Who Makes Cents?: A History of Capitalism Podcast

How do you write the history of something as abstract, as placeless, and as vast as the globalization that has remade our world over the past several decades?  If you're Ian Kumekawa, you make those immaterial forces concrete by telling the story of one object: a hulking 94-meter-long steel barge he calls “The Vessel.”  From housing for oil roughnecks in the North Sea, to a barracks for British soldiers in the Falklands, to a jail docked on a Manhattan pier, the Vessel reveals how the murky world of offshore capitalism is in fact embodied in tangible things. It always involves real people living and working in real places.  This one ship, then, helps us to see the too-often-invisible material reality of global capitalism at the close of the twentieth century. 

This month's episode looks at the history of Chinese industrialization by focusing on Anshan Iron and Steel Works or Angang, located in Manchuria. Long portrayed as the quintessential model of Mao-era socialist industrialization, Angang, as Koji Hirata shows, was, in many ways, built on the material and ideological foundations laid by imperial Japan and nationalist China. Moving forward in time, Hirata analyzes Angang's role in the making of socialist China, including revealing the relativley understudied political tensions that existed within China's largest state-owned enterprise (SOE) between factory directors, who answered to Beijing, and local party officials in Anshan; the political education of workers; and much more. The episode concludes by taking a long look at Anshan's shifting fortunes—and Manchuria, more broadly—amid a series of reforms during the late 20th century, and its transformation into a Chinese Rustbelt.

It's now been over a decade since the New York Times declared that the history of capitalism was in full swing at American universities. This podcast also just celebrated its 10 year anniversary. With those milestones in mind, we wanted to take the temperature of the very folks driving the field forward into new and exciting directions. To do that, your co-hosts hit the road, interviewing attendees at the 2025 Business History Conference in Atlanta. Listen to find out what's on the mind of some of the leading historians in our field.

In this month's episode Justene Hill Edwards leads listeners on a deep dive into the rise and fall of the Freedman's Savings and Trust Company, also known as the Freedman's Bank. Among the topics explored are the bank's relationship to the similarly named Freedman's Bureau, the ways the bank's administrators worked to gain African Americans' trust, and, notably, how these same administrators betrayed African Americans' trust by squandering, and, at times, outright stealing their savings to fuel their own risky ventures with longterm consequences for the racial wealth gap and African Americans' relationship with American capitalism.

Back in high school, my social studies teacher—who was, of course, also the football coach—told my class that entrepreneurs were the heroes of American history. If we enjoyed a dynamic economy and good jobs, it was all thanks to their genius for innovation and risk-taking. And if we wanted to get ahead, he said, we'd need to foster the same sort of entrepreneurial spirit in ourselves. You are probably rolling your eyes right now. I certainly remember doing the same back in 10th grade. But Erik Baker's new book, Make Your Own Job How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America, revealed that my teacher was far from outlier: he was part of a century-long current of entrepreneurial boosterism. From Henry Ford to Marcus Garvey, Peter Drucker to Sam Walton, the War on Poverty to the shareholder value revolution, Baker shows how the entrepreneurial work ethic captivated thinkers in every corner of American life. And he reveals how for workers, it promised a way to transcend precarity and—just maybe—become the protagonist of one's own economic life. 

Looking back from our contemporary vantage point, the United States' global capitalist empire looks both omnipresent and inevitable. Much of the world's trade is denominated in dollars. American financial institutions are at the helm of international investment and capital transfers. And US military might enforces this order, either implicitly—or sometimes quite explicitly. But as Mary Bridges argues, America's financial dominance was neither pre-ordained nor monolithic, particularly in its early days at the start of the twentieth century. In her new book, Bridges' follows the foot soldiers on the imperial frontier: everyday bankers, working at overseas branch banks in places like Manilla and Hong Kong. It was these bankers who did the daily work of building out American global finance. And they brought with them their classed, racialized, and gendered worldviews, embedding those structures of inequality in the very foundations of dollar-dominated globalization.

