2008 was a watershed year for global finance. The banking system was eventually pulled back from the brink, but the world was saddled with the worst slump since the 1930s Depression, and millions were left unemployed. While numerous books have addres...

Recent decades have witnessed the rise of social and environmental certification programmes that are intended to promote responsible business practices. Consumers now encounter organic or fair-trade labels on a variety of products, implying such desi...

This book is the first to investigate the gap between the plans and the reality of the Soviet Union's mid-twentieth-century project to industrialize and modernize its agricultural system. Historians agree that the project failed badly: agriculture wa...

Helena Rubinstein (1870-1965) broke free from the constraints of her 19th-century, small-town Polish Jewish background to become a cosmetics industry giant and household name. She produced and marketed the means for ordinary women to transform themse...

In 1980, the iconoclastic economist Julian Simon challenged celebrity biologist Paul Ehrlich to a bet. Their wager on the future prices of five metals captured the public's imagination as a test of coming prosperity or doom. Ehrlich, author of the la...

In the largest study of profit-sharing and employee ownership in years, Joseph R. Blasi, Richard B. Freeman and Douglas L. Kruse investigated dozens of large- and medium-sized companies across all sectors of the United States' economy. The ten-year e...

Drew A. Swanson has written an "environmental" history about a crop of great historical and economic significance: American tobacco. A preferred agricultural product for much of the South, the tobacco plant would ultimately degrade the land that nurt...

Many of today's most troubling environmental and economic issues have come to seem insoluble: carbon emissions, overshoot, inequality, joblessness, and a dysfunctional food system. Can we change direction, move away from business-as-usual, and achiev...

This important book delivers a critical wake-up call: a fierce global race for innovation advantage is under way, and while other nations are making support for technology and innovation a central tenet of their economic strategies and policies, Amer...

<p>While dozens of recent books and articles have predicted the near-certainty of China's rise to global supremacy, this book boldly counters such widely-held assumptions. Timothy Beardson brings to light the daunting array of challenges that tod...