General History
The human past outside the specifically financial: nations, empires, civilisations, eras and world-historical narrative. Read by anyone after context on how the present came about.
941 books
Books 941
Giorgio Vasari · 1550 · Vasari's lives; the origin of artistic reputation and its market
Benjamin Franklin · 1791 · Franklin's self-improvement system; the origin of thrift and deferred reward
Charles Mackay · 1841 · The original catalogue of speculative folly; still cited on every bubble.
Ibn Khaldun · 1858 · Fourteenth-century theory of dynastic cycles, taxation and the rise of states
Ida M. Tarbell · 1904 · The muckraking investigation that helped force the 1911 breakup.
John Maynard Keynes · 1919 · Written before the fact by a Treasury insider; the reparations arithmetic that set up the collapse.
John Kenneth Galbraith · 1955 · Still the standard account of speculative mania and its aftermath.
Alfred D. Chandler Jr. · 1962 · Sears is one of Chandler's four case studies in the multidivisional firm.
Sidney Homer, Richard Sylla · 1963 · Four thousand years of rates; the reference work.
Robert A. Caro · 1974 · Robert Moses and the politics of who gets to build and toll public assets.
Adam Fergusson · 1975 · The canonical narrative account of the 1923 inflation and what it did to savers and creditors.
David McCullough · 1977 · The Panama Canal: chokepoint economics and what building one costs.
Alfred D. Chandler Jr. · 1977 · Pulitzer-winning account of why firms integrated and managers replaced markets.
Chalmers A. Johnson · 1982 · The founding text on the developmental state and industrial policy.
Thomas P. Hughes · 1983 · The classic history of electrification as a system business.
Thomas K. McCraw · 1984 · Pulitzer history of the people who built American utility regulation.
Marc Reisner · 1986 · The canonical account of western water politics and who ended up owning it.
Richard Rhodes · 1986 · The origin of the industry and its physics, told definitively.
David Halberstam · 1986 · Ford against Nissan; the canonical account of postwar Detroit's decline.
H. Thomas Johnson, Robert S. Kaplan · 1987 · The book that started the field's self-criticism.
Alfred D. Chandler Jr. · 1990 · Comparative history of managerial capitalism in three countries.
Ron Chernow · 1990 · On the predecessor houses; National Book Award winner.
William Cronon · 1991 · Chicago, grain elevators and futures: how a commodity market got invented.
Daniel Yergin · 1991 · The standard history of the oil industry Exxon inherited and led.
Barry Eichengreen · 1992 · The scholarly case that the gold standard transmitted the Depression.
Victor Bulmer-Thomas · 1994 · The standard economic history; export dependence and import substitution explained.
Nicholas Pileggi · 1995 · The skim era and the Teamsters pension-fund financing of Las Vegas.
Richard Kluger · 1996 · Pulitzer-winning history of the cigarette war; R.J. Reynolds is a principal actor.
Jan de Vries, Ad van der Woude · 1997 · The definitive economic history of the Dutch Republic, 1500-1815.
Peter Biskind · 1998 · How the 1970s directors' era gave way to the blockbuster system.
David S. Landes · 1998 · Why some economies grew rich; culture and institutions across five centuries
Peter L. Bernstein · 2000 · Open Library unreachable during build; every openlibrary.org query failed with connection errors
Edwin Black · 2001 · IBM's punch-card business in Nazi Germany; contested but landmark.
Andrew S. Grove · 2001 · Insider: Grove's memoir of Hungary and escape, ending before Intel.
Robert A. Caro · 2002 · Caro on Johnson's mastery of an institution's levers and incentives
Ron Chernow · 2004 · Chernow on the man who built American public credit and its bank
T1 The Box
Marc Levinson · 2006 · How the container turned ships into standardised, financeable assets.
Adam Tooze · 2006 · The Nazi economy as an exercise in resource and financial constraint.
T1 Fordlandia
Greg Grandin · 2009 · The Amazon rubber town; Ford's ideology tested to destruction abroad.
Liaquat Ahamed · 2009 · The Creditanstalt collapse and its transmission through the 1931 European banking crisis.
Siddhartha Mukherjee · 2010 · Cancer and the science-to-drug pipeline; Pulitzer winner.
T1 Railroaded
Richard White · 2011 · The transcontinentals as financially unsound political creations.
T1 Digital Gold
Nathaniel Popper · 2015 · The standard origin history of bitcoin and its early holders.
Barry Eichengreen · 2015 · The Depression and the euro crisis compared.
Tim Wu · 2016 · Two centuries of harvesting and reselling human attention.
T1 The Gene
Siddhartha Mukherjee · 2016 · History of heredity from Mendel to gene editing
Robert J. Gordon · 2016 · The productivity case for why the post-1970 US grows slower than the myth.
