyle

“The evolution of modern management is usually associated with good old-fashioned intelligence and ingenuity…But capitalism is not just about the free market; it was also built on the backs of slaves.”
—Forbes

The story of modern management generally looks to the factories of England and New England for its genesis. But after scouring through old accounting books, Caitlin Rosenthal discovered that Southern planter-capitalists practiced an early form of scientific management. They took meticulous notes, carefully recording daily profits and productivity, and subjected their slaves to experiments and incentive strategies comprised of rewards and brutal punishment. Challenging the traditional depiction of slavery as a barrier to innovation, Accounting for Slavery shows how elite planters turned their power over enslaved people into a productivity advantage. The result is a groundbreaking investigation of business practices in Southern and West Indian plantations and an essential contribution to our understanding of slavery’s relationship with capitalism.

“Slavery in the United States was a business. A morally reprehensible—and very profitable business…Rosenthal argues that slaveholders…were using advanced management and accounting techniques long before their northern counterparts. Techniques that are still used by businesses today.”
—Marketplace

“Rosenthal pored over hundreds of account books from U.S. and West Indian plantations…She found that their owners employed advanced accounting and management tools, including depreciation and standardized efficiency metrics.”
—Harvard Business Review

At the height of its power around 1800, the English East India Company controlled half of the world’s trade and deployed a vast network of political influencers at home and abroad. Yet the story of the Company’s beginnings in the early seventeenth century has remained largely untold. Rupali Mishra’s account of the East India Company’s formative years sheds new light on one of the most powerful corporations in the history of the world.

From its birth in 1600, the East India Company lay at the heart of English political and economic life. The Company’s fortunes were determined by the leading figures of the Stuart era, from the monarch and his privy counselors to an extended cast of eminent courtiers and powerful merchants. Drawing on a host of overlooked and underutilized sources, Mishra reconstructs the inner life of the Company, laying bare the era’s fierce struggles to define the difference between public and private interests and the use and abuse of power. Unlike traditional accounts, which portray the Company as a private entity that came to assume the powers of a state, Mishra’s history makes clear that, from its inception, the East India Company was embedded within—and inseparable from—the state.

A Business of State illuminates how the East India Company quickly came to inhabit such a unique role in England’s commercial and political ambitions. It also offers critical insights into the rise of the early modern English state and the expansion and development of its nascent empire.

Since the rise of the small-sum lending industry in the 1890s, people on the lowest rungs of the economic ladder in the United States have been asked to pay the greatest price for credit. Again and again, Americans have asked why the most fragile borrowers face the highest costs for access to the smallest loans. To protect low-wage workers in need of credit, reformers have repeatedly turned to law, only to face the vexing question of where to draw the line between necessary protection and overreaching paternalism.

City of Debtors shows how each generation of Americans has tackled the problem of fringe finance, using law to redefine the meaning of justice within capitalism for those on the economic margins. Anne Fleming tells the story of the small-sum lending industry’s growth and regulation from the ground up, following the people who navigated the market for small loans and those who shaped its development at the state and local level. Fleming’s focus on the city and state of New York, which served as incubators for numerous lending reforms that later spread throughout the nation, differentiates her approach from work that has centered on federal regulation. It also reveals the overlooked challenges of governing a modern financial industry within a federalist framework.

Fleming’s detailed work contributes to the broader and ongoing debate about the meaning of justice within capitalistic societies, by exploring the fault line in the landscape of capitalism where poverty, the welfare state, and consumer credit converge.

From Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben to the Jolly Green Giant and Ronald McDonald, corporate icons sell billions of dollars’ worth of products. But only one of them was ever a real person—Colonel Sanders of Kentucky Fried Chicken/KFC. From a 1930s roadside café in Corbin, Kentucky, Harland Sanders launched a fried chicken business that now circles the globe, serving “finger lickin’ good” chicken to more than twelve million people every day. But to get there, he had to give up control of his company and even his own image, becoming a mere symbol to people today who don’t know that Colonel Sanders was a very real human being. This book tells his story—the story of a dirt-poor striver with unlimited ambition who personified the American Dream.

Acclaimed cultural historian Josh Ozersky defines the American Dream as being able to transcend your roots and create yourself as you see fit. Harland Sanders did exactly that. Forced at age ten to go to work to help support his widowed mother and sisters, he failed at job after job until he went into business for himself as a gas station/café/motel owner and finally achieved a comfortable, middle-class life. But then the interstate bypassed his business and, at sixty-five, Sanders went broke again. Packing his car with a pressure cooker and his secret blend of eleven herbs and spices, he began peddling the recipe for “Colonel Sanders’ Kentucky Fried Chicken” to small-town diners in exchange for a nickel for each chicken they sold. Ozersky traces the rise of Kentucky Fried Chicken from this unlikely beginning, telling the dramatic story of Sanders’ self-transformation into “The Colonel,” his truculent relationship with KFC management as their often-disregarded goodwill ambassador, and his equally turbulent afterlife as the world’s most recognizable commercial icon.