A simple leather shoe. A scratchy shirt made of cotton or wool. A roughly-hewn axe. A leather whip, braided in New Jersey. Southern slavery did not just depend on an extractive economic system, or a highly-unequal racial and social order, or a brutal regime of labor exploitation—even though it needed all of those things. It also required a vast array of goods: real, tangible tools and garments that were usually made in the North and used in the South. Seth Rockman's new book follows those everyday objects: from their production, to their sale, to their distribution and use on plantations. Along the way, he reveals the economic and imaginative ties that linked people living across antebellum America—North and South. And he explains how those plantation goods could become sites of struggle, as slaves used them to contest the terms of their bondage.

Taxes. Is there anything Americans like to complain about more? This episode takes a deep dive into the U.S. tax system, paying particular attention to the property tax. Exploding a popular myth that purports Black Americans pay little to no taxes, historian Andrew Kahrl reveals how Black Americans have long paid more than their fair share of property taxes amid and after the rise of the Jim Crow fiscal order. Along the way, we also discuss the role property taxes play in local government, movements for equitable taxation, and the exploitative tax lien industry and its role in a massive government-sanctioned theft of Black land. 

450 million. According to our best estimates, that's how many guns there are in the United States. To put that in perspective: if you gave a firearm to every single person in the nation—including babies and young children—you'd still have at least 100 million guns left over. Why did we amass such a large stockpile of guns? How did the US become an outlier among nations when it came to civilian gun ownership? On this month's episode, Andrew McKevitt reveals the history of what he calls “gun capitalism” in the decades after World War II. He helps us see how the exploding firearms market was related to broader currents: from the rise of mass consumerism, to Cold War anti-communism, to grassroots social movements for consumer regulation. Is there any way to stem the seemingly limitless accumulation of guns in the United States? Take a listen and find out. 

In 2022 and 2023, an estimated 50 million Americans went camping. Many others participated in outdoor recreation activities ranging from mountain-climbing to sailing. According to the U.S. Department of Congress, in 2022, the outdoor recreation economy was worth $563.7 billion or 2.2 percent of GDP. In this episode, historian Rachel Gross takes us on an adventure through the outdoor industry's rise, from Teddy Roosevelt's famous buckskin jacket to the ascendance of companies like Eddie Bauer and L.L. Bean, to the use of synthetic materials like GoreTex, and much much more. Along the way, we discuss an important question: Why is it that so many people's first stop on the way to the woods is an outdoor store?

In today's episode, Margot Canaday reveals the not-so-hidden history of LGBT workers in modern America. In the absence of state protections, she finds, some employers actually appreciated queer workers precisely because they were contingent, unattached, and exploitable. In many ways, that employment relationship augured the way all workers would come to be treated in the era of post-Fordism. And it would set the terms for queer peoples' struggles for recognition and protections on the job in the closing decades of the twentieth century.  

Today, China is the U.S. third largest trading partner and second-largest source of imports. This wasn't always the case. Indeed, in the 1970s, when the United States first began trading with communist China after several decades, few could have foreseen such a scenario. In this episode, guest Elizbeth Ingleson reveals the surprising story of how two Cold War foes found common cause in transforming China's economy into a source of cheap labor. Along the way, we discuss some of the key policy decisions and Chinese and American actors, including U.S. business, that facilitated China's convergence with the capitalist world. 

When we study capitalism, we usually focus on the active time in people's lives: the moments where things like work, consumption, production, trade, accumulation, and exchange all happen. But Teresa Ghilarducci, the guest on this week's episode, argues that capitalism also shapes what happens next, in that period after people's working lives have come to an end. Teresa's new book, Work, Retire, Repeat: The Uncertainty of Retirement in the New Economy tells the story of how retirement—just like work—has become much more precarious over the past several decades. It's a story about politics, about demographics, about economics. How we pay for retirement, she reveals, tells us a lot about what we value in our society, and how that's changed over time. And along the way, she offers us a few policy proposals that just might remedy the way we handle retirement today.

