New Books in Economic and Business History

In Oklahoma, one out of every six residents is poor. One in five children lives in poverty and faces food insecurity. In Hungry Oklahoma: Confronting Poverty and Food Insecurity (U Oklahoma Press, 2026), native son and sociologist Robert Lee Maril follows in the tradition of the national bestsellers Nickel and Dimed and Evicted to illuminate the lived experience of poverty and food insecurity in communities across the state.

Maril's account is immediately personal. He begins with "guests," as shoppers are called by volunteers, waiting in line in the sweltering heat one summer for "Thy Will Be Done," a food pantry, to open. Unable to afford air conditioning, some guests don't buy foods that would spoil on the counter. One woman, Norma, carefully places only canned vegetables in her cart. When she returns to her twenty-year-old pickup, in the truck bed are lawn chairs, blankets, and pans-everything she owns. "The landlord told us this morning we was homeless," Norma says. "I'm not thinking straight."

Drawing on interviews and participant-observation data from his volunteer work at a food pantry, as well as census and sociological data, Maril documents in rich ethnographic detail the status of poverty and low-wage workers in the state today and within historical context. He explores how institutions-such as faith-based organizations, government, and food pantries-structure and shape experiences of poverty. While Maril celebrates the nonprofit and faith-based efforts that make a difference, this book also is critical of conditions and stereotypes that have entrenched poverty in the state.

Hungry Oklahoma ultimately suggests that persistent and pervasive poverty can be eliminated. Its moving accounts of real Oklahomans and their experiences make it a clarion call for not only those interested in policy issues but all Oklahomans who want a better today and tomorrow for those who call the state home.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Michael Brand is a CX strategist and trainer, based in Switzerland, who has been named a Thinkers 360 Top 50 Global Thought Leader on Customer Loyalty. Dr. Vincent Covello directs the Center for Risk Communications, and is a nationally and internationally recognized trainer, researcher, consultant, and expert in emergency, crisis, risk, and change communications. Deanna Leonard is a futurist, executive coach, and AI transformation leader. Her career has spanned senior leadership posts across a wide range of Fortune 500 companies.

In this freewheeling, one-hour roundtable discussion, the focus is on the Customer Experience through the lens of both the opportunities and misuses that AI involves. The topics addressed include the following: 1) the importance of active listening, 2) the 20 words that can make or break an exchange with a customer, 3) how front-line CX employees can be enabled to do their jobs better, and 4) the need for training budgets to be protected, if not increased. In emotional terms, two feelings rise to prominence in this session: fear (of not being heard and responded to) and trust (rooted in the demonstration of caring before knowledge gets shared or an action-step taken). The answers as to who people trust, and why, when experiencing stress will be sure to surprise you.

Real Transformations: Business Change That Works from the Inside Out is co-hosted by Julie Anixter and Dan Hill, PhD, entrepreneurs with deep experience as corporate change agents, devoted to helping companies make continuous change work for everyone through clarity and connection. To learn about their keynote talks, workshops and labs, check out Real-Transformation.com.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How is finance changing in the contemporary world? In FinTech Capital: The Digital Transformation of Everyday Money and Finance (Princeton University Press, 2026), Paul Langley, a Professor of Economic Geography at Durham Universityand Andrew Leyshon, a Senior Fellow in the Centre for Economy, Policy and Place, Nottingham Trent University and Emeritus Professor of Economic Geography at the University of Nottingham,
chart the rise of a new form of capitalism in the digital age. Drawing
on detailed case studies from across the world, from familiar everyday
examples such as Klarna to continent-spanning institutions such as Standard Bank,
the book theorises the dynamics of this new moment in global
capitalism. Of interest across the social sciences, the book will be
essential reading for anyone seeking to understand money today.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Authoritarian Markets explores the political foundations of China's banking boom and its far-reaching impact on the Chinese economy.

In
1978 China had no commercial banks. Today it commands the world's
largest banking system, with assets equal to 40 percent of global GDP.
In Authoritarian Markets: The Politics of China's Banking Explosion
(Cornell University Press, 2026), Dr. Adam Y. Liu argues that this rise
was not the product of market reforms but of political bargains and
bureaucratic mobilization.

In
the 1990s, Beijing issued bank licenses as bargaining chips—securing
cooperation from local governments as it pushed through painful reforms.
The result was a sprawling, competitive banking market built not in spite of authoritarian rule but because of it.

Drawing
on interviews, spatial data, census records, surveys, and experiments,
Dr. Liu reveals how local state banks became both engines of China's
growth and incubators of its current economic risks. Eye-opening and
persuasive, Authoritarian Markets offers fresh insight into the political logic of market development in China and authoritarian states worldwide.

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. 
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Beyond the Ocean: France and the Atlantic World from the Crusades to the Age of Revolutions (Oxford University Press,
2026), Christopher Hodson and Brett Rushforth reveal the vast and
complex world of France's Atlantic enterprises in the premodern era.
Drawing upon years of archival work, Hodson and Rushforth demonstrate
how France's overseas activities created its empire, intentionally or
not, and how these distant places built the French state and used it for
their own ends. Beyond the Ocean covers an impressive sweep of
history, from the late eleventh century through the early nineteenth,
and yet the authors manage to retain a human element. Their judicious
inclusion of micro-histories and primary-source quotation, as well as
their lively prose, helps the reader enter into what it may have felt
like to live through these developments, to participate in the era when
"France became France, and the Atlantic became a world."
Crucially, their attention to the non-European actors in this story and
women's worlds and work makes the book a helpful corrective to top-down
approaches to imperial histories. Beyond the Ocean is a must-read for Atlantic world scholars, but has value for anyone interested in early modern Europe or cultural exchange.

Elspeth Currie
is a PhD Candidate in the Department of History at Boston College where
she studies women’s intellectual history in early modern Europe.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices