New Books in Economic and Business History

Fictions of Freedom: Migration, Modern Slavery and Bureaucracy in India (Cambridge UP, 2026) emerges from the fact of anti-trafficking interventions having led to newer forms of oppressions and entanglements of bureaucracy. Situating the lives of sex workers and daily-wage earning labourers through a multi-sited ethnography in India, this book opens up an examination of the rescue industry alongside migration and informality, and how the lived reality of the workers is crowded with sociopolitical unfairness, individual and state-sponsored violence, informal debt, gender and caste-based hierarchies, and limited livelihood options. It aims to offer a critical lens into the practices, modalities, and contestations through which freedom is lived and asserted in India. The book is open access here.

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Making Sense of China's Economy (Routledge, 2023) untangles China’s complex economic structure, evolving issues and curious contradictions, and explains some key features of this most puzzling of global economic powerhouses. This book reveals how factors such as demographics, the initial stage of development in 1978, the transition away from full state ownership and central planning, the dual urban-rural society, and a decentralised governance structure have combined to shape the economy, its development and its reforms. It shows how the pragmatic and adaptive nature of China’s policymaking upends familiar perspectives and hinders simple cross-country comparisons. The book also explores crucial topics including the property market, debt accumulation and environmental challenges. In this book, Tao Wang innovatively weaves the multiple strands of China’s economy into a holistic and organic tapestry that gives us unique insights from both a Chinese and an international perspective. This book is critical reading for business leaders, investors, policymakers, students, and anyone else hoping to understand China’s economy and its future evolution and impact, written by a specialist who has studied the country from both inside and out.
Tao Wang is senior advisor at UBS Investment Bank in Hong Kong, and until recently was chief China economist at the firm.
Michael Leger is Policy Fellow at the Blavatnik School of Government, Oxford.
Lucas Tse is Examination Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford.

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In An Anticolonial Development: Race, Schooling, and Emancipation in Twentieth-Century West Africa (Cambridge UP, 2026), Elisa Prosperetti argues that while racialized, colonial notions of development saw African bodies as the primary sites of economic value, anticolonial development imagined the minds of Africans as the key to economic productivity. Thus, the broadening of access to Europhone education (that is, using European languages) was a central component of anticolonial and antiracist visions of an emancipated African future. But this educationally-driven vision of the future had deep roots, calling back to other experiences of freedom, however partial, in the Black Atlantic world. Thus, the book further argues that the forms that decolonization took in coastal West Africa are best explained by framing decolonization as a Black Atlantic emancipation, akin to 19th-century slavery abolitions. Although decolonization in West Africa shared parallels with what happened across other parts of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East after World War II, a Black Atlantic frame accounts for certain regional specificities that the general process/category of decolonization does not. Combining more than sixty interviews with former students, teachers, and school administrators with research in state and institutional archives in West Africa, Europe, and the United States, An Anticolonial Development analyzes the rise and fall of public education as the principal project of anticolonial development in West Africa.
Elisa Prosperetti is a historian at the National Institute of Education (part of the Nanyang Technological University) in Singapore. Her research focuses on modern African and global history, particularly histories of diaspora, education, race, development, economic and intellectual history, and decolonization. Her first book, An Anticolonial Development: Race, Schooling, and Emancipation in Twentieth-Century West Africa, was published in 2026 by Cambridge University Press. She received her MA (2015) and PhD (2019) degrees in History from Princeton University and her BSc in International History and International Relations from the London School of Economics (2008). Prior to graduate school, she worked for several years as a classroom teacher.
You can learn more about Dr. Prosperetti’s work here
Afua Baafi Quarshie is a Ph.D. candidate in history at the Johns Hopkins University. Her research focuses on mothering and childhood in post-independence Ghana.

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Belize is often described as a “pristine” ecotourism destination with a landscape that is “naturally” valuable. Yet for much of the twentieth century, British Honduras—as the country was known under colonial rule—was seen as lacking value, an unprofitable backwater. Valuing Nature at the Ends of the World: Natural Capital and Climate Disaster in Belize (Columbia UP, 2026) explores how Belize’s precarious coastal environment has become a site for a new kind of capitalist value production, in which landscapes and ecosystems derive worth from their vulnerability or looming destruction in the era of climate change.
Drawing on a decade of ethnographic research, Dr. Patrick M. Gallagher offers a critical account of market-oriented conservation in the Caribbean that ranges across everyday coastal life, emergent ecological science, and climate policy spaces. He shows how the long material and social histories of racialized colonialism shape the making of technocratic tools for valuing nature. Gallagher traces how new forms of capitalist value emerge from the interaction among colonial pasts, contemporary conservation practices, and vivid scenarios of imminent climate change–driven disaster and loss. He also examines how people and policymakers in Belize imagine and create new ways of life in a changing environment. Ethnographically grounded and rich in theoretical insight, this book illuminates how the Anthropocene environment, newly visible and valuable at the moment of its presumed disappearance, came into being in Belize and around the world.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Imagine that you have just lost your job. You wonder: “Who or what can I depend on now?” The answer, it turns out, varies significantly depending on where you live. In Norway, a small European social democracy, you would almost certainly turn to the country’s comprehensive public welfare system. With a work history, you could be eligible for two years of unemployment benefits that replace upwards of 62% of your previous salary. Meanwhile, you would not be too worried about covering other major expenses: annual out-of-pocket healthcare costs are capped at a few hundred dollars, parents receive monthly payments per child, public education is tuition-free, and pensions are guaranteed. What would this experience teach you about government, work, taxes, and freedom?
In Down and Out in Utopia: Unemployment as Moral Education in Norway (U Toronto Press, 2026), anthropologist Dr. Kelly McKowen explains what happens to those without jobs in one of the world’s wealthiest and most egalitarian countries. Following the daily lives of a diverse group of unemployed individuals during the “oil crash” of the mid-2010s, he shows that being “down and out” in a social democracy offers people a unique moral education with lessons about the nature and value of the state, labor, welfare, and belonging.
Engaging, timely, and illuminating, Down and Out in Utopia makes the case that through social policy, we shape life’s hardships – and these hardships, in turn, shape us and how we view the world.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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