In this month's episode, co-host Jessica Levy and guest Cheryl Narumi Naruse examine popular narratives surrounding Singapore's "miraculous" journey from Third to First world nation, currently ranked third in the world in terms of Gross Domestic Product per capita. The episode takes a particular look at the period leading up to and following the 1997 Asian financial crisis, during which this tiny island city-state underwent a massive rebranding campaign to transform its reputation from a culturally sterile and punitive nation to an alluring location for economic flourishing. Topics discussed include Singapore's relationship with a core constituency of Global Asia, namely Overseas Singaporeans, genres of postcolonial capitalism, and much, much more.

One recent study found that 81% of businesses in the United States have zero employees. That is, they are run by sole proprietors, working for and by themselves, The ideal of self-employment has become dominant in our culture, too. More Americans than ever dream of becoming an entrepreneur, an independent owner, a founder. But for all of its prevalence in our economy and in our imaginations, the origins of this impulse are a bit hazy. When did so many of us begin to idolize self-employment? What might it reveal about broader shifts in the employment landscape in the 20th and 21st centuries? In his new book, One Day I'll Work for Myself: The Dream and Delusion That Conquered America, Ben Waterhouse answers precisely those questions. He explains how the rise of self-employment dates back to the economic transformations of the 1970s and intensified during the decades of precarity that followed. In our wide-ranging conversation, we touch on everything from franchise jurisprudence to the gig economy to the surprising story behind the Sam Adams beer company.

Most scholars would date the origins of neoliberalism to the 1970s, when a range of crises gave rise to new forms of market-oriented governance. But Brent Cebul, our guest on this month's episode, argues that liberalism's sharp turn towards neoliberalism wasn't so sharp after all. In fact, as early as the New Deal, liberals tried to realize their policy goals through market means. And officials in Washington worked hand-in-hand with otherwise conservative business and municipal elites on those development programs. Throughout the entirety of the long twentieth century, liberals have bound their visions of progress to the local needs of capital. In the process, they've ended up entrenching the very inequalities that they had set out to solve in the first place.  

In 2022, roughly one in 10 suburban residents lived in poverty (9.6%), compared to about one in six in primary cities (16.2%), according to a recent study by the Brookings Institute. The issue of suburban poverty has garnered significant attention, prompting more than a bit of nostalgia for the good ole days of when suburbs were prosperous, living proof of the American dream. This narrative of postwar suburbia as prosperous, if also exclusive places, has been reinforced by historians and other scholars who, over the years, have shown how the federal government via FHA-insured mortgages and other programs facilitated a dramatic rise in suburban homeownership after WWII, while laregely restricting access through covenants and zoning laws to White Americans. But is this the full story? In this month's episode, Tim Keogh challenges this narrative, demonstrating that for many the postwar American suburban dream was more myth than reality. Alongside exclusive white middle-class communities, Keogh explains how the suburbs have long served as home to low-income residents, whose labor in construction, retail, childcare and a range of other low-wage jobs helped enable suburban prosperity in the absence of a robust welfare state. Along the way, we explore the policy decisions that helped to ensure poverty's persistence alongside prosperity and what we can do today to eliminate poverty wherever it might appear.    

Today, discussions of care are ubiquitous. From employer-programs promoting self-care to the $800 billion healthcare industry, care forms a central part of our lives and the economy. But, are the systems and structures currently in place to care serving those who need it the most? This month's episode, featuring historian and activist Premilla Nadasen, takes a close look at the care economy and its relationship to racial capitalism and the reconfiguration of the welfare state. Along the way, we talk about the rise of the care-industrial-complex, wherein private corporations and non-profits benefit from public investment in care; what it's like for those who work in the care industry; and what a caring society built on radical care, as opposed to care-for-profit, might look like. 

