New Books in Economic and Business History

For early San Franciscans, seafood was an important source of
nutrition and a feature of social life, inspiring culinary developments
that remain components in California cuisine more than a century later.
Consumers interested in flavorful alternatives to meat and associated
health benefits could follow recipes for nearly fifty types of marine
life from state waters, such as salmon, flounder, and oysters. Others
are no longer available, out-of-vogue, or simply forgotten. Further,
overfishing and environmental damage decimated many local seafood
stocks, providing a cautionary tale with global significance.

In San Francisco Seafood: A History from Ocean to Table (Bloomsbury,
2026), Dr. Paul Stangl traces the development of San Francisco's
fisheries, seafood markets, cookery, and dining culture from the Gold
Rush to the 1920s. Migrants from around the world imported fishing
techniques and cuisines, then slowly adapted as they came to understand
local resources and each other. Newcomers found the tastiest fish
through trial and error and assimilated the “best” into a new cuisine.
Different ethnic and occupational groups collaborated, fought, and
learned from one another as they irreversibly altered the natural world
around them. By the end of the First World War, San Francisco's seafood
cuisine scarcely resembled that of the 1850s, due to cultural
adaptation, technological advancements, and changes to the natural
environment. It was no longer derivative of New England and France, but
included influences from the Southern states, Asia, and South America.San Francisco Seafood
chronicles the city's transformation from a fish-barren town-where
restaurants served canned, pickled, and dried fish from the East
Coast-to a seafood-rich metropolis that harvested seafood from Mexico to
Alaska. He emphasizes how the impacts on nature and local labor serve
as a necessary cautionary tale for today's global seafood trade. This is
a thorough and insightful history of a once emerging, and now
essential, cuisine for food and history buffs alike.

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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In the spirit of Hannah Arendt's natality principle (that new things are always and should always be being born, each one unique and endowed with limitless potential) we at RTB love it when a new podcast appears. Especially one as thoughtful and original as The Caste Pod, which assembles scholars and activists to make sense of what caste is, how it's experienced and how it has travelled globally.

Join us to discuss and share an extended excerpt is its widely published (check out her earlier books!) founder Ajantha Subramanian, Professor of Anthropology at CUNY Graduate Center, and producer (with Lori Allen) of the “Violent Majorities” series here at RTB.

John and Ajantha delve into the founding of the podcast, and then enter into the business end of the series, which is to explore the complex interplay between caste, race and class as organizing features of economic inequality and its corresponding features of cultural discrimination and oppression.

Ajantha's extended conversation with Prachi and Ram of Savera, a multiracial, interfaith, anti-caste coalition of Indian Americans from The Caste Pod episode 10 lays bare its premise: to put scholars and activists into conversation and opens a space engineered for each to learn form the other.

Before introducing the Savera excerpt, Ajantha frames the topic by way of Isabel Wilkerson's influential (if problematic) book Caste and its neglect of class and economic issues, and also the case against Cisco for caste discrimination in California that in significant ways internationalized the fight around caste's role in perpetuating economic and political inequity.

Listen and Read Here.
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On June 10, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York returned two pieces of artwork to Cambodia: an Angkor statue and a sandstone lintel. It’s the latest repatriation effort by the U.S.’s premier art museum, and the third time the Met has had to give up Cambodian artifacts specifically.

Matthew Campbell’s The Man Who Stole The Gods: A True Story of War, Obsession, and a Global Art Conspiracy (Penguin, 2026) dives into the story of the Cambodian antiquities trade, from looted temples in the Cambodian forests, through dealers in Bangkok like Douglas Latchford, and then into museums and billionaire homes in the West. And he also digs into how this trade fell apart: How the U.S. Department of Justice and activists in Cambodia pressured dealers and museums like the Met to give this art back.

Matthew is an award-winning reporter for Bloomberg Businessweek. His previous book, Dead in the Water—co-authored with Kit Chellel—was selected as a Book of the Year by The Economist, the Financial Times, and The Times. Matt has reported from more than twenty-five countries on crime, corruption, terrorism, economics, and the environment. His work has earned some of journalism’s highest honors, including awards from the Gerald Loeb Foundation, the Overseas Press Club, the National Press Club, SOPA, and SABEW for both feature and investigative reporting

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Man Who Stole the Gods. 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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We are joined by Nelson Lichtenstein, one of the deans of American labor history. The conversation ranges widely, from the tragedy of the Clinton administration and what might have been, to the importance of studying capitalism, to the politics of baby boomer self-loathing—all key parts of the history of the 1990s!
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Paper
was a precious commodity in the eighteenth century: every sheet was
made by hand. There was therefore a significant market in recycling
substandard paper from paper mills and discarded proofs and sheets from
printers and booksellers for secondary use, alongside a black market in
which stealing and receiving stolen paper took place on a vast scale. A
single piece of paper could be termed ‘waste’ and yet sold for cash
three times in succession, on each occasion performing a useful
function. The end user would keep the newly purchased
‘waste’ or paper wrapping in a special drawer from which it would be
taken for a myriad household purposes, including cooking, needlework, decoration
and hygiene. Popular satirical prints depicted explicit paper uses,
while creators of flamboyant papier mâché ceilings concealed the
material by gilding it.

With over 100 illustrations, and
drawing on letters from a range of people from farmers to notable
authors and members of the aristocracy, together with meticulous
archival research, Too Good to Waste: Recycling Paper in the Eighteenth Century
(Bodleian Library, 2026) by Dr. Amélie Junqua and Dr. Geoffrey Day
traces the extraordinary history of ingenious paper recycling in
eighteenth century England.

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