New Books in Economics Marshall Poe

In The Turn to Process: American Legal, Political, and Economic Thought, 1870-1970 (Cambridge University Press, 2023), Kunal M. Parker explores the massive reorientation of American legal, political, and economic thinking between 1870 and 1970. Over this period, American conceptions of law, democracy, and markets went from being oriented around truths, ends, and foundations to being oriented around methods, processes, and techniques. No longer viewed as founded in justice and morality, law became a way of doing things centered around legal procedure. Shedding its foundations in the 'people,' democracy became a technique of governance consisting of an endless process of interacting groups. Liberating themselves from the truths of labor, markets and market actors became intellectual and political techniques without necessary grounding in the reality of human behavior. Contrasting nineteenth and twentieth century legal, political, and economic thought, this book situates this transformation in the philosophical crisis of modernism and the rise of the administrative state.
Kunal M. Parker is a Professor of Law and Dean's Distinguished Scholar at the University of Miami.
Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network.
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India’s stock markets are booming. One calculation from Bloomberg puts India as the world’s fourth-largest equity market, overtaking Hong Kong, as domestic and foreign investors pile into the Indian stock exchange.
But getting to the point where India’s stock markets—and its financial system more broadly—could work effectively took a long time. As Rajrishi Singhal tells it in Slip, Stitch and Stumble: The Untold Story of Financial Reforms in India (Viking, 2024), India’s financial system suffered from antiquated procedures, cartels and a confused paper trail that left the door for abuse wide open.
In this interview, Rajrishi and I talk about India’s financial sector, its earlier dysfunction, how it was fixed—and scammers like Harshad Mehta, “The Big Bull.”
Rajrishi Singhal has been a senior journalist, banker and public policy analyst. He was executive editor at the Economic Times, consulting editor with Mint, research and strategy head at a private sector bank and senior fellow for geoeconomic studies at a Mumbai-based think tank.
You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.
Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon.
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For centuries, the vastness of the Chinese market tempted foreign companies in search of customers. But in the 1970s, when the United States and China ended two decades of Cold War isolation, China’s trade relations veered in a very different direction. In Made in China: When US-China Interests Converged to Transform Global Trade (Harvard University Press, 2024) Dr. Elizabeth Ingleson shows how the interests of US business and the Chinese state aligned to reframe the China market: the old dream of plentiful customers gave way to a new vision of low-cost workers by the hundreds of millions. In the process, the world’s largest communist state became an indispensable component of global capitalism.
Drawing on Chinese- and English-language sources, including previously unexplored corporate papers, Ingleson traces this transformation to the actions of Chinese policymakers, US diplomats, maverick entrepreneurs, Chinese American traders, and executives from major US corporations including Boeing, Westinghouse, J. C. Penney, and Chase Manhattan Bank. Long before Walmart and Apple came to China, businesspeople such as Veronica Yhap, Han Fanyu, Suzanne Reynolds, and David Rockefeller instigated a trade revolution with lasting consequences. And while China’s economic reorganisation was essential to these connections, Ingleson also highlights an underappreciated but crucial element of the convergence: the US corporate push for deindustrialization and its embrace by politicians.
Reexamining two of the most significant transformations of the 1970s—US-China rapprochement and deindustrialization in the United States—Made in China takes bilateral trade back to its faltering, uncertain beginnings, identifying the tectonic shifts in diplomacy, labor, business, and politics in both countries that laid the foundations of today’s globalized economy.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.
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Development is political but what does that mean for how we solve some of the biggest challenges facing the world today? A pathbreaking new book, The Politics of Development (Sage, 2024), sets out to answer this question and many more. Why is it so hard to reduce corruption, deliver good quality healthcare, and create more equal societies? And what can be done to remove these blockages, so that politics goes from being the problem to the solution? Join three of the editors – Claire Mcloughlin, David Hudson and People, Power, Politics host Nic Cheeseman – as they talk about the novel approach of their volume (co-edited with Sameen Ali and Kailing Xie) and the many lessons it reveals about why getting it right can be so hard. Listen now to find out why The Politics of Development is “destined to become essential reading” (Duncan Greene)!
Claire Mcloughlin is Associate Professor at the International Development Department, University of Birmingham, and the lead editor of The Politics of Development.
David Hudson is Professor of Politics and Development, also at the International Development Department, University of Birmingham, and an editor of The Politics of Development.
Nic Cheeseman is the Professor of Democracy and International Development at the University of Birmingham and Founding Director of CEDAR, and was also an editor of The Politics of Development.
The People, Power, Politics podcast brings you the latest insights into the factors that are shaping and re-shaping our political world. It is brought to you by the Centre for Elections, Democracy, Accountability and Representation (CEDAR) based at the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom. Join us to better understand the factors that promote and undermine democratic government around the world and follow us on X (Twitter) at @CEDAR_Bham!
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The whole world has a stake in India's future, and that future hinges on whether India can develop its economy and deliver for its population--now the world's largest--while staying democratic. India's economy has overtaken the United Kingdom's to become the fifth-largest in the world, but it is still only one-fifth the size of China's, and India's economic growth is too slow to provide jobs for millions of its ambitious youth. Blocking India's current path are intense global competition in low-skilled manufacturing, increasing protectionism and automation, and the country's majoritarian streak in politics. In Breaking the Mold: India’s Untraveled Path to Prosperity (Princeton UP, 2024), Raghuram Rajan and Rohit Lamba show why and how India needs to blaze a new path if it's to succeed.
India diverged long ago from the standard development model, the one followed by China--from agriculture to low-skilled manufacturing, then high-skilled manufacturing and, finally, services--by leapfrogging intermediate steps. India must not turn back now. Rajan and Lamba explain how India can accelerate growth by prioritizing human capital, expanding opportunities in high-skilled services, encouraging entrepreneurship, and strengthening rather than weakening its democratic traditions. It can chart a path based on ideas and creativity even at its early stage of development.
Filled with vivid examples and written with incisive candor, Breaking the Mold shows how India can break free of the stumbling blocks of the past and embrace the enormous possibilities of the future.
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In 1974 the government of Jordan established a new ministry to oversee a nationwide scheme to buy and distribute subsidized flour and regulate bakeries. The scheme sets terms for the politics that are the subject of a new book: States of Subsistence: The Politics of Bread in Contemporary Jordan (Stanford University Press, 2022). Rest assured, this is no dull account of state welfare that posits and tests for a two-dimensional relationship between the delivery of a staple food and public acquiescence to authoritarian rule. Far from it! To explain these politics, José Ciro Martínez goes to work baking, and taking the reader through kitchens, byways and marketplaces. Via descriptions of bakers and regulators, and interviews with consumers and policymakers, he offers a sophisticated account of how the state meets the stomach in Jordan, and how both citizens and bureaucracy are changed through this intra-action.
States of Subsistence was the winner of the 2023 Roger Owen Book Award, sponsored by the Middle East Studies Association, and singled out for an honourable mention by the 2023 Charles Taylor Book Award committee of the American Political Science Association’s Interpretive Methodologies and Methods Group.
If you like this episode of New Books in Interpretive Political and Social Science then you might also be interested in Mona El Ghobashy on Bread and Freedom: Egypt’s Revolutionary Situation, or Gerard McCarthy on Outsourcing the Polity: Non-state Welfare, Inequality and Resistance in Myanmar.
José’s book recommendations are:

Teo Ballvé, The Frontier Effect: State Formation and Violence in Colombia


Lauren Berlant, On the Inconvenience of Other People


Hisham Matar, My Friends



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