The du Ponts, one of the most powerful families in American industry, actively fought the policies that gave government more and more power over the economy. It was not centralization they opposed—indeed, the New Deal initially gained their favor because it appeared to promise a “corporate state” administered along the same lines as a business organization—but the sharing, or brokering, of power among various political interests. If government was to direct the economy, they felt, it should be in the hands of proven business leaders such as themselves.

The du Pont brothers and their close colleague, John Raskob, first tried their hand at political action by waging a campaign against prohibition, which they said intruded upon the liberty of all citizens, raised taxes, and hampered the economy. It was this issue, and the management of public schools, that prompted the industrialists to propose business-style administrative bodies in government. To further this goal the du Ponts became increasingly active in the Democratic Party, especially the presidential campaigns from 1928 to 1940.

With the repeal of prohibition and the creation of the National Recovery Administration, the New Deal at first looked promising to the du Ponts. But they contested the emerging broker state—one that legitimated the rival claims of competing interests and maintained dual structures of public and private economic governance—of the late 1930s. When the chance for national political management by a private, centralized industrial hierarchy and corporatism failed to gain a hold in the American polity, the du Ponts joined forces with the opposition. They backed the supposedly nonpartisan Liberty League with the intention of organizing a grass-roots protest of the incursion of government into peoples’ lives and the increasing power of the executive branch. But the League received little popular support and survived only by the contributions of disaffected business leaders.

Throughout these turbulent years the du Ponts kept up an active correspondence; rarely does the historian have access to such extensive personal as well as official records. By focusing on one family’s contribution to the economic and political debate between the world wars, Robert Burk casts light on the changing fortunes of business and government in twentieth-century America. In so doing, he modifies some of our popular conceptions about the 1920s and 1930s.

Recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions in Citizens United and other high-profile cases have sparked passionate disagreement about the proper role of corporations in American democracy. Partisans on both sides have made bold claims, often with little basis in historical facts. Bringing together leading scholars of history, law, and political science, Corporations and American Democracy provides the historical and intellectual grounding necessary to put today’s corporate policy debates in proper context.

From the nation’s founding to the present, Americans have regarded corporations with ambivalence—embracing their potential to revolutionize economic life and yet remaining wary of their capacity to undermine democratic institutions. Although corporations were originally created to give businesses and other associations special legal rights and privileges, historically they were denied many of the constitutional protections afforded flesh-and-blood citizens.

This comprehensive volume covers a range of topics, including the origins of corporations in English and American law, the historical shift from special charters to general incorporation, the increased variety of corporations that this shift made possible, and the roots of modern corporate regulation in the Progressive Era and New Deal. It also covers the evolution of judicial views of corporate rights, particularly since corporations have become the form of choice for an increasing variety of nonbusiness organizations, including political advocacy groups. Ironically, in today’s global economy the decline of large, vertically integrated corporations—the type of corporation that past reform movements fought so hard to regulate—poses some of the newest challenges to effective government oversight of the economy.

Corporate social responsibility has entered the mainstream, but what does it take to run a successful purpose-driven business? A Harvard Business School professor examines leaders who put values alongside profits to showcase the challenges and upside of deeply responsible business.

For decades, CEOs have been told that their only responsibility is to the bottom line. But consensus is that companies—and their leaders—must engage with their social and environmental contexts. The man behind one of Harvard Business School's most popular courses, Geoffrey Jones distinguishes deep responsibility, which can deliver radical social and ecological responses, from corporate social responsibility, which is often little more than window dressing.

Deeply Responsible Business offers an invaluable historical perspective, going back to the Quaker capitalism of George Cadbury and the worker solidarity of Edward Filene. Through a series of in-depth profiles of business leaders and their companies, it carries us from India to Japan and from the turmoil of the nineteenth century to the latest developments in impact investing and the B-corps. Jones profiles business leaders from around the world who combined profits with social purpose to confront inequality, inner-city blight, and ecological degradation, while navigating restrictive laws and authoritarian regimes.

He found that these leaders were motivated by bedrock values and sometimes—but not always—driven by faith. They chose to operate in socially productive fields, interacted with humility with stakeholders, and felt a duty to support their communities. While far from perfect—some combined visionary practices with vital flaws—each one showed that profit and purpose could be reconciled. Many of their businesses were highly successful—though financial success was not their only metric of achievement.

As companies seek to coopt ethically sensitized consumers, Jones gives us a new perspective to tackle tough questions. Inspired by these passionate and pragmatic business leaders, he envisions a future in which companies and entrepreneurs can play a key role in healing our communities and protecting the natural world.

Although alcohol is generally forbidden in Muslim countries, beer has been an important part of Egyptian identity for much of the last century. Egypt’s Stella beer (which only coincidentally shares a name with the Belgian beer Stella Artois) became a particularly meaningful symbol of the changes that occurred in Egypt after British Occupation.

