Economic and Business History

How Standard Oil used railroad rebates to crush rival refiners, case by case.

How DuPont, GM, Standard Oil and Sears built the multidivisional firm.

How salaried managers replaced markets in coordinating US business, 1840 to 1920.

A century of US regulation through four figures, from Charles Francis Adams to Kahn.

Ford and Nissan side by side, showing why US carmakers lost to Japan.

How cost accounting served managers until financial reporting took it over.

Why big industrial firms in the US, Britain and Germany rose or lagged, 1880 to 1940.

The history of oil from the first Pennsylvania well to the Gulf War.

A century of the American cigarette industry, from mass marketing to 1990s lawsuits.

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

How IBM and its German subsidiary worked with Nazi Germany from 1933 through the war.

How the shipping container cut freight costs and remade global trade.

Henry Ford's failed attempt to build a small American town in the Amazon.

How the transcontinental railroads, the first corporate giants, reshaped America.

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

How media from the penny press to social media capture attention and resell it.

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

Three generations of the Sackler family and how Purdue Pharma sold OxyContin.

How Vanderbilt, Gould, Rockefeller, Morgan and others built 19th-century fortunes.

Charles Schwab's rise from Carnegie's mill to head US Steel, then build Bethlehem.

The big international oil companies and how the 1973 embargo took away their control.

The standard group history, repeatedly revised and expanded.

The first volume of a history of the Hudson's Bay Company.

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

The investors, politicians and workers who built the transcontinental railroad.

How coal built empires and economies, and the death and pollution it caused.

A short history of the joint stock company, from trading charters to multinationals.

The Ford Motor Company from 1903 to the end of the 20th century.

The 1976 tasting of top French wines against new California ones, and its effects.

Henry Ford as a shaper of American culture as much as of its industry.

What drives family business dynasties such as the Rothschilds, Fords and Toyodas.

How the cigarette rose in 20th-century America, and how its harm was proved.

Long-distance trade from Mesopotamia and the spice routes to modern globalisation.

The record-priced 1787 Lafite said to be Jefferson's, and doubts about its origin.

How A&P became the world's largest retailer and the political fight it set off.

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

The rise and fall of the American department store, with Sears throughout.

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

A political history of American monopoly and of the tradition that fought it.

The US drug industry from patent medicines to the opioid epidemic and the Sacklers.

The first independent scholarly history using company archives.

Six materials the world runs on, sand, salt, iron, copper, oil and lithium, traced.

The major revisionist defence written against Tarbell.

The classic scholarly history of the mail-order and store model.

The authorised scholarly history of Standard Oil of New Jersey.

The family and trusts that outlived the operating company.

How Unilever's overseas subsidiaries worked, 1895 to 1965.

The Jewish families behind America's great department stores.

Jardine Matheson and the model of the diversified Hong Kong trading house.

Why the first merger wave happened and why most of it disappointed.

Three generations of Rockefellers and how the fortune passed down.

How the Vanderbilt heirs spent and scattered the family fortune.

The 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill and Exxon's response, reported from Alaska.

Commercial aviation from biplanes after the First World War to deregulation.

The next generation of Canada's business owners after the old Establishment.

The building of America's first transcontinental railroad, from plan to completion.

How Kodak's advertising taught Americans what to photograph.

How Henry Ford published The International Jew, a book the Nazis spread.

The two Wall Street Journal reporters who broke the story.

How the Homestead strike turned Carnegie and Frick's partnership into a feud.

Carnegie, Rockefeller, Gould and Morgan and the economy they built

Conrail, deregulation and how US railroads returned to profit.

Ida Tarbell and John D. Rockefeller, and the collision between the two.

Illustrated studio history tied to the documentary of the same name.

The rise and fall of the Texas oil fortunes, the Hunts among them.

Uranium: its mining, its boom towns and the geopolitics of its supply.

Harvard business historian; sets her brand-building against the whole industry.

How BCG, Bain and McKinsey created the market for strategy itself.

One product's history, including the Wertheimer deal that made the money.

How tobacco chemists engineered cigarettes, drawn from the industry's own documents.

Why US railroads declined under regulation and recovered after the Staggers Act.

How Star Wars merchandise came to outgrow the films that created it.

Argues price stability always required a swing producer or cartel.

Short critical history of the brothers and the studio style.

The accounting oligopoly's economics and conflicts.

How Walt Disney bet his company on building Disneyland.

History of the Vienna school as a network, including its financing and its export to the US.

Glencore, Vitol, Trafigura and Cargill; the definitive book on the trading houses.

The original population-versus-resources argument that still frames the debate

How the Industrial Revolution's self-regulating market upended society.

How economics copied the maths of 19th-century physics, and what that cost it.

Illustrated family survey.

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

Eight centuries of price revolutions and what ended each one.

J. G. Boswell and the secret farming empire he ran in the heart of California.

The East India Company, from spice trader to ruler of India: the first multinational.

Revolutions in power, transport, communication and organisation that made big firms.

Economics applied to pirates: why they behaved as they did and why they succeeded.

Extortion at Domaine de la Romanee-Conti.