Vaclav Smil · 2017 · Why energy transitions historically take decades, not years.
T1 The Anarchy
William Dalrymple · 2019 · The East India Company as the first corporate conquest of a country.
Patrick Radden Keefe · 2021 · The definitive account of the family, the company and the marketing.
Sebastian Mallaby · 2022 · Open Library unreachable during build; title confirmed on his CFR expert page
George Jacob Holyoake · 1858 · The Rochdale Pioneers by a contemporary; the founding cooperative account.
Matthew Josephson · 1934 · The framing of Rockefeller's generation that shaped US policy.
Carl Van Doren · 1938 · The standard mid-century Franklin biography; Munger's model of a working life
Ferdinand Pecora · 1939 · The investigator's own account of the hearings that produced the SEC
B. H. Liddell Hart · 1944 · Liddell Hart on why the lessons of history are so rarely applied
Frederick Lewis Allen · 1952 · How American life and incomes changed between 1900 and 1950
Thomas S. Kuhn · 1957 · Kuhn on how one model replaced another and why it took so long
T2 Endurance
Alfred Lansing · 1959 · Shackleton's survival; decision-making when the plan is already lost
Polly Hill · 1963 · Classic fieldwork proving African farmers were rational capitalist investors.
C. R. Boxer · 1965 · The VOC and WIC as commercial and military enterprises.
Catherine Drinker Bowen · 1966 · The constitutional convention as a long and contested negotiation
Will Durant, Ariel Durant · 1968 · A century of history compressed into recurring patterns and rates
John Brooks · 1969 · Wall Street from 1920 to 1938, told through its people.
Horace Freeland Judson · 1969 · The definitive history of molecular biology's founding discoveries
John Brooks · 1973 · The 1960s conglomerate mania and its unwinding.
Robert Hessen · 1975 · The operator Carnegie promoted; the best view of how the mills ran.
Anthony Sampson · 1975 · The classic account of the oil majors' cartel before OPEC broke it.
William H. McNeill · 1976 · Disease as a driver of history, trade and population
Rosemary Thorp, Geoffrey Bertram · 1978 · The classic export-led growth study; why commodity booms did not compound.
Robert Conot · 1979 · First biography to work the Edison papers; unsparing on the finances.
Edmund Morris · 1979 · Roosevelt before the presidency; the central figure of trust-busting
Norman Davies · 1981 · The long history that explains the institutional starting point.
R. M. Lala · 1981 · The standard group history, repeatedly revised and expanded.
T2 The Kingdom
Robert Lacey · 1981 · The classic account of the first oil boom and the Al Saud bargain.
Daniel J. Boorstin · 1983 · How humans discovered time, geography and nature; a history of knowing
T2 The Chip
T. R. Reid · 1984 · Origins of the integrated circuit and the industry structure it created.
Peter C. Newman · 1985 · The Hudson's Bay Company: three centuries of chartered corporate power.
Kenneth T. Jackson · 1985 · Suburbanization of the United States; the standard history.
Donald Worster · 1985 · Water control as the basis of power in the arid American West.
Carl-Ludwig Holtfrerich · 1986 · The revisionist case that the inflation had real benefits before it broke.
David Rock · 1987 · The standard history of how a rich country made itself poor.
Simon Schama · 1987 · The culture of a society that got rich first and was uneasy about it.
Jan Morris · 1988 · The colony at its commercial peak, before the handover.
Steven B. Webb · 1989 · How expectations and fiscal credibility ended the inflation almost overnight.
William Serrin · 1992 · A century of the town Carnegie built and broke.
T2 Truman
David McCullough · 1992 · Pulitzer-winning presidential biography; the postwar American decisions
Gerald D. Feldman · 1993 · The scholarly standard; corrects Fergusson on who gained and who lost.
David Bushnell · 1993 · The standard one-volume history; the institutional backdrop to everything else.
Erik J. Zurcher · 1993 · The standard history; the state-business relationship runs through it.
Steven Levy · 1994 · The making of the Macintosh, written close to the events.
W. G. Huff · 1994 · The economic history: entrepot trade, forced saving and state-directed investment.
Sebastian Edwards · 1995 · The World Bank chief economist on the debt crisis and the reforms after it.
Juan Gabriel Valdés · 1995 · How an economics faculty exchange programme became a national policy regime.
Andres Oppenheimer · 1996 · Salinas, the 1994 peso crisis and the tequila effect.
Adam Fforde, Stefan de Vylder · 1996 · The canonical doi moi study; reform as bottom-up fence-breaking, not decree.
Samuel P. Huntington · 1996 · Cultural blocs as the organising frame of post-Cold War conflict
Katie Hafner, Matthew Lyon · 1996 · ARPA computing research, the funding culture PARC was staffed from.
