New Books in Economic and Business History

Temptations in Ruin: Sovereign Accumulation and the Making of Post-Genocide Turkey (U Pennsylvania Press, 2025) examines the political-economic afterlife of the Armenian genocide in present-day Turkey, focusing on the region of Muş (Moush). Anthropologist Alice von Bieberstein explores how the 1915 genocide and dispossession of Armenians shaped property regimes, citizenship, and economic logics that continue to reverberate today.By combining ethnography with historical context and diverse perspectives, Temptations in Ruin generates new insights into how past violence shapes contemporary economic practices and social relations. To tell this history, von Bieberstein introduces the concept of “sovereign accumulation” to describe the ways in which the state and other actors mobilize histories of sovereign violence for present-day economic benefit. This framework illuminates the legacy of violence and resource extraction present in such practices as urban renewal projects, treasure hunting for “Armenian gold,” and heritage tourism and identifies these practices’ very existence as manifestations of the economic aftermath of the genocide.Temptations in Ruin uncovers the ways in which the genocide gave rise to a racialized property regime and a recursive movement of sovereign accumulation that builds on and re-animates the Armenian genocide as generative of wealth in the present. And it demonstrates the complex interplay between genocide denial, destruction, and valorization in post-genocide contexts. Highlighting the enduring resonance of genocide, von Bieberstein enhances our understanding of political violence’s long-term impacts on society and on the economy.

Alice von Bieberstein is Assistant Professor of Social Anthropology at Humboldt University, Berlin.
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⁠How Low Interest Rates Change the World: Global Trends Caused by Low Rates and Emerging Factors Shaping the Future of Rates⁠ (Oxford UP, 2025) explores the societal impact of changing interest rates. Taking its starting point in the remarkable four-decade decline in global interest rates from 1980 to 2020, the book examines five global trends it caused, the underlying factors that drove interest rates lower, and emerging trends likely to shape the future path of interest rates.

The book contends that the steady decline in interest rates around the world from 1980 to 2020 played a pivotal role in shaping five significant global trends during the same period: soaring debt levels, escalating housing prices, surging stock markets, widening economic inequality, and increased financial risk-taking.

The book also explores emerging factors likely to shape the future trajectory of interest rates. While demographic trends may keep rates low, other forces, such as rising public debt, can push them higher. The book offers its perspective on the interaction of these opposing trends, and presents its view on the future evolution of interest rates.

How Low Interest Rates Change the World is a no-nonsense fact-based book written in plain language. A key feature of the book is its empirical approach and reliance on data. Figures and tables richly illustrate and support the arguments presented, thereby inviting a broad audience to follow its fascinating journey into the evolution of interest rates and their impact.

Transcript ⁠here⁠
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Information and communication technologies have fundamentally altered the markets for capital, labor, supplies, and distribution in ways that undermine the basic categories we use to understand the economy. Nationality, industry, firm, size, employee, and other fundamental terms are increasingly detached from the operations of the economy. If we want to understand and tame the new sources of economic power, we need a new diagnosis and a new set of tools. The broad consensus across the political spectrum in the US that monopolistic corporations – particularly Big Tech companies -- have grown too powerful, and that we need to revive antitrust to take on the 'curse of bigness' is mistaken. But both the diagnosis and the cure are rooted in an outdated understanding of how the American economy is organized. Listen to this interview about Taming Corporate Power in the 21st Century (Cambridge UP, 2022)
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Former chief steward and union organizer Gordon Simmons joins Michael Stauch to discuss his new book on the history of labor struggles by public sector workers in West Virginia since 1969. With an emphasis on rank-and-file rebellion expressed through wildcat strikes and other job actions, Simmons provides a sweeping account of the past that has rich lessons for the present.

 

Highlights include:

●      A discussion of wildcat strikes and why West Virginia’s public sector workers waged them, again and again, in this period;

●      How a teacher wearing blue jeans sparked a battle over expressions of the counterculture in workplaces across West Virginia;

●      Why New Democrats like Joe Manchin sided against rank-and-file rebellion among public sector workers in Virginia;

●      How West Virginia public school teachers in 2018 used Facebook to organize a walkout that defied the union and won significant concessions from the state;

●      The joy of participating in “collective hell-raising” with co-workers and friends.

 

Guest: Gordon Simmons is a retired union organizer and president of the West Virginia Labor History Association. He is now employed as an investigator for the Human Rights Commission for the state of West Virginia and as an adjunct professor in philosophy at Marshall University.
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In a world shaken by crises, why does the dollar continue to dominate? In Dollar Dominance: Why It Rules the Global Economy and How to Challenge It (Policy Press, 2025) Photis Lysandrou explores the interaction between global instability and the enduring strength of the dollar. Drawing on examples from the 2008 Great Financial Crisis to the COVID-19 pandemic and Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the author reveals how uncertainty and instability in global trade, production and politics drives investors towards the safety of the dollar, reinforcing its dominance over other currencies. With clear and insightful analysis, Lysandrou reveals the true global financial foundations of dollar dominance, and lays out what it would take for other currencies such as the Euro to challenge its position
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