Somehow we are already 8 months into 2024 (how is it August already?), and here are some new books on economics that were published this year that you may have missed either because of the identity of the author, or their geographical location, or because the topics are not typically considered interesting to those interested in reading about the economy. We include 10 books that cover a range of topics that we think provide a richer understanding of socioeconomic phenomena and are therefore crucial to understanding economics and the world.
This time around, we are reading two new important books around feminist interventions in understanding work around production and reproduction by blurring the boundary between what are often considered as distinct parts of the economy, but with a decidedly distinct focus. One centers work and workers in the story of environmental change and the other focuses on, among other things, decentering the costs of social reproduction to emphasize the relationships that often form the basis for social reproduction “that invoke love, pain, joy, exhaustion, solidarity, and exploitation.” We know that the burden of the work of social reproduction is disproportionately borne by women, however, both these books highlight the differential and racialized nature of this burden. Relatedly, therefore, we have also been reading about the role of White women in the United States in the slave trade. Importantly, it shows how white women fought for their own social and economic empowerment based on their ownership of slaves. We also include two books on revolutionary thought and thinkers in Africa, about movements from across the continent, and with interviews with anti-apartheid activists, radical organizers, journalists and former students of Africa’s anti-colonial liberation thinkers. In a related vein, we have been reading a critical commemoration of the legacy of Vladimir Lenin. They make for some really inspiring reading! We have also included two books that looks at the political economy and history of two countries in the world that many of us in the Anglosphere do not know much about, and place them in the global context: Iran and Guyana. As always, we love reading about the economics discipline, and we include an interesting new book looking at economics imperialism. Finally, 10 months into the intensifying genocide of Palestinian people, we include a brilliant new book that systematically show the role played by Israeli universities in constructing and perpetuating Israeli apartheid and genocide in Palestine. Therefore, it becomes evident that Israeli academic institutions are legitimate targets of Boycott, Divestment, and Sanction movement, despite claims by Israeli academics to the contrary.
We hope you enjoy these books! As always, please let us know if you have any suggestions for our next reading list.
Depletion: The Human Costs of Caring
By Shirin Rai
In this new book, Shirin Rai explores the labor that goes into the reproduction of life in different contexts and with differential resources, which is largely performed by women across countries and cultures. In order to do that she uses the concept of “Depletion”, or the human cost of social reproductive labor, which affects everyone as individuals, households, and communities, often drawn upon as a “free good.” She shows that the unequal system of social reproduction harms those who care, and unequally affects life that needs to be sustained and reproduced. Rai also extends the concept of depletion to include planetary care, and argues that this helps us connect ecological harm and harm to individuals, households, and communities. Using theories of social reproduction and fascinating and varied case studies, Rai makes an important new contribution to our understanding of production and reproduction, including the need for and movements and institutions that in different contexts have worked and continue to work to reverse depletion. She also decenters the focus on costs of social reproduction to highlight the relationships that often for their basis that invoke love, pain, joy, exhaustion, solidarity, and exploitation. Importantly, she also challenges the neat binary between productive and reproductive realms using the concept of depletion. In her own words, “Depletion argues that strategies for recognizing, measuring, pluralizing, and reversing the harms of depletion are urgently needed in the context of the growing costs of care and caring for our social and ecological worlds.” Order it here.
Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom
By Maya Wind
In this compelling new book, Maya Wind argues that while universities in Israel are often considered as being “exceptionally free” by people and institutions in the West, they are an integral part of the Israeli security state and serve as an extension of its violence. She also takes on the claim made by many Israeli scholars that while the Israeli state may be committing atrocities against Palestinians, it has nothing to do with the Israeli academy. Based on her extensive research of policy documents, state and military memos, and other documents in the Israeli state and military archives and libraries, Maya Wind documents the material ways in which Israeli universities are materially implicated in the systemic violation of Palestinian rights and academic freedom. Israeli academia has been involved in the Israeli project of territorial and demographic replacement which has been central for Israeli statebuilding. Furthermore, students and faculty in these universities have developed and manufactured weapons for Zionist militias since the inception of the Israeli state. In addition, Palestinian universities have also been governed by the Israeli military, meant to specifically prevent them from becoming sites of Palestinian resistance. In this and many other ways, and through rigorous research Wind shows why Israeli universities are legitimate targets of the Boycott, Divest, and Sanction movement against Israeli apartheid. This book is absolutely essential reading today, and the call for BDS has never been more important than when there is an ongoing genocide against Palestinian people. Order it here. And don’t forget to sign the D-Econ BDS Pledge.