Weaving cultural studies with business history, Egypt’s Beer traces Egyptian history from 1880 to 2003 through the study of social, economic, and technological changes that surrounded the production and consumption of Stella beer in Egypt, providing an unparalleled case study of economic success during an era of seismic transformation. Delving into archival troves—including the papers of his grandfather, who for twenty years was CEO of the company that produced Stella—Omar D. Foda explains how Stella Beer achieved a powerful presence in all popular forms of art and media, including Arabic novels, songs, films, and journalism. As the company’s success was built on a mix of innovation, efficient use of local resources, executive excellence, and shifting cultural dynamics, this is the story of the rise of a distinctly Egyptian “modernity” seen through the lens of a distinctly Egyptian brand.

The poignant rise and fall of an idealistic immigrant who, as CEO of a major conglomerate, tried to change the way America did business before he himself was swallowed up by corporate corruption.

At 8 a.m. on February 3, 1975, Eli Black leapt to his death from the 44th floor of Manhattan’s Pan Am building. The immigrant-turned-CEO of United Brands—formerly United Fruit, now Chiquita—Black seemed an embodiment of the American dream. United Brands was transformed under his leadership—from the “octopus,” a nickname that captured the corrupt power the company had held over Latin American governments, to “the most socially conscious company in the hemisphere,” according to a well-placed commentator. How did it all go wrong?

Eli and the Octopus traces the rise and fall of an enigmatic business leader and his influence on the nascent project of corporate social responsibility. Born Menashe Elihu Blachowitz in Lublin, Poland, Black arrived in New York at the age of three and became a rabbi before entering the business world. Driven by the moral tenets of his faith, he charted a new course in industries known for poor treatment of workers, partnering with labor leaders like Cesar Chavez to improve conditions. But risky investments, economic recession, and a costly wave of natural disasters led Black away from the path of reform and toward corrupt backroom dealing.

Now, two decades after Google’s embrace of “Don’t be evil” as its unofficial motto, debates about “ethical capitalism” are more heated than ever. Matt Garcia presents an unvarnished portrait of Black’s complicated legacy. Exploring the limits of corporate social responsibility on American life, Eli and the Octopus offers pointed lessons for those who hope to do good while doing business.

“A landmark book…[a] bold reframing of the history of the British Empire.”
—Caroline Elkins, Foreign Affairs

An award-winning historian places the corporation—more than the Crown—at the heart of British colonialism, arguing that companies built and governed global empire, raising questions about public and private power that were just as troubling four hundred years ago as they are today.

Across four centuries, from Ireland to India, the Americas to Africa and Australia, British colonialism was above all the business of corporations. Corporations conceived, promoted, financed, and governed overseas expansion, making claims over territory and peoples while ensuring that British and colonial society were invested, quite literally, in their ventures. Colonial companies were also relentlessly controversial, frequently in debt, and prone to failure. The corporation was well-suited to overseas expansion not because it was an inevitable juggernaut but because, like empire itself, it was an elusive contradiction: public and private; person and society; subordinate and autonomous; centralized and diffuse; immortal and precarious; national and cosmopolitan—a legal fiction with very real power.

Breaking from traditional histories in which corporations take a supporting role by doing the dirty work of sovereign states in exchange for commercial monopolies, Philip Stern argues that corporations took the lead in global expansion and administration. Whether in sixteenth-century Ireland and North America or the Falklands in the early 1980s, corporations were key players. And, as Empire, Incorporated makes clear, venture colonialism did not cease with the end of empire. Its legacies continue to raise questions about corporate power that are just as relevant today as they were 400 years ago.

Challenging conventional wisdom about where power is held on a global scale, Stern complicates the supposedly firm distinction between private enterprise and the state, offering a new history of the British Empire, as well as a new history of the corporation.

“An extraordinary work of intellectual history as well as a scholarly tour de force, a bracing polemic, and a work of Christian prophecy…McCarraher challenges more than 200 years of post-Enlightenment assumptions about the way we live and work.”
—The Observer

At least since Max Weber, capitalism has been understood as part of the “disenchantment” of the world, stripping material objects and social relations of their mystery and magic. In this magisterial work, Eugene McCarraher challenges this conventional view. Capitalism, he argues, is full of sacrament, whether one is prepared to acknowledge it or not. First flowering in the fields and factories of England and brought to America by Puritans and evangelicals, whose doctrine made ample room for industry and profit, capitalism has become so thoroughly enmeshed in the fabric of our society that our faith in “the market” has become sacrosanct.

Informed by cultural history and theology as well as management theory, The Enchantments of Mammon looks to nineteenth-century Romantics, whose vision of labor combined reason, creativity, and mutual aid, for salvation. In this impassioned challenge to some of our most firmly held assumptions, McCarraher argues that capitalism has hijacked our intrinsic longing for divinity—and urges us to break its hold on our souls.

“A majestic achievement…It is a work of great moral and spiritual intelligence, and one that invites contemplation about things we can’t afford not to care about deeply.”
—Commonweal

“More brilliant, more capacious, and more entertaining, page by page, than his most ardent fans dared hope. The magnitude of his accomplishment—an account of American capitalism as a religion…will stun even skeptical readers.”
—Christian Century

More than any other single group of individuals, the Boston Associates were responsible for the sweeping economic transformation that occurred in New England between 1815 and 1861. Through the use of the corporate form, they established an extensive network of modern business enterprises that were among the largest of the time. Their most notable achievement was the development of the Waltham-Lowell system in the textile industry, but they were also active in transportation, banking, and insurance, and at the same time played a major role in philanthropy and politics.

