New Books in Economic and Business History

Whatever happened to the working class? A compelling new social history of Britain since 1945
From the picket lines of the Miners' Strike to the Amazon warehouses of today, the British working class has been pushed from the center of political life to its margins, though not without a fight. But how did a force that once shaped nations become invisible?

Historian Ewan Gibbs reconstructs what was lost—and what was taken. Through vivid first-hand accounts, he traces the transformation of a class forged in mines and shipyards into one scattered across call centers and gig economy apps. This is the story of council estates sold off, unions broken, mill towns hollowed out, and a sense of solidarity ground down by decades of insecurity.
Yet, as inequality deepens and class roars back into political debate, Gibbs confronts the essential question: who now speaks for labour? Richly researched and deeply humane, An Injury to All: The Unmaking of the British Working Class (Verso, 2026) is the definitive history of British post war working-class life.
Ewan Gibbs is Senior Lecturer in Economic and Social History at the University of Glasgow. He writes about energy, industry, work and protest for the London Review of Books, Financial Times, The Times, Prospect, Break Down, Dissent and Jacobin. His first book, Coal Country: The Meaning and Memory of Deindustrialization in Postwar Scotland, was shortlisted for the Scottish History Book of the Year.
Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.

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The history of the environmental movement-from environmentalism of the nineteenth century to the environmental justice struggles of the late twentieth century-has often been portrayed as a series of efforts led by white environmentalists. In Stewards of the Land, Stevie Ruiz reassesses the movement and reveals that it has always been a multiracial endeavor. From Southern California berry fields to Japanese American concentration camps, from Chinese cooks in national parks to Chicano Civilian Conservation Corps workers, Ruiz traces how the racialized labor and environmental knowledge of Asian migrants and Chicana/o communities built the material foundations of modern environmentalism.
Stewards of the Land: Race and Reclaiming Environmental Labor in the American West (UNC Press, 2026) argues that environmental justice was never just a reaction to pollution in the 1970s but has a much longer history tied to land theft, labor exploitation, and the everyday struggles of frontline communities to live and work with dignity. Drawing from comparative ethnic studies and archival research and with a commitment to decolonial praxis, Ruiz recovers the stories of those who labored-often invisibly-to build, maintain, and reimagine environmental spaces in the American West.
Stevie Ruiz is a Professor of Chicana and Chicano studies at California State University, Northridge and a historian, author, and environmental justice scholar. 
His research focuses on the intersection of labor, immigration, and the American environmental movement — the work of building, maintaining, and stewarding the land that is so
often left out of the story. For more information about his work, see his website.
Kalani Foster is a PhD candidate at the University of Manchester whose research focuses on the intersection between biodiversity conservation, data and technology, and coloniality. For more information, and ways to contact him, see his research profile.

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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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