Are you a professional living and working in an English-speaking country? If so, this episode is for you. Teachers, doctors, nurses, accountants, engineers, lawyers, social workers, the list goes on, professionals play an important role in our society. This wasn't always the case. This episode explores the rise of the professional class in the Anglophone world, including engaging in a decades-old question of whether or not professionals constitute a class. Topics covered include the role that professionals played in the rise of Anglo-settler colonialism; the relationship between the professions and virtue; racial, gendered, and class identities among professionals; and the intensifying battle between professionals and managers. Once seen as allied in administering the global welfare state, professionals and managers, in recent decades, have increasingly found themselves on opposing sides—a conflict made pronounced, in the United States, at least, by a series of recent teachers and nurses strikes, among other examples.

An iced cold Coca-Cola. A cross-country flight on Delta to visit friends. A much-needed medication overnighted via Fed-Ex. Bulk toilet paper purchased at Wal-Mart. What do these items have in common?  In today's modern economy, each of these can be purchased from the comfort of the couch, frequently with a credit card pioneered by Bank of America. They are all also from companies headquartered in the American South. In this month's episode, historian Bart Elmore explains how corporations from the American South helped make it possible for us to satisfy our desires from the convenience of our home and/or hometown, no matter how remote, and the environmental costs associated with each.

This month's episode gives a nod to one of the figures in our logo: the construction worker. Our guest, Mark Erlich has worked in the construction industry as a carpenter and union leader for a half century. In this episode, he shares his insights on the industry's past, present, and future, paying particular attention to the politics and material conditions surrounding construction work. In response to those who argue that today's labor shortages in the construction industry are the result of societal preferences, Erlich points to the decades-long degradation of construction work, including declining pay and protections. Fix those and you'll solve the labor problem.

In this month's episode, guest Chelsea Schields discusses oil refining and intimacy, illuminating the social ties and affective attachments engendered by oil in the Dutch islands of Aruba and Curaçao. Known today for their gorgeous beaches and sunny weather that attract tourists year-round, during the mid-twentieth century these islands were home to some of the largest oil refineries in the world. Along the way, we cover topics such as  the role of race and gender in structuring labor relations; inter and intra imperial politics; migration; anti-colonial and anti-welfare movements; the 'offshore'; and much much more. 

When it was completed in 1914, the Panama Canal nearly halved the travel time between the U.S. West Coast and Europe and revolutionized trade and travel between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. It's construction, overseen by the U.S. government-Isthmian Canal Commission (ICC), has long been hailed as a marvel of American ingenuity. Less well-known was the project's dependence on the labor of Black migrant women. In this episode, Joan Flores-Villalobos demonstrates how Black West Indian women's intimate lives and labor were at the center of the Panama Canal's construction, explaining how they built a provisioning economy that proved critical to the canal's development and the maintenance of the West Indian diaspora.

In this month's episode, Christy Thornton discusses the surprising influence of post-revolutionary Mexico on some of the twentieth century's most important international economic institutions, including the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Triangulating between archives in Mexico, the United States, and Great Britain, Thornton traces how Mexican officials repeatedly led the charge among Third World nations campaigning for greater representation within and redistribution through multilateral institutions created to promote international development and finance. In doing so, she recovers the crucial role played by Mexican economists, diplomats, and politicians in shaping global economic governance and U.S. hegemony during the mid-twentieth century.

This month, we welcomed Jennifer Mittelstadt back to the show, joined by Mark Wilson, to discuss their new edited volume, The Military and the Market. Moving beyond familiar topics like defense spending, the volume takes an expansive approach to examining military-market relations in a wide range of contexts--from family business in the Civil War to managing post-World War II housing construction for U.S. soldiers and their families, and much more. Alongside Jennifer and Mark, listeners will hear from Kara Dixon Vuic, whose chapter explores the U.S. military's managment of markets for sex. Taken together, The Military and the Market challenges scholars and military policymakers alike to really grapple with the breadth and complexity of U.S. military-market relations over the course of two centuries.

In this episode, historian Allan Lumba explores how the United States wielded monetary authority in the colonial Philippines, including the role of money as a tool for countering decolonization, entrenching racial and class hierarchies, and directing the profits of colonialism towards the U.S. and Wall Street, in particular, with long-lasting consequences for Filipinos and Americans still dealing with the aftermath of what Lumba calls conditional decolonization.

This month's episode takes listeners back in time to the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a time of significant labor unrest. At the time, employers, often with government support, went to great lengths to put down dissent, including employing violent tactics such as whippings, kidnappings, shootings, and imprisonment. Among those that helped to spear-head this violent suppression of workers and their allies were groups like the Ku Klux Klan, Law & Order Leagues, and Citizens Alliances. Though usually discussed separately, all of these groups used similar language to tar their lower-class challengers as menacing villains and deployed comparable tactics to suppress them. Calling into question a narrative of business management in this period centered on the adoption of scientific management principles and welfare capitalism, Pearson illuminates the repressive, and often terrifying, tactics undergirding industrial-labor relations at the turn of the 20th century.

This month's episode picks up on a theme previously explored on the podcast: international finance.  Drawing on a broad range of German, English, Japanese, and Chinese sources, Ghassan Moazzin traces the rise of foreign banking in China during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a period that saw a dramatic increase in international trade and investment in the country. Particular attention is paid to the role of foreign banks in integrating China into global financial markets, including marketing China's sovereign debt, and their involvement in the 1911 Revolution and other events in modern Chinese history.

In this month's episode, Claire Dunning explains how and why non-profits came to play such an important role in U.S. cities after World War II. In doing so, she explores the emergence of non-profit neighborhoods amid various changes in urban policy, starting with urban renewal and continuing through the War on Poverty and the rise of community development corporations. While acknowledging all of the important work done by non-profits, the book also draws attention to a central paradox of our reliance on non-profits to address a range of social issues: the dramatic expansion in non-profits has coincided with rising poverty and inequality, rather than their eradication. 

In this episode, Mircea Raianu traces the rise of the Tata Group, one of India's largest and oldest companies, from its early days involved in cotton and opium trading to multinational conglomerate invested in everything from salt to software, and, notably, steel. Among the topics discussed, include Tata's involvement with colonial and anti-colonial developments; international networks of finance capital and scientific management; and Cold War geopolitics. Ultimately, Raianu offers a model for how to study global capitalism in the global South, explicating Tata's connections to the world and India, while also avoiding the traps of exoticism and over generalization.

This month's episode centers Samoa, including the Pacific islands comprising the present-day independent country of Samoa and American Samoa, examining capitalism, globalization, and coconut colonialism at the turn of the 20th century. In doing so, it pays close attention to the lives of workers, including plantation laborers, ethnographic edutainers, and service workers, revealing how Samoans navigated colonialism and capitalism, contesting exploitative labor conditions, while, at the same time, articulating their own forms of Oceanian globality.

In 2020, George Floyd was killed by police outside a store in Minneapolis known as “the best place to buy menthols.” Of Black Americans who smoke, eighty-percent smoke menthol cigarettes. In this episode, Keith Wailoo explores the history of menthol cigarettes and their marketing to Black Americans. In doing so, he ties together the history of tobacco companies and the disproportionate number of Black deaths at the hands of police violence, COVID-19, and other forms of racial violence and exploitation, giving new meaning to the cry: “I can't breathe.” 

This month's episode takes a deep dive into the history of work and automation in the post-World War II era. It traces the discourse around automation from its origins in the factory to its wide-ranging implications in political and social life. Countering automation's proponents, who prophesize that robots will soon replace human labor, Jason Resnikoff reveals how the automation discourse has tended to obscure the human beings who continue to labor, often in sped up and intensified manners, alongside machines.

This month's episode focuses on a popular commodity, namely rubber. Despite consuming a large share of the world's rubber supply, the United States has long relied on the global market to meet American demand for rubber. During the early twentieth-century, this dependence on foreign rubber led the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company to the West African nation of Liberia, where the company built one of the largest rubber plantations in the world. What follows is a tale of land expropriation, medical racism, and corporate power that stretches from the 1920s to the 2020s.