Evaluating each of these efforts in turn and placing the Associates in the context of the society and culture that produced them, the author convincingly explains the complex motives that led the group to undertake initiatives on so many different fronts. Dalzell shows that men like Francis Cabot Lowell, Nathan Appleton, and Amos and Abbott Lawrence are best understood as transitional figures. Although they used modern methods when it suited their interest, they were most concerned with protecting the positions they had already won at the top of a traditional social order. Thus, for all the innovations they sponsored, their commitment to change remained both partial and highly selective. And while something very like an industrial revolution did occur in New England during the nineteenth century, paradoxically the Associates neither sought nor welcomed it. On the contrary, as time passed they became increasingly preoccupied with combating the forces of change.

In addition to the light it sheds on a crucial chapter of business history, this gracefully written study offers fresh insights into the role and attitudes of elites during the period. Furthermore it contradicts some of the prevailing thought about entrepreneurial behavior in the early phases of industrialization in America.

Travis Vogan teams archival research and interviews with an all-star cast to pen the definitive account of how ESPN turned X's and O's into billions of $$$. Vogan's institutional and cultural history focuses on the network since 1998, the year it launched a high-motor effort to craft its brand and grow audiences across media platforms. As he shows, innovative properties like SportsCentury, ESPN The Magazine, and 30 for 30 built the network's cultural caché. This credibility, in turn, propelled ESPN's transformation into an entity that lapped its run-of-the-mill competitors and helped fulfill its self-proclaimed status as the "Worldwide Leader in Sports."

Ambitious and long overdue, ESPN: The Making of a Sports Media Empire offers an inside look at how the network changed an industry and reshaped the very way we live as sports fans.

Business is political. What are the ethics of it?

Businesses are political actors. They not only fund political campaigns, take stances on social issues, and wave the flags of identity groups – they also affect politics in their everyday hiring and investment decisions. As a highly polarized public demands political alignment from the powerful businesses they deal with, what’s a company to do?

Amit Ron and Abraham Singer show that the unavoidably political role of companies in modern life is both the fundamental problem and inescapable fact of business ethics: corporate power makes business ethics necessary, and business ethics must strive to mitigate corporate power. Because of its economic and social influence, Ron and Singer forcefully argue that modern business’s primary social responsibility is to democracy. Businesses must work to avoid wielding their power in ways that undermine key democratic practices like elections, public debate, and social movements. Pragmatic and urgent, Everyone’s Business offers an essential new framework for how we pursue profit—and democracy—in our increasingly divided world.

In the aftermath of a financial crisis marked by bank-friendly bailouts and loosening campaign finance restrictions, a chorus of critics warns that business leaders have too much influence over American politics. Mark Mizruchi worries about the ways they exert too little. The Fracturing of the American Corporate Elite advances the surprising argument that American CEOs, seemingly more powerful today than ever, have abrogated the key leadership role they once played in addressing national challenges, with grave consequences for American society.

Following World War II, American business leaders observed an ethic of civic responsibility and enlightened self-interest. Steering a course of moderation and pragmatism, they accepted the legitimacy of organized labor and federal regulation of the economy and offered support, sometimes actively, as Congress passed legislation to build the interstate highway system, reduce discrimination in hiring, and provide a safety net for the elderly and needy. In the 1970s, however, faced with inflation, foreign competition, and growing public criticism, corporate leaders became increasingly confrontational with labor and government. As they succeeded in taming their opponents, business leaders paradoxically undermined their ability to act collectively. The acquisition wave of the 1980s created further pressures to focus on shareholder value and short-term gain rather than long-term problems facing their country.

Today’s corporate elite is a fragmented, ineffectual group that is unwilling to tackle the big issues, despite unprecedented wealth and political clout. Mizruchi’s sobering assessment of the dissolution of America’s business class helps explain the polarization and gridlock that stifle U.S. politics.

Gentlemen Bankers investigates the social and economic circles of one of America’s most renowned and influential financiers to uncover how the Morgan family’s power and prestige stemmed from its unique position within a network of local and international relationships.

At the turn of the twentieth century, private banking was a personal enterprise in which business relationships were a statement of identity and reputation. In an era when ethnic and religious differences were pronounced and anti-Semitism was prevalent, Anglo-American and German-Jewish elite bankers lived in their respective cordoned communities, seldom interacting with one another outside the business realm. Ironically, the tacit agreement to maintain separate social spheres made it easier to cooperate in purely financial matters on Wall Street. But as Susie Pak demonstrates, the Morgans’ exceptional relationship with the German-Jewish investment bank Kuhn, Loeb & Co., their strongest competitor and also an important collaborator, was entangled in ways that went far beyond the pursuit of mutual profitability.