Thomas K. McCraw · 1997 · National business systems compared through the firms that defined them.
T2 Crystal Fire
Michael Riordan, Lillian Hoddeson · 1997 · The transistor at Bell Labs and the birth of the information age.
Stephen Haber · 1997 · Comparative essays on why Brazil and Mexico diverged from the United States.
Enrique Krauze · 1997 · The presidential system that shaped who gets concessions.
T2 Nazi Gold
Tom Bower · 1997 · The dormant-accounts scandal and the first serious breach of Swiss secrecy.
Adam Hochschild · 1998 · The Congo Free State as a privately owned extraction business, and the campaign that ended it.
Lee Kuan Yew · 1998 · The first volume of the memoirs, covering independence and the early state.
Gurcharan Das · 2000 · A Procter & Gamble insider on the 1991 liberalisation and what preceded it.
Chrystia Freeland · 2000 · Loans-for-shares and the privatisation that created the oligarchs.
Ray MacSharry, Padraic White · 2000 · Insider: the finance minister and IDA head on how the FDI model was built.
Karl Maier · 2000 · The standard account of why the Nigerian state underdelivers.
Maury Klein · 2001 · The best single narrative of 1929 itself.
T2 Rebel Code
Glyn Moody · 2001 · The reporting history of Linux and the businesses built around it.
M. Mitchell Waldrop · 2001 · Licklider and the ARPA lineage that staffed and shaped PARC.
David E. Hoffman · 2002 · Six men and the mechanics of how post-Soviet wealth was assembled.
Gerardo della Paolera, Alan M. Taylor · 2003 · The long-run data behind the country's century of relative decline.
Walter Isaacson · 2003 · Isaacson's Franklin: printer, investor and builder of durable institutions
Doris Kearns Goodwin · 2003 · Lincoln's cabinet of opponents; a study in managing rivals
T2 The Company
John Micklethwait, Adrian Wooldridge · 2003 · Short history of the limited-liability corporation as a legal invention.
Douglas Brinkley · 2003 · Company-authorized centennial history with archive access.
Julia Preston, Samuel Dillon · 2004 · The end of one-party rule and what it changed for business.
Martin Meredith · 2004 · The land seizures and the destruction of commercial agriculture, in continental context.
George M. Taber · 2005 · The 1976 tasting that repriced New World wine.
T2 Medici Money
Tim Parks · 2005 · Renaissance banking, branch networks and the origins of modern finance.
Steven Watts · 2005 · Scholarly biography placing Ford in American cultural history.
T2 Dynasties
David S. Landes · 2006 · Rothschilds to Toyodas: what makes family firms last or fail.
Giles Tremlett · 2006 · Written into the property boom; explains the regional politics of credit.
Martin Meredith · 2007 · How the mining houses and their financiers created the modern economy.
Michael Reid · 2007 · The Economist's survey of why Latin America keeps underperforming.
Allan M. Brandt · 2007 · The regulatory and litigation environment that set what the tobacco assets were worth.
Steve LeVine · 2007 · How Tengiz and Kashagan were negotiated; the best account of dealmaking in the region.
Robert F. Bruner, Sean D. Carr · 2007 · Morgan acting as lender of last resort before there was a Fed.
T2 Tulipmania
Anne Goldgar · 2007 · The archival demolition of most of what people believe about the tulip bubble.
William L. Silber · 2007 · The 1914 closure of the exchange, and how the dollar took over.
William J. Bernstein · 2008 · How trade shaped the world, from Mesopotamia to the shipping container
Niall Ferguson · 2008 · Niall Ferguson's history of financial innovation — from Medici banking to mortgage-backed securities. Adds a dimension the other books underweight: capital markets, insurance, and credit are not peripheral to economic development but central to it. Readable but should be checked against critics of Ferguson's selective history.
Benjamin Wallace · 2008 · The Jefferson bottles and the fraud problem in fine wine.
C. M. Turnbull · 2009 · The standard scholarly history of the entrepot.
T2 City of Gold
Jim Krane · 2009 · Dubai's construction of a trading city, written as the 2009 debt crisis hit.
Fintan O'Toole · 2009 · Written in the wreckage; angry but specific about tax breaks, planning and regulatory capture.
Benjamin Roth · 2009 · A small-town lawyer writing it down as it happened, 1931 onward.
David Van Reybrouck · 2010 · Union Minière, the concession economy and what happened after independence.
Tim Wu · 2010 · How communications industries consolidate; frames cable's regulatory position.
T2 Water
Steven Solomon · 2010 · Global history of water as the constraint on wealth and power.
Anatol Lieven · 2011 · Kinship networks, patronage and why the state is weaker and more durable than it looks.
Steven Pinker · 2011 · Long-run violence data against the narrative of a worsening world
Marc Levinson · 2011 · The first everyday-low-price chain, and the political backlash it drew.