Workers of the Earth: Labour, Ecology, and Reproduction in the Age of Climate Change
By Stefania Barca
By centering labor and the working class in environmental change, Barca tells an “unusual” narrative of environmental change, specifically in the context in the period known as the Great Acceleration, the last six decades characterized by unprecedented degradation of earth systems as a result of rapid economic growth. In her analysis, Barca considers humans as a living part of the earth who are also affected by the degradation that affects non-human nature, but unequal distribution of agency, power, and vulnerabilities. Therefore, she positions the planetary crisis as an endogenous problem that requires transformation of the global economy in service of those who work for it as opposed to an external one that requires limiting the global economy over which global capital has mastery. She argues that an obsession with GDP growth is not only ecologically unsustainable, but also unsustainable for workers who labour for it, specifically from environmental hazards like air and water pollution, radiation or electromagnetic exposure, and catastrophic climate events. Using an ecofeminist lens, this book shows how environmental changes in the industrial age have directly affected workers and turned them into ecological subjects. Barca also broadens the labor-environmentalism beyond its focus on waged work and shows that reproductive labor has played an indispensable role in the history of environmentalism. Buy it here.
Revolutionary Movements in Africa: An Untold Story
Edited by Pascal Bianchini, Ndongo Samba Sylla and Leo Zeilig
This is a fascinating book that uncovers revolutionary movements of the 1960s and 1970s across the African continent. Covering specific radical projects from Sudan to Madagascar, from South Africa to Mali, the book spans labour movements, student movements, feminist movements, and radical debates such as the famous (but often forgotten) Dar es Salaam debates (which featured intellectual and political giants like Julius Nyerere, Issa Shivji, Walter Rodney, Mahmood Mamdani, Dani Wadada Nabudere, Yash Tandon and others, all engaging with the cutting edge Marxist debates of the time and how they related to Africa). The book maps these movements and ideas and gives some suggestions as to what we can learn from them today. Order here.
Lenin – The Heritage We (Don’t) Renounce
Edited by Hjalmar Jorge Joffre-Eirchhorn and Parick Anderson
This book critically commemorates the 100th anniversary of the death of Lenin on 21 January, 1924. Through 104 contributions, the book is a vast and exciting revisiting of Lenin’s legacy and the relevance of his thinking for understanding contemporary times. The topics that the chapters touch on are vast, the contributors are diverse, and the form of writing varies from poetry, skits, fictional writing, to academic and journalistic contributions. Themes include imperialism, the right to self-determination, dialectics, AI, Black liberation, communist feminism and revolutionary dreaming and organizing. Interestingly, the chapters also put Lenin in conversation with other radical thinkers to trace the scope and changing forms of his influence, such as Amílcar Cabral, Ruth First, and Mao, and they examine his influence in a range of national contexts, from Nigeria, to Iceland, to Sri Lanka. The chapters and short and accessible, making for great beach reading. Order it here.
Capitalism in contemporary Iran: capital accumulation, state formation and geopolitics
By Kayhan Valadbaygi
This is an important book taking a radical political economy approach to understanding capital accumulation in Iran. Unlike a lot of mainstream literature on Iran, Valadbaygi carefully interrogates how processes of domestic class and state formation are situated in and related to the wider capitalist world market. As such, the book shows how there are connections between the nature of development in Iran and the geopolitical tensions with the West. Starting from the 1979 revolution to contemporary Iran, it provides a historical and contemporary analysis of development in Iran, including an in-depth interrogation of how Iranian neoliberalism has brought about new contested class dynamics in the country, which in turn has impacted the state form and geopolitical strategy. The book is a must-read for anyone interested in understanding Iran beyond the simplistic media reporting on the country. Order it here.
They Were Her Property – White Women as Slave Owners in the American South
By Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers
This book overturns the widely-held assumption that married white women were passive bystanders in the business of American slavery. On the contrary, Jones-Rogers shows that slave-owning women were sophisticated economic actors that actively engaged in and profited from holding slaves. Indeed, since women tended to inherit more slaves than land, enslaved people tended to be women’s primary source of wealth. Jones-Rogers also documents how white women treated enslaved people as brutally as slave-owning men, dismissing assumptions that women would be more empathetic. Bringing together, women’s history and African American history, this book unpacks how white women actively participated in the slave market and even used it for their own economic and social empowerment. Order it here.