Delving into the archives of many Morgan partners and legacies, Gentlemen Bankers draws on never-before published letters and testimony to tell a closely focused story of how economic and political interests intersected with personal rivalries and friendships among the Wall Street aristocracy during the first half of the twentieth century.

A university press is a curious institution, dedicated to the dissemination of learning yet apart from the academic structure; a publishing firm that is in business, but not to make money; an arm of the university that is frequently misunderstood and occasionally attacked by faculty and administration. Max Hall here chronicles the early stages and first sixty years of Harvard University Press in a rich and entertaining book that is at once Harvard history, publishing history, printing history, business history, and intellectual history.

The tale begins in 1638 when the first printing press arrived in British North America. It became the property of Harvard College and remained so for nearly half a century. Hall sketches the various forerunners of the “real” Harvard University Press, founded in 1913, and then follows the ups and downs of its first six decades, during which the Press published steadily if not always serenely a total of 4,500 books. He describes the directors and others who left their stamp on the Press or guided its fortunes during these years. And he gives the stories behind such enduring works as Lovejoy’s Great Chain of Being, Giedion’s Space, Time and Architecture, Langer’s Philosophy in a New Key, and Kelly’s Eleanor of Aquitaine and the Four Kings.

Violet Crown Award, Writers League of Texas, 2007
Citation, San Antonio Conservation Society, 2009

Scarred by the deaths of his mother and sisters and the failure of his father's business, a young man dreamed of making enough money to retire early and retreat into the secure world that his childhood tragedies had torn from him. But Harry Luby refused to be a robber baron. Turning totally against the tide of avaricious capitalism, he determined to make a fortune by doing good. Starting with that unlikely, even naive, ambition in 1911, Harry Luby founded a cafeteria empire that by the 1980s had revenues second only to McDonald's. So successfully did Luby and his heirs satisfy the tastes of America that Luby's became the country's largest cafeteria chain, creating more millionaires per capita among its employees than any other corporation of its size. Even more surprising, the company stayed true to Harry Luby's vision for eight decades, making money by treating its customers and employees exceptionally well.

Written with the sweep and drama of a novel, House of Plenty tells the engrossing story of Luby's founding and phenomenal growth, its long run as America's favorite family restaurant during the post-World War II decades, its financial failure during the greed-driven 1990s when non-family leadership jettisoned the company's proven business model, and its recent struggle back to solvency. Carol Dawson and Carol Johnston draw on insider stories and company records to recapture the forces that propelled the company to its greatest heights, including its unprecedented practices of allowing store managers to keep 40 percent of net profits and issuing stock to all employees, which allowed thousands of Luby's workers to achieve the American dream of honestly earned prosperity. The authors also plumb the depths of the Luby's drama, including a hushed-up theft that split the family for decades; the 1991 mass shooting at the Killeen Luby's, which splattered the company's good name across headlines nationwide; and the rapacious over-expansion that more than doubled the company's size in nine years (1987-1996), pushed it into bankruptcy, and drove president and CEO John Edward Curtis Jr. to violent suicide.

Disproving F. Scott Fitzgerald's adage that "there are no second acts in American lives," House of Plenty tells the epic story of an iconic American institution that has risen, fallen, and found redemption—with no curtain call in sight.

How can workers retain job security in an industry currently experiencing extensive restructuring and retrenchment? In the United States, massive layoffs in the 1980s in industries like steel have resulted in increased worker demands for job security provisions in collective agreements and legal protections against layoffs. In many Western European countries, where private-sector practices ensuring strong job security and laws regulating layoff practices were well established, the 1980s brought strong pressure from business to relax job security in order to facilitate rapid restructuring.

Susan Houseman's book presents some of the first hard evidence on the economic effects of providing job security, evidence gathered during the restructuring of the European Community's steel industry in the 1970s and 1980s. The author reviews personnel practices by the Community's leading steel companies, basing her analysis on extensive interviews with employers, workers, and government officials in West Germany, France, Britain, Belgium, Luxembourg, Italy, and the Netherlands. Drawing on economic theory, she shows that the extent of workers' rights to job security will affect how an industry optimally adjusts to a decline in demand and to a situation of excess capacity.

Using detailed plant data, she shows that job security for workers affected decisions concerning employment, production, investment, and plant closures in the industry, While job security for workers may slow the process of industrial restructuring and result in lower productivity, the author points out that it also generates important social benefits, including community stability and a more equitable distribution of the risks and costs of economic change.
This book will draw the attention of policymakers in government and in international organizations such as the European Community, the OECD, and the ILO. It will also be of interest to scholars in labor economics, industrial relations, public policy, and business.

Although much has already been written about the rise and fall of Enron, four important questions remain unanswered: What management behavior and practices led Enron down the path from truly innovative to fraudulent management? How could Enron’s board of directors have failed to detect the business, ethical, and legal risks embedded in the company’s aggressive financial strategies and accounting practices? Why did Enron’s external watchdogs—security analysts, credit-rating agencies, and regulatory agencies—fail to bark? What actions can prevent Enron-type breakdowns in the future? Innovation Corrupted addresses each of these questions.