Byung-Kook Kim, Ezra F. Vogel · 2011 · The authoritative volume on how the developmental state was built.
Charles Hornsby · 2012 · Exhaustive and unusually attentive to who owned what, and when.
T2 Swiss Made
R. James Breiding · 2012 · The best single account of how Swiss firms built durable niches.
George Megalogenis · 2012 · How deregulation from 1983 produced three decades without recession.
David Nasaw · 2012 · Joseph Kennedy: film, liquor, market operations and the first SEC chairmanship
Michael Axworthy · 2013 · Political history that explains who controls which parts of the economy.
Ernest Freeberg · 2013 · What electric light did to American life; the market Edison created.
Benn Steil · 2013 · Keynes, White and the design of the postwar currency order.
Christopher Clark · 2013 · How Europe stumbled into 1914; decisions under uncertainty and momentum
David Pilling · 2014 · Japan as the working example of a shrinking, ageing economy.
Michael Reid · 2014 · The clearest account of Brazil's political economy and its ceilings.
Sven Beckert · 2014 · One commodity chain as the whole story of industrial capitalism.
Mauricio Drelichman, Hans-Joachim Voth · 2014 · Philip II's serial defaults, and why bankers kept lending anyway.
Walter Isaacson · 2014 · Collaboration, not lone genius, as the engine of the digital era.
Ayesha Jalal · 2014 · Why the security state crowded out the productive economy from the start.
Lodewijk Petram · 2014 · How VOC shares actually traded: brokers, forwards, options, settlement.
T2 World Order
Henry Kissinger · 2014 · Competing regional conceptions of legitimate order and the balance of power
Vicki Howard · 2015 · The rise and fall of the American department store, Sears throughout.
Stephen Witt · 2015 · How the MP3 destroyed recorded-music revenue and set up the streaming rebuild.
Serhii Plokhy · 2015 · The history that explains the regional industrial geography and its ownership.
David McCullough · 2015 · Two bicycle makers solving flight through iteration and self-funding
Leonor Freire Costa, Pedro Lains, Susana Münch Miranda · 2016 · The standard long-run account, from empire trade through EU convergence.
Bastian Obermayer, Frederik Obermaier · 2016 · Insider: the reporters who received and worked the Mossack Fonseca leak.
David Coltart · 2016 · Insider account by a cabinet minister through dollarisation and the unity government.
T2 Fear City
Kim Phillips-Fein · 2017 · New York's 1975 near-default and who bondholders can actually discipline.
Richard Rothstein · 2017 · How federal housing policy engineered segregation.
Alan Greenspan, Adrian Wooldridge · 2018 · A former Fed chairman's economic history of creative destruction.
Marcin Piatkowski · 2018 · The best single account of why Poland converged and others did not.
David Edgerton · 2018 · Revises the declinist story of British industry and its ownership.
David Reich · 2018 · Ancient DNA rewriting human population history
T2 Goliath
Matt Stoller · 2019 · A century of American anti-monopoly politics.
Adam Higginbotham · 2019 · The event that set the industry back a generation.
Marcia Chatelain · 2020 · Pulitzer-winning history of McDonald's franchising in Black America.
Matt Ridley · 2020 · Innovation as gradual recombination rather than invention.
Brian Easton · 2020 · The definitive economic history; the long context for the 1984 rupture.
Gerald Posner · 2020 · Industry history covering J&J's opioid marketing and its regulatory politics.
Catherine Belton · 2020 · The KGB network's recapture of the commanding heights.
T2 Land
Simon Winchester · 2021 · Global history of land ownership, enclosure and dispossession.
Mircea Raianu · 2021 · The first independent scholarly history using company archives.
T2 Chip War
Chris Miller · 2022 · Intel's rise and manufacturing decline inside the global chip contest.
Sebastian Edwards · 2023 · Best single volume: the reforms, the 1982 crash, the pension system and the reaction against it.
Sulmaan Wasif Khan · 2024 · Current account of the cross-strait risk that prices every Taiwanese asset.
Evan Thomas, Walter Isaacson
unverified
Marquis W. Childs · 1936 · The book that made the Swedish model an international reference point.
Allan Nevins · 1940 · The major revisionist defence written against Tarbell.
Boris Emmet, John E. Jeuck · 1950 · The classic scholarly history of the mail-order and store model.
Ralph W. Hidy, Muriel E. Hidy · 1955 · The authorised scholarly history of Standard Oil of New Jersey.
E. W. Bovill · 1958 · Trans-Saharan gold and salt trade; the medieval West African economy
Lynn White · 1962 · How the stirrup and the plough reorganised medieval society and economy
Murray N. Rothbard · 1963 · The Austrian account of 1929 and the policy response that followed
Peter Laslett · 1965 · Pre-industrial English society before wage labour and cities
Michael Cannon · 1966 · The Melbourne property mania and bank collapses of the 1890s.