Indebtedness, like inequality, has become a ubiquitous condition in and beyond the United States. Yet few have probed American cities' dependence on municipal debt. Focusing on San Francisco, this month's guest, Destin Jenkins, traces the evolving relationship between cities, bondholders, banks, and municipal debt from the Great Depression to the 1980s. In doing so, he sheds new light on the power arrangement at the center of municipal finance, and offers some suggestions on how to contest it.

It is no secret that the United States is facing a crisis with regards to higher education. In this month's episode, historian Elizabeth Tandy Shermer explains the long history that gave rise to the current situation in which many institutions are struggling financially, while students and their parents are often the ones left to pay the bill with the help of loans.

Building on and complicating recent scholarship on slavery and capitalism, Justene Hill Edwards takes listeners on a journey through the slaves' economy. From bustling urban marketplaces to back-country roads, she highlights the myriad ways enslaved people participated in South Carolina's economy from colonialism to the Civil War. In doing so, she never loses sight of the limitations of the slaves' economy, revealing how enslaved peoples' investments in capitalism, while providing temporary relief, ultimately benefited the very people who denied them freedom.

For many Americans, the question--What is a dollar worth?--may sound bizarre, if not redundant. Fluctuating international exchange rates, highly volatile crypto-currencies, counterfeit money, these are all things the average American hears about on the news, but rarely thinks about on a day-to-day basis. Even the most enthusiastic Bitcoin supporters will likely readily admit they prefer to conduct the majority of their daily transactions in a currency whose value is relatively stable, and backed by the government. And while fewer and fewer of those transactions take place using actual paper money, the fact is, the U.S. dollar remains the primary currency in which goods are quoted, traded, and payments settled across not only in the United States, but around the globe. This was not the case two-hundred years ago when Americans were obliged to live and transact in a world filled with upwards of 10,000 unique bank notes tied to different banks of various trustworthiness. This number does not even include the plethora of counterfeit bills and countless shinplasters issued by un-regulated merchants, firms, and municipalities. In this month's episode, our guest, Joshua Greenberg explains the incredible amount of monetary knowledge required of Americans to participate in this highly volatile and chaotic market economy. An extensive monetary knowledge was necessary not just for financiers, merchants, and others operating at a high-level of economic activity, but also those who may never have had the occasion to step foot inside a bank themselves, but, nevertheless were compelled to constantly evaluate for themselves the value and authenticity of the paper money being handed to them or risk losing out.

Today, healthcare workers account for the largest percentage of U.S. workers. Yet, their power pales in comparison to the unionized industrial workforce that preceded them, and whom it is their job now to care for. In this episode, Gabriel Winant explains how these two worlds--the post-war industrial economy and the post-industrial service economy--came together in 'Steel City, USA,' where during the late twentieth century the healthcare economy emerged to take advantage of the social hierarchies engendered by the American welfare state.

Despite the rising cost of tuition and a recent slump in college enrollment, many Americans continue to look to education to improve their social and economic status. Yet, more and more degrees have not led to reduced levels of inequality. Rather, quite the opposite. Inequality remains the highest its been in decades. In this episode, Cristina Groeger delves into the history of this seeming contradiction, explaining how education came to be seen as a panacea even as it paved the way for deepening inequality. Starting in the late 19th century—at time when few Americans attended college, let alone high school—she explores how schooling came to be associated with work. For some, especially women and immigrants, education offered new pathways into jobs previously held by white, native-born men. The idea that more education should be the primary means of reducing inequality, however, fails adequately account for the experience of many Americans and indeed is, Groeger argues, a dangerous policy trap. If we want a more equitable society, we should not just prescribe more time in the classroom, but fight for justice in the workplace.

In this episode, labor historian Ronald Schatz speaks about the National War Labor Board. Recruited by the government to help resolve union-management conflicts during World War II, many of the labor board vets went on to have long and illustrious careers negotiating conflicts in a wide-range of sectors from the steel industry to public sector unionism. Some were recruited to mitigate unrest on college and university campuses in response to student unrest. While not a traditional labor history, the history of the labor board vets is one worth paying attention to both for what it tells us about past efforts to arbitrate labor-management conflicts, and what could be in store amid future conflicts. 