In contrast to the time-line narratives of previous books on Enron that offer interesting but largely unsystematic insight into individual actions and organizational processes, Innovation Corrupted pursues a more methodical analysis of the causes and lessons of Enron’s collapse. Based upon newly available sources, Salter identifies the social pathologies and administrative failures that fostered the company’s ethical drift and inhibited the board of directors from exercising effective governance and control. Salter also goes beyond the work of previous books by proposing practical recommendations for preventing future Enron-type disasters. These prescriptions relate to board oversight, financial incentives for executives, and, most importantly, the maintenance of ethical discipline when operating in the murky borderlands of the law. It was in this shadowed space that Enron’s senior executives lost their way.

Long before Deng Xiaoping’s market-based reforms, commercial relationships bound the Chinese Communist Party to international capitalism and left lasting marks on China’s trade and diplomacy.

China today seems caught in a contradiction: a capitalist state led by a Communist party. But as Market Maoists shows, this seeming paradox is nothing new. Since the 1930s, before the Chinese Communist Party came to power, Communist traders and diplomats have sought deals with capitalists in an effort to fuel political transformation and the restoration of Chinese power. For as long as there have been Communists in China, they have been reconciling revolutionary aspirations at home with market realities abroad.

Jason Kelly unearths this hidden history of global commerce, finding that even Mao Zedong saw no fundamental conflict between trading with capitalists and chasing revolution. China’s ties to capitalism transformed under Mao but were never broken. And it was not just goods and currencies that changed hands. Sustained contact with foreign capitalists shaped the Chinese nation under Communism and left deep impressions on foreign policy. Deals demanded mutual intelligibility and cooperation. As a result, international transactions facilitated the exchange of ideas, habits, and beliefs, leaving subtle but lasting effects on the values and attitudes of individuals and institutions.

Drawing from official and commercial archives around the world, including newly available internal Chinese Communist Party documents, Market Maoists recasts our understanding of China’s relationship with global capitalism, revealing how these early accommodations laid the groundwork for China’s embrace of capitalism in the 1980s and after.

China’s status in the world of expanding European empires of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has long been under dispute. Its unequal relations with multiple powers, secured through a system of treaties rather than through colonization, has invited debate over the degree and significance of outside control and local sovereignty. Navigating Semi-Colonialism examines steam navigation—introduced by foreign powers to Chinese waters in the mid-nineteenth century—as a constitutive element of the treaty system to illuminate both conceptual and concrete aspects of this regime, arguing for the specificity of China’s experience, its continuities with colonialism in other contexts, and its links to global processes.

Focusing on the shipping network of open treaty ports, the book examines the expansion of steam navigation, the growth of shipping enterprise, and the social climate of the steamship in the late nineteenth century as arenas of contestation and collaboration that highlight the significance of partial Chinese sovereignty and the limitations imposed upon it. It further analyzes the transformation of this regime under the nationalism of the Republican period, and pursues a comparison of shipping regimes in China and India to provide a novel perspective on China under the treaty system.

“The ultimate story behind all the stories… In an age when the press is alternately villain or hero, Pressman serves as a kind of medicine man of journalism, telling us how we got from there to here.”—Graydon Carter, former editor of Vanity Fair

In the 1960s and 1970s, the American press embraced a new way of reporting and selling the news. The causes were many: the proliferation of television, pressure to rectify the news media’s dismal treatment of minorities and women, accusations of bias from left and right, and the migration of affluent subscribers to suburbs. As Matthew Pressman’s timely history reveals, during these tumultuous decades the core values that held the profession together broke apart, and the distinctive characteristics of contemporary American journalism emerged.

Simply reporting the facts was no longer enough. In a country facing assassinations, a failing war in Vietnam, and presidential impeachment, reporters recognized a pressing need to interpret and analyze events for their readers. Objectivity and impartiality, the cornerstones of journalistic principle, were not jettisoned, but they were reimagined. Journalists’ adoption of an adversarial relationship with government and big business, along with sympathy for the dispossessed, gave their reporting a distinctly liberal drift. Yet at the same time, “soft news”—lifestyle, arts, entertainment—moved to the forefront of editors’ concerns, as profits took precedence over politics.

Today, the American press stands once again at a precipice. Accusations of political bias are more rampant than ever, and there are increasing calls from activists, customers, advertisers, and reporters themselves to rethink the values that drive the industry. As On Press suggests, today’s controversies—the latest iteration of debates that began a half-century ago—will likely take the press in unforeseen directions and challenge its survival.

The rapid growth of Taiwan’s postwar “miracle” economy is most frequently credited to the leading role of the state in promoting economic development. Megan Greene challenges this standard interpretation in the first in-depth examination of the origins of Taiwan’s developmental state.