T3 Hoax
Stephen Fay, Lewis Chester, Magnus Linklater · 1972 · The Clifford Irving forged autobiography, reported as it happened.
Peter Collier, David Horowitz · 1976 · The family and trusts that outlived the operating company.
D. K. Fieldhouse · 1978 · How the emerging-market subsidiaries actually worked; Open Library unreachable.
Pamela McCorduck · 1979 · The first hype cycle recorded as it happened.
Leon Harris · 1979 · The families behind America's great department stores.
E. Richard Brown · 1979 · How the philanthropy reshaped American medicine; the money after the oil.
Marco Palacios · 1980 · Economic history of the crop, the growers' federation and the export institutions built around it.
Charles R. Morris · 1980 · Contemporary anatomy of the same fiscal crisis, written from the numbers.
Maggie Keswick · 1982 · Jardine Matheson: the hong model of diversified trading conglomerate.
Naomi R. Lamoreaux · 1985 · Why the first merger wave happened and why most of it disappointed.
Howard Rheingold · 1985 · Contemporary account of the personal-computing idea PARC realised.
Sterling Seagrave · 1988 · Journalistic account of how the crony monopolies and offshore holdings were built.
John Ensor Harr, Peter J. Johnson · 1988 · Family-archive history of the fortune across three generations.
Arthur T. Vanderbilt II · 1989 · How the heirs dispersed the fortune; written by a descendant.
David E. Nye · 1990 · How a general-purpose technology diffused through everyday commercial life.
Art Davidson · 1990 · The 1989 spill and Exxon's response, reported from Alaska.
Charles Van Doren · 1991 · Survey of what humans have known, era by era
Aurel Schubert · 1991 · The definitive study of the bank failure that broke Central European finance.
Nicolas Shumway · 1991 · The competing national ideas behind the recurring policy reversals.
Jared Diamond · 1991 · Human behaviour read from evolutionary biology; a Munger latticework staple
David P. Demarest · 1992 · Documentary history of the strike, assembled from contemporary sources.
Daniel Crevier · 1993 · Written after the second AI winter; the corrective to every cycle of enthusiasm.
Alfred W. McCoy · 1993 · The provincial dynasties behind the listed conglomerates; still the reference on ownership.
David Kynaston · 1994 · The four-volume history of the world's oldest continuous financial centre.
William Roseberry, Lowell Gudmundson, Mario Samper Kutschbach · 1995 · Comparative coffee political economy; sets Colombia's growers' federation in context.
Sterling Seagrave · 1995 · Overseas-Chinese business networks; the milieu in which Li's empire grew.
Pasuk Phongpaichit, Chris Baker · 1995 · The pre-crisis baseline: how the boom economy was actually structured.
John Hooper · 1995 · The standard survey of post-Franco institutions and business culture.
T. A. Heppenheimer · 1995 · Industry context for the deregulation opening Southwest exploited.
Ivan T. Berend · 1996 · Economic history that explains the industrial base the Czechs privatised.
Javier Martínez, Alvaro Díaz · 1996 · How the productive structure and business class were remade after 1973.
Brian Easton · 1996 · The post-war economy through the liberalisation, by its best chronicler.
Eun Mee Kim · 1997 · The state-chaebol bargain and how it shifted over forty years.
Isabel Vincent · 1997 · Companion investigation into Swiss banks and looted wartime assets.
T3 Titans
Peter C. Newman · 1998 · The next generation of Canadian owners after the Establishment volumes.
Murray A. Rubinstein · 1999 · The standard history volume, including the land reform and SME base.
Nancy Martha West · 2000 · How Kodak's advertising taught Americans what to photograph.
T3 Millionaire
Janet Gleeson · 2000 · John Law, the Mississippi bubble and the invention of paper money in France.
T3 Nonzero
Robert Wright · 2000 · History read as an expanding series of non-zero-sum games
Anthony Gottlieb · 2000 · History of Western philosophy from the Greeks to the Renaissance
Stephen Kinzer · 2001 · Written around the 2001 banking crisis, the last full reset of the system.
Neil Baldwin · 2001 · Open Library merges this record with Albert Lee's 1980 book of the same title.
Arthur Herman · 2001 · Scottish Enlightenment as the source of modern commercial and economic thinking
Paul Ginsborg · 2001 · Family capitalism, clientelism and the state from 1980.
Jomo K. S. · 2001 · The 1997-98 crisis and the heterodox capital-control response, analysed properly.
James Franklin · 2001 · How evidence and probability were reasoned about before formal statistics
Frank Safford, Marco Palacios · 2002 · Regional fragmentation as the structural fact behind Colombian markets.