The history of red-lining is one increasingly well-known within and beyond the academy. In the 1930s, as part of an attempt to shore up the struggling economy by underwriting home mortgages, the government’s Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC), developed a series of guidelines and criteria for assessing the risk of lending in urban areas. HOLC criteria drew heavily on the racial logics employed by lenders, developers, and real estate appraisers. Thus, “A-rated” neighborhoods, those associated with the least risk for banks and mortgage lenders, tended to be exclusively white. While, “D”-rated areas, deemed the most-risky, included large numbers of black and/or other non-white residents. These neighborhoods were color-coded red on HOLC maps, hence the term red-lining. They were often denied home loans. HOLC and redlining had a dramatic effect on American cities with consequences lasting to the present day. Yet, the image of the HOLC’s color-coded maps suggests a more static relationship between lending and urban America than actually existed. In today’s episode, Rebecca Marchiel tells a more complex and nuanced story of white and black community activists who engaged with the federal government and banks in an effort to expose redlining—in its multiple forms—and imprint their own “financial common sense” on banking. In doing so, she undercuts notions that the reality depicted in HOLC’s maps was set in stone by the 1960s, when residents in Chicago’s West Side first became suspicious that they had become victims of red-lining, while at the same time revealing the alternative models of financing proposed by community activists in the urban reinvestment movement.

It is common these days to bemoan the amount of personal information companies like Amazon, Facebook, and other modern telecommunications goliaths collect about us. For many, this invasion of privacy exists as a necessary consequence of our growing dependence on the internet. With every click of the mouse—making it possible to have products manufactured half-way around the world delivered to our doorstep—there is a reluctant awareness of the risk that our private lives might be made public. That sense of the potential of our private lives being made public is all the more real when we acknowledge the human beings at the center of these information networks. Our modern service economy relies on people whose jobs involve an intimate awareness of our daily lives—the Amazon delivery person who brings us toilet paper, the barista who procures for us our morning coffee and knows whether we prefer cream or almond milk; the data analyst who knows what new titillating show we’re watching  and uses that information to sell us on the latest product. Our desire for on-demand services is satisfied through these people having access to information about us, all the more so amid the ongoing pandemic. Katie Hindmarch-Watson has spent many years thinking about the human labor involved in making a service economy. In Serving a Wired World: London's Telecommunication Workers and the Making of an Information Capital, she shows how concerns about privacy and information were at the center Victorian-era London’s telecommunications industry centered around the telegraph and telephone: the internet of its day. In doing so, she takes us on a journey involving telegraph boys ensnared in homosexual scandal and wicked telephone girls suspected of interrupting connections, all the while revealing the intimate and bodied labor that made (an) information capital.

In this episode, Shennette Garrett-Scott explores black financial innovation and its transformative impact on U.S. capitalism through the story of the St. Luke Bank in Richmond, Virginia: the first and only bank run by black women. Garrett-Scott chronicles both the bank’s success and the challenges this success wrought, including shedding light on the bureaucratic violence that targeted St. Luke's and other black banks. Through the St. Luke Bank, Garrett-Scott gives black women in finance the attention they deserve.

The history of capitalism in Egypt has long been synonymous with cotton cultivation and dependent development. In Egypt's Occupation: Colonial Economism and the Crisis of Capitalism, Aaron Jakes challenges longstanding conceptions of Egypt as peripheral to global capitalism through revealing the country's role as a laboratory for colonial economism and financial innovation amid the turn of the twentieth-century boom and bust. In doing so, Jakes offers a sweeping reinterpretation of both the historical geography of capitalism in Egypt and the role of political-economic thought during Britain's occupation of Egypt. 

The history of globalization is one that has often been told as a story of elites. There are a number of truths to this narrative. Yet, as Casey Lurtz shows, it also ignores some things. In From the Grounds Up: Building an Export Economy in Southern Mexico, Lurtz tells the history of how a border region, the Soconusco, became  Mexico’s leading coffee exporter. She does so not by focusing on the Mexican politicians and foreign capitalists who came to the Soconusco with dreams of grandeur. Rather, as the title suggest, Lurtz digs below the surface of these visions to reveal the role played by local people in the dual projects of economic liberalism and globalization.