Greene examines the ways in which the Guomindang state planned and promoted scientific and technical development both in mainland China between 1927 and 1949 and on Taiwan after 1949. Using industrial science policy as a lens, she shows that the state, even during its most authoritarian periods, did not function as a monolithic entity. State planners were concerned with maximizing the use of Taiwan’s limited resources for industrial development. Political leaders, on the other hand, were most concerned with the state’s political survival. The developmental state emerged gradually as a result of the combined efforts of technocrats and outsiders, including academicians and foreign advisors. Only when the political leadership put its authority and weight behind the vision of these early planners did Taiwan’s developmental state fully come into being.

In Taiwan’s combination of technocratic expertise and political authoritarianism lie implications for our understanding of changes taking place in mainland China today.

An innovative history of the fashion industry, focusing on the connections between Paris and New York, art and finance, and design and manufacturing.

Fashion is one of the most dynamic industries in the world, with an annual retail value of $3 trillion and globally recognized icons like Coco Chanel, Christian Dior, and Yves Saint Laurent. How did this industry generate such economic and symbolic capital?

Focusing on the roles of entrepreneurs, designers, and institutions in fashion’s two most important twentieth-century centers, Paris to New York tells the history of the industry as a negotiation between art and commerce. In the late nineteenth century, Paris-based firms set the tone for a global fashion culture nurtured by artistic visionaries. In the burgeoning New York industry, however, the focus was on mass production. American buyers, trend scouts, and designers crossed the Atlantic to attend couture openings, where they were inspired by, and often accused of counterfeiting, designs made in Paris. For their part, Paris couturiers traveled to New York to understand what American consumers wanted and to make deals with local manufacturers for whom they designed exclusive garments and accessories. The cooperation and competition between the two continents transformed the fashion industry in the early and mid-twentieth century, producing a hybrid of art and commodity.

Véronique Pouillard shows how the Paris–New York connection gave way in the 1960s to a network of widely distributed design and manufacturing centers. Since then, fashion has diversified. Tastes are no longer set by elites alone, but come from the street and from countercultures, and the business of fashion has transformed into a global enterprise.

The company is under-performing, its share price is trailing, and the CEO gets...a multi-million-dollar raise. This story is familiar, for good reason: as this book clearly demonstrates, structural flaws in corporate governance have produced widespread distortions in executive pay. Pay without Performance presents a disconcerting portrait of managers' influence over their own pay--and of a governance system that must fundamentally change if firms are to be managed in the interest of shareholders.

Lucian Bebchuk and Jesse Fried demonstrate that corporate boards have persistently failed to negotiate at arm's length with the executives they are meant to oversee. They give a richly detailed account of how pay practices--from option plans to retirement benefits--have decoupled compensation from performance and have camouflaged both the amount and performance-insensitivity of pay. Executives' unwonted influence over their compensation has hurt shareholders by increasing pay levels and, even more importantly, by leading to practices that dilute and distort managers' incentives.

This book identifies basic problems with our current reliance on boards as guardians of shareholder interests. And the solution, the authors argue, is not merely to make these boards more independent of executives as recent reforms attempt to do. Rather, boards should also be made more dependent on shareholders by eliminating the arrangements that entrench directors and insulate them from their shareholders. A powerful critique of executive compensation and corporate governance, Pay without Performance points the way to restoring corporate integrity and improving corporate performance.

When Steven Burd, CEO of the supermarket chain Safeway, cut wages and benefits, starting a five-month strike by 59,000 unionized workers, he was confident he would win. But where traditional labor action failed, a novel approach was more successful. With the aid of the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, a $300 billion pension fund, workers led a shareholder revolt that unseated three of Burd’s boardroom allies.

In The Rise of the Working-Class Shareholder: Labor's Last Best Weapon, David Webber uses cases such as Safeway’s to shine a light on labor’s most potent remaining weapon: its multitrillion-dollar pension funds. Outmaneuvered at the bargaining table and under constant assault in Washington, state houses, and the courts, worker organizations are beginning to exercise muscle through markets. Shareholder activism has been used to divest from anti-labor companies, gun makers, and tobacco; diversify corporate boards; support Occupy Wall Street; force global warming onto the corporate agenda; create jobs; and challenge outlandish CEO pay. Webber argues that workers have found in labor’s capital a potent strategy against their exploiters. He explains the tactic’s surmountable difficulties even as he cautions that corporate interests are already working to deny labor’s access to this powerful and underused tool.

The Rise of the Working-Class Shareholder is a rare good-news story for American workers, an opportunity hiding in plain sight. Combining legal rigor with inspiring narratives of labor victory, Webber shows how workers can wield their own capital to reclaim their strength.

An eye-opening portrait of global capitalism spanning 150 years, told through the history of the Tata corporation.

Nearly a century old, the grand façade of Bombay House is hard to miss in the historic business district of Mumbai. This is the iconic global headquarters of the Tata Group, a multinational corporation that produces everything from salt to software. After getting their start in the cotton and opium trades, the Tatas, a Parsi family from Navsari, Gujarat, ascended to commanding heights in the Indian economy by the time of independence in 1947. Over the course of its 150-year history Tata spun textiles, forged steel, generated hydroelectric power, and took to the skies. It also faced challenges from restive workers fighting for their rights and political leaders who sought to curb its power.