Timothy Mitchell · 2002 · Heavy going, but the sharpest account of how land, capital and expertise were arranged.
T3 24 Days
Rebecca Smith, John R. Emshwiller · 2003 · The two Wall Street Journal reporters who broke the story.
Jill Jonnes · 2003 · The current war: Edison against Westinghouse and Tesla.
Denny Roy · 2003 · Background on the party-state and land reform behind the industrial model.
Martin Myant · 2003 · The book on voucher privatisation, bank ownership and the tunnelling that followed.
Katherine Verdery · 2003 · Land restitution in Transylvania; a case study in manufacturing property rights.
David Owen · 2004 · Chester Carlson and xerography, the invention that funded PARC.
Gordon S. Wood · 2004 · Franklin's reinvention from imperial gentleman into American businessman
Adrian Vickers · 2005 · The political history behind the current institutional settlement.
Chris Baker, Pasuk Phongpaichit · 2005 · The standard modern history, strong on business families and state capital.
Richard Lloyd Parry · 2005 · Reporting from the 1997-98 collapse and the fall of Suharto.
Les Standiford · 2005 · Narrative of the Frick partnership and Homestead.
Patricio N. Abinales, Donna J. Amoroso · 2005 · The standard history of a weak state captured by strong families.
David Ost · 2005 · How the union that won the transition lost the workplace that followed.
Horst Siebert · 2005 · A structural account of the social market model and its rigidities.
T3 The Tycoons
Charles R. Morris · 2005 · Carnegie, Rockefeller, Gould and Morgan and the economy they built
Anders Åslund, Michael McFaul · 2006 · Why the 2004 turning point failed to dislodge the incumbent asset holders.
Julio F. Carrión · 2006 · Stabilisation, privatisation and the authoritarian bargain that delivered them.
Rush Loving Jr. · 2006 · Conrail, deregulation and the industry's return to profit.
Anders Aslund, Anders Åslund · 2007 · Comparative transition account; Czech vouchers judged against other sequencing choices.
Leo Goodstadt · 2007 · How Hong Kong's banks and bank crises shaped the miracle economy.
Alfonso W. Quiroz · 2008 · Two centuries of graft quantified; the cost of doing business, measured.
Shuja Nawaz · 2008 · The army's internal history; essential for reading political risk here.
Jules Marchal · 2008 · The Congo palm-oil concessions behind the soap business; archival and damning.
Steve Weinberg · 2008 · Dual portrait of Tarbell and Rockefeller and their collision.
Mary Hilson · 2008 · Historian's account of what the model actually is and where it diverges.
Richard Schickel · 2008 · Illustrated studio history tied to the documentary of the same name.
Ivan T. Berend · 2009 · Covers EU accession as the main driver of Romanian institutional change.
Robert Lacey · 2009 · The sequel covering the religious backlash and reform attempts.
Roger Boyes · 2009 · Contemporaneous reporting on the collapse and the Icesave dispute.
T3 The Big Rich
Bryan Burrough · 2009 · The Texas fortunes, including the Hunts before and after the silver trade.
Miguel Tinker Salas · 2009 · The foreign oil companies' company towns and the society they built.
T3 The Miracle
Michael Schuman · 2009 · Asia's growth stories told through the people who drove them.
T3 Uranium
Tom Zoellner · 2009 · The rock itself: mining, boom towns and the geopolitics of supply.
Geoffrey Jones · 2010 · Harvard business historian; sets her brand-building against the whole industry.
Tarek Osman · 2010 · Readable political economy of the Nasser-to-Mubarak arc and the crony privatisations.
Sebastian Edwards · 2010 · Why growth kept disappointing despite reform; good on institutions and productivity.
Paul Rivlin · 2010 · The wider economy: labour markets, defence spending, inflation and stabilisation.
Walter Kiechel · 2010 · How BCG, Bain and McKinsey created the market for strategy itself.
Riordan Roett · 2010 · Institutional history of the stabilisation that made the commodity boom possible.
Tilar J. Mazzeo · 2010 · One product's history, including the Wertheimer deal that made the money.
Ian Scoones · 2010 · Ten years of field data on what actually happened to seized farmland.
Tadeusz Kowalik · 2011 · The critique of the transition's distributional cost.
Robert N. Proctor · 2011 · Built from the industry's own litigation document archive.
Daniel Branch · 2011 · Ethnic coalition politics as the mechanism that allocates economic rents.
Allen J. Fromherz · 2011 · How the ruling family consolidated gas revenue and the merchant elite.
Hal Vaughan · 2011 · Declassified files on her Abwehr connection; contested by the house.
Steven A. Cook · 2011 · Nasser to Tahrir; the political frame around state capitalism and infitah.