False Prophets
By Matthew Watson
In False Prophets, Matthew Watson examines the two-step movements through which ‘economics imperialism’ has been rolled out across the social sciences. The first step in this process of intellectual colonisation concerned efforts to mathematize economic knowledge. The second concerns the ‘apparently indiscriminate wielding of mathematical market models’. How this plays out in practice is familiar to most of us already: questions of climate justice are subordinated to models seeking the ‘efficient allocation’ of resources; party politics is framed not in terms of ideological promise and contestation but ‘the purely functional task of identifying the electoral market equilibrium reflected in the wishes of the median voter’; or when economics imperialism sets its sights on history, ‘mathematical market models have been used to overturn consensus opinions built on deep archival research of what the actors involved thought at the time’. There has of course been much written about economics imperialism before, and about the role played by Watson’s cast of mathematizing economists (Jevons, Robbins, Samuelson, Debreu and Arrow). What False Prophets provides, though, is a sense of economics imperialism as a ‘much more conditional and a much more contingent process than its proponents like to make out’. Jevons, Robbins and Samuelson wrote against a backdrop of contestation and methodological pluralism about what ‘mathematical rigour’ means, even if it is treated as settled by economics imperialists as they stray into new disciplinary territories. But if the claims that economics imperialists make about bringing clarity of understanding are laid on wobbly mathematical and philosophical foundations, can their project hold up to criticism, even on its own terms? You can buy False Prophets from Agenda here.
Voices for African Liberation
Edited by Leo Zeilig, Chinedu Chukwudinma, and Ben Radley
The Review of African Political Economy editors have a longstanding commitment to providing a platform for analysis and discussion that can inform strategies for Africa’s liberation. Though Euro-American leftists and academics often orient themselves around the memory of 1968 in Paris or New York, the students and workers who rose up across the African continent are too easily forgotten. When ROAPE was founded, hope abounded in the liberation-development projects of Tanzania, Ghana, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau. In 2014, ROAPE embarked on a project to connect a new generation of radicals, socialists and revolutionaries with elders of liberation movements. This book is the outcome of that project, containing interviews with anti-apartheid activists, radical organizers, journalists and former students of Africa’s anti-colonial liberation thinkers. Many of the radicals and organizers of the mid-twentieth century, including Walter Rodney and Amilcar Cabral were assassinated, and the editors of ROAPE have included here interviews with their biographers and comrades who seek to carry on their legacy. The book also gathers interviews with contemporary radical theorists, from Issa Shivji to Ndongo Samba Sylla and the late Samir Amin, interviewed shortly before his passing. The final section has interviews with contemporary activists operating outside academia, from reparations campaigner Esther Stanford-Xosei to South African anti-apartheid and union organiser Trevor Ngwane and Ghanaian Third World Network coordinator Yao Graham. The book’s collection of voices, radical histories and hope for unfinished liberation struggles is, it is fair to say, unparalleled. There is so much ground covered, it could be a summer reading list on its own! You can get Voices for African Liberation from ebb here.
Global Guyana
By Oneka LaBennett
In Global Guyana, Oneka LaBennett weaves together auto-ethnography, oral history and archival research to create a book that is about ‘seeing Guyana and Guyanese women, in particular, as always-already-there but often invisible players linked to the construction of gender and race, globalization and resources’. Guyana is often sidelined in academic discourse on the Caribbean, occasionally even snipped out of maps of the region, and subjected to infantilizing coverage by the New York Times and Netflix specials that depict Guyana as ‘nowhere’. It does not have a booming tourist economy, true, but the ‘political economy of erasure’ to which Guyana has been subjected is intertwined, as LaBennett shows, with a political economy of erosion. The silica-quartz sand from Guyana’s beaches is shipped out across the Caribbean to replenish tourist beaches elsewhere. LaBennett sees parallels with the erasure of blackness in the construction of African-Indian ancestry in Guyana and elsewhere across the Caribbean. Guyanese women in particular have been scapegoated by the Bajan state, constructed as hypersexualized threats to the nuclear family, rooted in Bajan anxieties about competition for employment and scarce resources. As the global business press ‘rediscovers’ Guyana in the wake of Exxon Mobil’s 2015 oil discovery, which has Guyana poised to be the world’s largest per capita oil exporter, longstanding tropes about isolation, backwardness and ethnic conflict have resurfaced. Hemispheric environmental change might be emanating from Guyana’s unparalleled oil discoveries. But taking inspiration from Andaiye in the closing chapter, LaBennett argues for a global feminism looking out from Guyana, rooted in the longstanding global outreach of Guyanese women who have time and again unsettled gendered racializations in their negotiations of kinship, labour, migration and the imposition of extractive economies. You can buy Global Guyana here.
This list was compiled for D-Econ by Devika Dutt, Paul Gilbert, and Ingrid Harvold Kvangraven