In this sweeping history, Mircea Raianu tracks the fortunes of a family-run business that was born during the high noon of the British Empire and went on to capture the world’s attention with the headline-making acquisition of luxury car manufacturer Jaguar Land Rover. The growth of Tata was a complex process shaped by world historical forces: the eclipse of imperial free trade, the intertwined rise of nationalism and the developmental state, and finally the return of globalization and market liberalization. Today Tata is the leading light of one of the world’s major economies, selling steel, chemicals, food, financial services, and nearly everything else, while operating philanthropic institutions that channel expert knowledge in fields such as engineering and medicine.

Based on painstaking research in the company’s archive, Tata elucidates how a titan of industry was created and what lessons its story may hold for the future of global capitalism.

When the Fox Film Corporation merged with Twentieth Century Pictures in 1935, the company posed little threat to industry juggernauts such as Paramount and MGM. In the years that followed however, guided by executives Darryl F. Zanuck and Spyros Skouras, it soon emerged as one of the most important studios. Though working from separate offices in New York and Los Angeles and often of two different minds, the two men navigated Twentieth Century-Fox through the trials of the World War II boom, the birth of television, the Hollywood Blacklist, and more to an era of exceptional success, which included what was then the highest grossing movie of all time, The Sound of Music.

Twentieth Century-Fox is a comprehensive examination of the studio’s transformation during the Zanuck-Skouras era. Instead of limiting his scope to the Hollywood production studio, Lev also delves into the corporate strategies, distribution models, government relations, and technological innovations that were the responsibilities of the New York headquarters. Moving chronologically, he examines the corporate history before analyzing individual films produced by Twentieth Century-Fox during that period. Drawn largely from original archival research, Twentieth Century-Fox offers not only enlightening analyses and new insights into the films and the history of the company, but also affords the reader a unique perspective from which to view the evolution of the entire film industry.

The bar code is now at the core of commerce, transportation, warehousing, manufacturing, and retailing, and its influence has spread to virtually every industry in the industrialized world. When this voluntary product code was first introduced in 1974, it led to the worldwide revolution in supply chain efficiency.

To celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of this now universally embraced technology, the Smithsonian Institution sponsored a symposium. Gathered together in this volume are the thoughts of eight speakers with hands-on experience concerning the development, diffusion, adoption, and applications of a truly groundbreaking technology. The volume concludes with papers from a panel discussion among those involved in creating the Universal Product Code, the foundation of the bar code.

“An incisive history of the venture-capital industry.”
—New Yorker

“An excellent and original economic history of venture capital.”
—Tyler Cowen, Marginal Revolution

“A detailed, fact-filled account of America’s most celebrated moneymen.”
—New Republic

“Extremely interesting, readable, and informative…Tom Nicholas tells you most everything you ever wanted to know about the history of venture capital, from the financing of the whaling industry to the present multibillion-dollar venture funds.”
—Arthur Rock

“In principle, venture capital is where the ordinarily conservative, cynical domain of big money touches dreamy, long-shot enterprise. In practice, it has become the distinguishing big-business engine of our time…[A] first-rate history.”
—New Yorker

VC tells the riveting story of how the venture capital industry arose from America’s longstanding identification with entrepreneurship and risk-taking. Whether the venture is a whaling voyage setting sail from New Bedford or the latest Silicon Valley startup, VC is a state of mind as much as a way of doing business, exemplified by an appetite for seeking extreme financial rewards, a tolerance for failure and experimentation, and a faith in the promise of innovation to generate new wealth.

Tom Nicholas’s authoritative history takes us on a roller coaster of entrepreneurial successes and setbacks. It describes how iconic firms like Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia invested in Genentech and Apple even as it tells the larger story of VC’s birth and evolution, revealing along the way why venture capital is such a quintessentially American institution—one that has proven difficult to recreate elsewhere.

Ai Hisano exposes how corporations, the American government, and consumers shaped the colors of what we eat and even the colors of what we consider “natural,” “fresh,” and “wholesome.”

The yellow of margarine, the red of meat, the bright orange of “natural” oranges—we live in the modern world of the senses created by business. Ai Hisano reveals how the food industry capitalized on color, and how the creation of a new visual vocabulary has shaped what we think of the food we eat. Constructing standards for the colors of food and the meanings we associate with them—wholesome, fresh, uniform—has been a business practice since the late nineteenth century, though one invisible to consumers. Under the growing influences of corporate profit and consumer expectations, firms have sought to control our sensory experiences ever since.

Visualizing Taste explores how our perceptions of what food should look like have changed over the course of more than a century. By examining the development of color-controlling technology, government regulation, and consumer expectations, Hisano demonstrates that scientists, farmers, food processors, dye manufacturers, government officials, and intermediate suppliers have created a version of “natural” that is, in fact, highly engineered. Retailers and marketers have used scientific data about color to stimulate and influence consumers’—and especially female consumers’—sensory desires, triggering our appetites and cravings. Grasping this pivotal transformation in how we see, and how we consume, is critical to understanding the business of food.