Larry Rohter · 2012 · The commodity-boom decade and the institutions underneath it.
David W. P. Elliott · 2012 · How the Party argued itself into opening the economy and joining WTO.
Michael J. LaRosa, Germán R. Mejía · 2012 · Short modern survey covering the reform and security-driven recovery years.
Daniel Tudor · 2012 · The society and politics a foreign investor in Samsung is buying into.
Carlo Bastasin · 2012 · Blow-by-blow of the 2010-12 rescues and the national politics behind them.
Leonard DeGraaf · 2013 · By the Edison archivist; illustrated, and best on the laboratory as business.
Frederick Taylor · 2013 · Modern retelling with more on the stabilisation and the Rentenmark.
James Owen Weatherall · 2013 · How physicists and mathematicians came to run money; useful context for Simons.
Andrew MacGregor Marshall · 2014 · Succession risk and the political instability that follows it.
Robert E. Gallamore, John R. Meyer · 2014 · The economics of Staggers Act deregulation.
James Mahaffey · 2014 · What actually went wrong, and how much of the fear is proportionate.
Jessica Gordon Nembhard · 2014 · African American co-operative economics, a history largely written out.
Chris Taylor · 2014 · Merchandising rights outgrowing the films that created them.
Anders Åslund, Simeon Djankov · 2014 · Includes the Czech voucher scheme written up by people who designed and criticised it.
Jeremy Seabrook · 2014 · Dhaka's garment industry from Rana Plaza back through its supply chain.
Ricardo Hausmann, Francisco Rodríguez · 2014 · Academic but decisive: the decline began decades before Chávez, and shows why.
George Megalogenis · 2015 · Migration and openness as the long-run growth variable.
Lilia M. Schwarcz, Heloisa M. Starling · 2015 · Long-run history explaining the inequality and clientelism investors meet.
Stathis N. Kalyvas · 2015 · Compact political economy of why the state developed the way it did.
Linda Lim · 2015 · Retrospective essays on the limits of the model and what comes next.
Nathan Bomey · 2016 · The largest Chapter 9 municipal bankruptcy, reported from inside the case.
Julian Guthrie · 2016 · The Ansari X Prize and the origin of commercial human spaceflight.
Daniel Gordis · 2016 · The political history behind the state's economic choices.
Farah Al-Nakib · 2016 · Oil urbanism and how land distribution created the domestic merchant fortune.
Robert McNally · 2017 · Argues price stability always required a swing producer or cartel.
Leandro Prados de la Escosura · 2017 · The long-run reconstruction of Spanish output and productivity.
David Thomson · 2017 · Short critical history of the brothers and the studio style.
T3 The Big Four
Ian D. Gow, Stuart Kells · 2018 · The accounting oligopoly's economics and conflicts.
Adam Fisher · 2018 · Oral history; Thiel and the PayPal cohort speak in their own words.
Tobias Buck · 2019 · The crisis, the bank rescue and the shape of the recovery.
Richard Snow · 2019 · The building of Disneyland as a bet-the-company project.
Ahmet T. Kuru · 2019 · A structural argument about why Muslim-majority economies underperform.
Janek Wasserman · 2019 · History of the Vienna school as a network, including its financing and its export to the US.
Paul Morland · 2019 · Demography as the hidden driver of the last two centuries of power.
Douglas Rogers · 2019 · The 2017 coup reported from inside, including its business backers.
Paul D'Anieri · 2019 · Gas transit, trade dependence and the economics underneath the conflict.
Christopher Knowlton · 2020 · The 1920s Florida land boom and its collapse.
T3 City on Fire
Antony Dapiran · 2020 · The 2019 protests and the political-risk repricing that followed.
Aaron Jakes · 2020 · Colonial economism and the debt-and-cotton origins of the modern Egyptian economy.
David Rundell · 2020 · A former diplomat on the durability of the system Vision 2030 must change.
Javier Blas, Jack Farchy · 2021 · Glencore, Vitol, Trafigura and Cargill; the definitive book on the trading houses.
Jorge Pontes, Marcio Anselmo · 2022 · Insider: two federal police delegates on the Lava Jato investigation.
William Neuman · 2022 · Reporting on the endgame: PDVSA's decay, default, sanctions and dollarisation.
Dan Senor, Saul Singer · 2023 · The sequel, on the social factors the authors think sustain it.
Thomas Robert Malthus · 1798 · The original population-versus-resources argument that still frames the debate
Henry S. Randall, J. B. Lippincott, Company · 1858
Lewis Copeland, Lawrence W. Lamm, Stephen J. McKenna · 1942
Irving Stone · 1956 · Narrative of the American West's mining and railroad fortunes
Numa Denis Fustel De Coulanges · 1956
Elting E. Morison · 1966
Michael Baxandall · 1972
Douglass C. 94 North, Robert Paul Thomas · 1973
James Thomas Flexner · 1974
Archibald Cox · 1976
R. Albert Berry · 1983 · Dated but the only serious English work on Colombian manufacturing.
Paul Johnson · 1983
William Manchester · 1983
Elizabeth L. Eisenstein · 1983
John F. Witte · 1985
Paul Kennedy · 1987 · Military spending measured against the economy that has to carry it.
