In this month's episode, Justene Hill Edwards takes listeners on a journey through the slaves' economy. From bustling urban marketplaces to back-country roads, she reveals the myriad ways enslaved people participated in South Carolina's market economy prior 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...

In this month's episode, Joshua Greenberg explores the chaotic and volatile monetary system of early America and the extensive financial knowledge required to navigate it. This monetary know-how was needed not only by financiers and merchants operating at a high-level of the economy, but also by those who may never have stepped foot inside a bank themselves, and yet, were nevertheless compelled to constantly evaluate the value and authenticity of the paper money being handed to them or risk...

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 industrial economy and the post-industrial service economy--came together in 'Steel City, USA,' revealing how the healthcare economy emerged to take advantage of the social hierarchies engendered by the American...

This episode centers on a paradox in contemporary American society, namely the coexistence of high rates of educational achievement alongside growing inequality in the United States. In order to address this paradox, Cristina Groeger takes listeners on a journey back in time to the turn of the twentieth century and explains how it is that education came to replace other forms of training as a major pathway into employment, while revealing the consequences of this transformation, including for...

In this episode, Ronald Schatz discusses the history of the National War Labor Board vets. Recruited by the U.S. government during WWII to help resolve union-management conflicts, many labor board vets went on to have long and illustrious careers arbitrating conflicts in a wide-range of sectors from the steel industry to the public sector. While not traditional labor activists, the history of the labor board vets offers important lessons for understanding the rise of industrial-labor...

The iconic Home Owners’ Loan Corporation maps, created during the New Deal, have served as powerful illustrations of red-lining. Yet, they suggest a more static relationship between financial institutions and cities than actually existed. In this episode, Rebecca Marchiel offers a riveting account of the urban reinvestment movement, a multi-racial coalition of activists that opposed redlining, while also revealing the obstacles they faced from bankers and government officials in implementing...

Modern telecommunications is often beset with concerns about privacy of information. Such concerns are not new. Rather, as Katie Hindmarch-Watson shows, they have long plagued information workers whose bodily and gendered labor was central to the development of Victorian-era London's telecommunications industry. Through tales of misbehaving telegraph boys and "wicked" telephone girls, she offers a cultural and gendered history of telecommunications work with deep implications for today's...

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 bureaucratic violence that targeted the bank. Through recounting the history of the St. Luke Bank, Garrett-Scott gives black women in finance the attention they...

In Egypt's Occupation, Aaron Jakes challenges longstanding conceptions of Egypt as peripheral to global capitalism based on its role as a cotton producer through showing how Egypt functioned 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 and the role of political-economic thought during the British occupation of Egypt. 

In From the Grounds Up: Building an Export Economy in Southern Mexico, Casey Lurtz tells the history of how a border region, the Soconusco, became Mexico’s leading coffee exporter. In doing so, she complicates narratives of globalization and economic liberalization that tend to prioritize national and global elites. Rather, as the title suggests, she digs below the surface of these processes in order to tell a powerful story about local engagement with capitalism and the state.

For those that argue that reparations are not possible or that too much time has passed, Caleb McDaniel 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, the largest known sum awarded by a U.S. court for restitution for slavery. Wood’s story offers valuable lessons about the history of slavery and freedom, and the lengths that different people went to in order to achieve both.

Augustine Sedgewick speaks about his new book, Coffeeland: One Man’s Dark Empire and the Making of Our Favorite Drug, revealing how coffee spread to Europe and the New World alongside industrialization and European imperialism, transforming whole societies in the process. In doing so, Sedgewick tells a story that 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 that America’s metropolitan areas are racially segregated and unequal. Existing explanations for this tend to focus on governmental policies and consumer behavior during the New Deal and immediate post-war period. Our guest, Paige Glotzer, however, 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...

We’ve all heard the statistics regarding Americans and fast food. 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. 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.

Today, we have a special episode. We speak to Zach Carter about COVID-19 and Keyesnianism. Zach is the author of the upcoming book The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes.  On Wednesday March 18th, he published an op-ed on Keynes's ideas for today. If you like this episode, please donate to Mariame Kaba's redistribution, mutual aid fund: https://www.paypal.com/pools/c/8npOgwIczH Zach Carter is a senior reporter at HuffPost, where he covers Congress, the...

Dara Orenstein on the Economic Geography of Warehouses If you’re like many people throughout the country and world, you’ve purchased something on Amazon. As a result, you’ve been incorporated into a set of supply chain relationships that inevitably pass through warehouses. On this episode, we return to topic we’ve discussed in past episodes—how logistics shapes capitalism. We speak to Dara Orenstein about the history of bonded warehouses specifically and foreign trade zones. We consider how...

Often, analyses of the intersections between race and capitalism consider how capitalism harms dispossessed communities of color because excluding or neglecting them is profitable. But what if serving those communities could be both very profitable and very damaging to the people in them? We speak with Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor about what she calls “predatory inclusion,” in which financial institutions and real estate interests sought to build black homeownership. In the process, they reaped...

Eileen Boris on the Construct of the Woman Worker What is work? Who are workers? Which activities are considered work, and which ones are excluded? These questions are some of the most critical questions in political and economic analysis. And how they are answered—both personally and by political institutions—is vital to how people spend their time and thus their lives. On this episode, we investigate this question specifically through the international debates about the “woman worker” as...

Students in U.S. history surveys come away from their lessons on World War I with one conflict fresh in their minds: How could Woodrow Wilson, a president who advocated segregation and famously screened the racist film Birth of a Nation in the White House, also have been an architect of the League of Nations and a champion of the self-determination of colonized people in Africa and Asia? In this episode, we speak with Adom Getachew, who casts Wilson in a different light. She argues that the...

Nan Enstad on Multinational Cigarette Corporations and Jim Crow Capitalism   The multinational corporation is a pervasive institution. For example, it’s nearly impossible to listen to this show without interacting with one. But what is the history of this thing we call the multinational corporation? And who gets to count as its constituents?   Today, we investigate this topic and how it has been shaped by cigarettes—from the workers who grew the tobacco to those who governed the tobacco...

When we talk about the 1973 energy crisis, we tend to cast it as a moment when Americans questioned assumptions about how the domestic economy worked and the U.S. role in the global economy. We don’t always spend as much time thinking about why the crisis happened, or what it represented in the Global South. OPEC’s decision to cut production and raise prices stemmed from a longer history of anti-colonial activists demanding a fundamental change in how the global economy operated. As countries...

We’ve just ended pride month and both the victories and limits of GLBT politics were on view. In San Francisco, protesters engaged in civil disobedience action against the growing corporatization of pride. Activists in San Francisco and elsewhere questioned the role of police in pride, emphasizing that “Stonewall was a riot.”   Our guest today traverses these debates by emphasizing the politics of LGBT families. She documents the rapidly changing political landscape over the past two...

We talk a lot about logistics on this show – the industries, like Amazon or FedEx, that have made fortunes managing the movement of goods from one place to another. Logistics companies undergird the globalized economy, making it possible for companies to benefit from low wages and labor abuses in the global South by moving finished products quickly and cheaply to markets all over the world. Our guest today explains how dock workers have been another force enabling the global economy to...

The Me Too movement has brought much needed attention to sexual violence and harassment both in and outside the workplace. It has challenged patriarchal norms and practices and illuminated entrenched power hierarchies. It also drew strength from longer struggles against the many manifestations of patriarchal power.   On this month’s show, we speak to Bernice Yeung about how some of the U.S.’s most precarious workers experienced and have fought back against workplace sexual violence. She...