Economic history and long-run growth

Why the Dutch Republic of 1500 to 1815 was the first modern economy.

A global history of cotton used to trace how capitalism developed.

American economic growth from colonial times to now, driven by creative destruction.

Steven Pinker's 500-page empirical survey of progress across 15 dimensions: health, wealth, equality, safety, knowledge, quality of life. Explicitly frames market economies and Enlightenment liberalism as the institutional sources of that progress. Has been criticized for cherry-picking metrics and underweighting catastrophic risks; the data itself is worth engaging with regardless.

Hans Rosling was a global health professor, not an economist, which gives his data-driven case for human progress particular credibility. He shows, in meticulous detail, that almost every quantitative measure of human welfare has improved dramatically over the past century. He attributes this to global trade and economic development without being a polemicist.

Prosperity grows as trade and specialisation let ideas meet and combine.

An interpretation of the New Deal and of the historians who have written on it.

Why Britain's empire after the Seven Years War struggled with the costs of power.

How Britain, Germany, Japan and the US each built their own form of capitalism.

Why some nations grew rich over 500 years, with culture as the deciding factor.

How Knudsen and Kaiser led America's industrial build-up for the Second World War.

How American manufacturing rose to lead the world, and why its share then fell.

How organisms, populations, machines, economies and civilisations grow, and stop.

Seventy-one short pieces that correct common impressions with plain arithmetic.

Why the inventions of 1870 to 1970 raised living standards as nothing since has.