Philip Mirowski · 1989 · How economics borrowed physics metaphors, and what that cost it
Li Lu · 1990 · Memoir of the Cultural Revolution and Tiananmen; his only English-language book.
Ricardo Manapat · 1991 · Hard-to-find catalogue of Marcos-era crony deals; the source everyone else cites.
Charles VanDoren · 1992
Sebastian Mallaby · 1992 · Open Library unreachable during build; every openlibrary.org query failed with connection errors
Jill Crystal · 1992 · Includes the Souk al-Manakh episode and the Kuwait Investment Office.
James Grant · 1992 · Open Library unreachable during build; title listed on grantspub.com books page
William Strauss, Neil Howe · 1996
David Hackett Fischer · 1996 · Eight centuries of price revolutions and what ended each one.
Stevenson Swanson, Chicago Tribune · 1997
John W. Dower · 1999
Ulysses S. Grant · 1999
Joseph J. Ellis · 2000
C. R. Pennell · 2000 · Background rather than business, but the makhzen and the palace's commercial role are here.
Edward Gibbon · 2000
Mark Arax, Rick Wartzman · 2003
Antoin E. Murphy · 2004 · Cross-holdings, the state and who actually controls French companies.
William J. Bernstein · 2004
Charles C. Mann · 2005
James Grant · 2005 · Open Library unreachable during build; title listed on grantspub.com books page
Giorgio Vasari · 2005
Peter L. Bernstein · 2005 · Open Library unreachable during build; every openlibrary.org query failed with connection errors
Marco Palacios · 2006 · Property rights, land and violence as a continuous economic story.
Istvan Hargittai · 2006
William J. Bernstein · 2008
Angela Vergara · 2008 · The copper enclave before nationalisation: labour, Anaconda and Kennecott.
Anders Åslund · 2009 · The 1991-2008 transition; explains where the industrial assets came from.
Michael Gross · 2009 · Money and power inside the Metropolitan Museum.
Gregory Cochran, Henry Harpending · 2009
Peter T. Leeson · 2009
Neil MacGregor · 2010
Henry Schlesinger · 2010
William Rosen · 2010
Ezra F. Vogel · 2011
Jane Gleeson-White · 2011
Terry S. Reynolds, Virginia P. Dawson · 2011
James Grant · 2011 · Open Library unreachable during build; title listed on grantspub.com books page
Tai-chun Kuo, Ramon H. Myers · 2011 · The policy record of the transition from agriculture to electronics.
Gordon S. Wood · 2011
Barry Hatton · 2011 · General portrait, not a business book, but the only readable account of the country's institutions.
Paul Ingrassia · 2012
Arthur Herman · 2012 · American industrial mobilisation in the 1940s; the precedent everyone reaches for.
Judith Flanders · 2012
Nicholas Wade · 2014
Diane Coyle · 2014
Bob Blaisdell · 2014
Charles King · 2014
Maximillian Potter · 2014 · Extortion at Domaine de la Romanee-Conti.
Roger Lowenstein · 2015 · How the Federal Reserve was argued into existence, 1907-1913.
Geoffrey de Villehardouin · 2015
Richard Saunders, Tinashe Nyamunda · 2016 · The Marange diamond fields; how an extractive rent was captured militarily.
Bhu Srinivasan · 2017
Julie A. Cohn · 2017 · Institutional history of interconnection and who controls it.
David M. Rubenstein · 2019 · Conversations with leading historians.
Li Lu · 2020 · Published in Chinese only; no English edition exists.
Roger Lowenstein · 2022
David M. Rubenstein · 2024 · Open Library records the title as Highest Calling; on the American presidency.
James Grant · 2025 · W. W. Norton, August 2025; confirmed by his 2026 WSJ author bio line
Philip B. Meggs, Alston W. Purvis · 2025
Adrienne M. Harrison · Open Library returns no work record for this title and author.
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Alfred Lansing
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Lee Kuan Yew Unread, but I saw this
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Lawrence J. Haas
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Nathaniel Philbrick
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Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney
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Caroline Weber
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Stéphane Courtois, Andrzej Paczkowski, Karel Bartosek
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Tim Flannery
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James Gleick
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Robert B. Strassler (ed.)
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Charlotte Trumpler (ed.)
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Candice Millard
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Richard E. Neustadt, Ernest R. May
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Carroll Quigley
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Steven Solomon
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