Thanks to the work of activists and intellectuals like Ta-Nehisi Coates and Jamelle Bouie, Black peoples’ demand for reparations have garnered growing attention among politicians, business leaders, university officials, and journalists. For those that argue that reparations are not possible or that too much time has passed, today’s guest has an important story to tell about a formerly enslaved woman named Henrietta Wood who sued for restitution in 1870 and won; paid $2,500, what is likely the largest sum ever awarded by a court in the United States in restitution for slavery. Wood’s story, which crosses multiple boundaries between lower and upper South, the antebellum and postbellum period, blurring the distinctions between, offers us valuable lessons about the history of slavery and freedom, and the lengths that different people went to in order to achieve both. More importantly, Henrietta Wood raises the question once again on people’s lips: what is owed to the formerly enslaved and their descendants? And demonstrates that such restitution is long overdue.

Many of us are familiar with the negative health effects of coffee, which include insomnia, nervousness, upset stomach, and increased heart rate. Yet, this hasn’t seemed to stop many Americans from reaching for a cup, or two or three, of coffee to help them make it through the day. One estimate puts coffee consumption in the United States at 400 million cups of coffee a day, or more than 140 billion cups a year, making the United States the world’s leading consumer of coffee. Yet, for all the coffee we consumer, we spend little time thinking about how this reliance affects the people who make it. Augustine Sedgewick seeks to change that with his new book, Coffeeland: One Man’s Dark Empire and the Making of Our Favorite Drug. Starting with coffee’s origins in the Middle East, he reveals how coffee spread to Europe and the New World alongside European imperialism, transforming whole societies in the process. Moving forward in time, he explains how the United States used its status as a consumer of coffee to expand its influence in the hemisphere. All in all, the story told here is about much more than coffee, integrating histories of labor, food, business, and imperialism to reveal how global capitalism creates disconnections, as well as connections.

It will come as little surprise to most listeners that America’s metropolitan areas are racially segregated and unequal. While the suburbs surrounding American cities tend to be relatively affluent and white, many urban areas, especially those with large non-white populations, remain under-resourced and under-served in comparison to their white suburban counterparts. Even as gentrification and other forces have increasingly forced poorer non-white residents to seek housing on the city’s periphery, suburbs continue to be associated with wealth and whiteness. Existing explanations for this political geography tend to focus on governmental policies and consumer behavior during the time period spanning the New Deal through World War II and the immediate post-war period. Once considered obscure academic parlance, terms like red-lining, white flight, and government-backed mortgages now regularly appear as part of popular discussions of housing inequality. While not refuting the importance of these events, Paige Glotzer situates American suburbs in a longer history of exclusionary practices dating back to the 19th century. In doing so, she also ties the American suburb to a broader history of racial capitalism and white settler colonialism. Paige Glotzer is Assistant Professor & John W. and Jeanne M. Rowe Chair in the History of American Politics, Institutions, and Political Economy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is the author of How the Suburbs Were Segregated: Developers and the Business of Exclusionary Housing 1890-1960

We’ve all heard the statistics regarding Americans and fast food. According to the National Health and Nutrition Survey, one third of Americans consumed fast food on any given day. Prior to the coronavirus pandemic, the fast food industry employed nearly 3.8 million Americans, many in minimum wage jobs. Not everyone has the same relationship with fast food. In this episode, we speak with Marcia Chatelain about  the dramatic impact one fast food company, McDonald’s, has had on black communities and black politics over the last half century. In doing so, she provides us with fresh insight on the relationship between fast food, race, and American capitalism. Marcia Chatelain is a Provost’s Distinguished Associate Professor of history and African American studies at Georgetown University. She is the author of Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America.

David and Alex are retiring from the show! But a new host is joining to take the reins. Listen to hear the founding co-hosts reflect on the past six years of the show and to meet our new host, Jessica Levy.