New Books in Economic and Business History

Tejasvi Nagaraja joins Michael Stauch to talk about Troop Movements: Labor, Race, and Global Freedom Struggles in America’s World War II (U Pennsylvania Press, 2026). They discuss how the mobilization of soldiers and defense workers for World War II brought together disparate sectors of workers, all of whom were enmeshed in struggles over workers’ rights and civil rights in the wake of the Great Depression and New Deal. The entangled experiences of this anti-fascist mobilization of workers and soldiers forged alliances across race, class, and global concerns and catalyzed the national and international political movements and conflicts of the postwar period. Synthesizing diverse sources—from the US Army and UK Colonial Office archives to labor unions’ and civil rights organizations’ records—Nagaraja reconstructs this story of top-down and bottom-up movements from Pennsylvania to Panama, Georgia to Germany, Michigan to Manila in the World War II era.
Highlights include:
Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee’s participation in a “war worker front” during World War II that brought together “soldiers and solderers” in a multiracial movement from below;
How an accidental explosion at Port Chicago (an ammunition depot in the Bay Area) and the sailor mutiny that followed, may have set in motion the modern Civil Rights movement;
The often overlooked logistical role that the United States played in World War II by coordinating global supply chains;
How World War II both heightened racial tensions, at home and abroad, and served as an instance of race-making in which the nation’s racial identity transformed;
Discussion of an obscure anti-fascist article by a young Ronald Reagan.
Guest: Tejasvi Nagaraja is an Assistant Professor of History at Cornell University in the ILR School. His first book is Troop Movements: Labor, Race, and Global Freedom Struggles in America’s World War II (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2026). His writing has appeared in The Greater Second World War anthology, American Historical Review, and Labor: Studies in Working-Class History.

Host: Michael Stauch is an associate professor of history at the University of Toledo and the author of Wildcat of the Streets: Detroit in the Age of Community Policing, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2025.

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Selling the Word of God: The Early Commercial History of the English Bible (Bodleian, 2026) by Dr. Harry Spillane is a history of the English Bible as a book. A book that in order to be read had first to be sold.
The Bible is the most published text in history and the story of its publication in the English language is extraordinary. Published on the occasion of the 500th anniversary of Tyndale’s groundbreaking printed translation of the New Testament, this book traces the evolution of the English Bible from 1525 to the much celebrated King James version of 1611. By this date, readers could already choose from over a dozen English versions, each of them printed in vastly different ways. Behind each edition are stories of rivalries, mistakes, bankruptcies and bestsellers. Far from being fixed, stable publications, Bibles were consistently undergoing change and development in the early modern period.
Creativity and enterprise were at the heart of the English Bible market, something that the usual focus on Bible translators has often overshadowed. Illustrated with early editions, this book considers how printers created new markets for Bibles, how they advertised them, and how they commissioned innovative forms of illustration and decoration to attract buyers. How, it asks, did the English Bible become a bestseller?
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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After Caesar's assassination, the triumvirs drew up a kill list; one such target, a man named Lucius Plotius Plancus, fled to a villa near Naples and tried hiding behind a curtain. The soldiers found him anyway–thanks to his heavy perfume.
Pliny the Elder, writing a century later, used the perfume to suggest the killing was justified. Historians have often taken that at face value, as proof that Rome despised Eastern luxuries. Jeremy Simmons reads it as a joke—Pliny was calling the man a walking corpse.
In Jeremy’s latest book Sea of Treasures: A Cultural History of Ancient Indian Ocean Trade (Princeton, July 2026) he asks what happened when goods like pepper and perfume arrived at their destinations. The goods took on new lives: perfume became a way of talking about death, pepper a medicine prescribed for its heat, Roman coins turned pendants in South Asia—or how soldiers knew the price of spices even on remote Hadrian’s Wall.
Jeremy is an assistant professor of history and the college at the University of Chicago.
You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Sea of Treasures. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.
Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

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Offshore Oildom: America’s Energy Expansion into the Ocean (LSU Press, 2026) tells the riveting story of the United States’ quest to secure the oil riches of the sea. Drawing on a wealth of untapped sources, Tyler Priest reveals how the offshore oil industry emerged from an ambitious project to incorporate the ocean’s submerged lands into the territory of the United States. These lands were frontier spaces, beyond traditional jurisdiction and control. Efforts to commandeer them for oil and gas extraction thus required new institutions of governance. From the titanic struggle over the tidelands starting in the 1930s to Project Independence in the 1970s, the process of establishing an offshore dominion of oil provoked intractable conflicts over money, values, and power. It pitted coastal states against their land-locked counterparts and captains of industry against federal civil servants and coastal communities. It stoked partisan and internecine warfare. It set off an international race to annex offshore territory, complicating U.S. foreign-policy objectives. It weighed on the minds of Supreme Court justices and troubled every occupant of the White House from Franklin Roosevelt forward. The modern environmental movement was born in opposition to offshore oil just as the 1970s energy crisis compelled the acceleration of drilling in the ocean. Creating and governing an offshore oildom involved nothing less than redrawing the territorial borders of the nation, rebuilding the political foundations of the U.S. energy system, and testing the environmental limits of resource extraction. This history is essential to understanding the tension between energy security and environmental protection in modern America.

Tyler Priest is associate professor of history at the University of Iowa. He is the author of the award-winning book The Offshore Imperative: Shell Oil’s Search for Petroleum in Postwar America and has published in the Journal of American History, Environmental History, Enterprise & Society, the Wall Street Journal, Politico, and Science. In 2010 he served as a senior policy analyst on the President’s National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling.
Filippo De Chirico is a PhD candidate in History and Politics of Energy at Roma Tre University (Italy). His research focuses on the history of the natural gas sector in Italy.

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Edward Blum interviews John William Nelson, Muddy Ground: Native Peoples, Chicago’s Portage, and the Transformation of a Continent (UNC Press, 2023)
In early North America, carrying watercraft—usually canoes—and supplies across paths connecting one body of water to another was essential in the establishment of both Indigenous and European mobility in the continent’s interior. The Chicago portage, a network of overland canoe routes that connected the Great Lakes and Mississippi watersheds, grew into a crossroads of interaction as Indigenous and European people vied for its control during early contact and colonization. John William Nelson charts the many peoples that traversed and sought power along Chicago’s portage paths from the seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries, including Indigenous Illinois traders, French explorers, Jesuit missionaries, Meskwaki warriors, British officers, Anishinaabe headmen, and American settlers. Nelson compellingly demonstrates that even deep within the interior, power relations fluctuated based on the control of waterways and local environmental knowledge.

Pushing beyond political and cultural explanations for Indigenous-European relations in the borderlands of North America, Nelson places environmental and geographic realities at the center of the history of Indigenous Chicago, offering a new explanation for how the United States gained control of the North American interior through a two-pronged subjugation of both the landscapes and peoples of the continent.

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