"Why should white people be running the banks of our community?" already the civil rights activist Malcolm X asked. Black Banks are a symbol of self-determination, resistance and hope for Black wealth. However, wealth inequality between black and white people in the US barely has changed in the last 150 years. In her book, The Color of Money. Black Banks …

Economics is the mother tongue of public policy. It dominates our decision-making for the future, guides multi-billion-dollar investments, and shapes our responses to climate change, inequality, and other environmental and social challenges that define our times. Pity then, or more like disaster, that its fundamental ideas are centuries out of date yet are still taught in college courses worldwide and …

In this classic work of economic history and social theory, Karl Polanyi analyzes the economic and social changes brought about by the "great transformation" of the Industrial Revolution. His analysis explains not only the deficiencies of the self-regulating market, but the potentially dire social consequences of untempered market capitalism. New introductory material reveals the renewed importance of Polanyi's seminal analysis …

This book presents a novel approach to histories of colonial urbanisation and to the study of the cities of the Global South by historically tracing the making of the Bombay slums. It delineates the official discourse on city development which emerged and ossified during times of intense crisis – the recurrent famines and later the bubonic plague – that gripped …

The relationship between race and capitalism is one of the most enduring and controversial historical debates. The concept of racial capitalism offers a way out of this impasse.

A persistent feature of some contemporary economic history is the fragmented study of nation-states as atomistic entities and the ontological premise of inherent, traditional features of societies as teleological explanations for their relative historical success or failure in economic modernisation. Andrew B. Liu in Tea Wars offers an important remedy. He explores the case of the British-Indian and Chinese tea industry in …

Given the criticality of the current economic and political juncture, this collection of articles on neoliberalism provides a rather timely intervention. The collection explores the heterogeneities and the various aspects that encompass the ‘neoliberal thought style’. It examines how the project of neoliberalism goes beyond the commonly (mis)understood reasoning of market fundamentalism and homoeconomicus, and encompasses various political, ideological, and …

The volume, released by YSI’s Economic Development Working Group, comprises interviews with 13 scholars from around the world who express a variety of viewpoints on the meaning and relevance of dependency theory in today’s context. Is it time for dependency theory to make a comeback? Its central idea is that developed (”core”) countries benefit from the global system at the …