Against my better judgement, I've finally started a (free) Substack. As I explain in my first post, I see this as an avenue to write on some of the big questions that economics research isn't well-suited to: normative claims, historical work, and thinking about the roots of economic analysis.

This week's review! - Martin Daunton's The Economic Government of the World. Explaining why Bretton Woods was what it was, and wasn't what it wasn't.

This week’s review! - Robert Yee's The City’s Defence. On economic knowledge, governance, empire, and the making of the postwar world.

This week’s (not) review! - a very short discussion of, and excerpt from, Vasily Grossman’s Everything Flows. For those who prefer their novels unabashedly world-historical…

This week’s review! - Michael Albertus’ Land Power. A book as filled with interesting vignettes as it is devoid of interesting ideas.

This week's review! - Claudia Goldin's Career and Family. History, the Pill, and the Pay Gap. Check it out!

Something a little different this week: my thoughts about (Ashley Kahn’s book on) Miles Davis, Kind of Blue, and when Eric Hobsbawm was really, really wrong.

This week’s review! — Peter Temin’s Lessons from the Great Depression. It’s all expectations, baby! (and history, and politics)

This week's review! - C. B. Schedvin's Australia and the Great Depression. Because I know that what excites your minds most of all are old monographs about the economic history of insignificant countries (seriously though, I promise it is interesting).

This week’s review! — Douglass North’s Institutions, Institutional Change, and Economic Performance. On changing your mind, Marxism and neoclassical economics, and, of course, institutional change.

Fact of the day: the first steam engine was brought to Australia in 1813 by a guy named John Dickson. But no-one knew how to assemble, let alone use it, and so it didn’t begin operating until a mechanic could be brought over from the UK two years later.

This week's review! - @brankomilan.bsky.social's The Great Global Transformation. On political economy of our moment.

Can’t believe no-one has yet written a history of Germany in the 19th/20th century called “Guns, Germans, and Steel”.

I’m not convinced this ‘historyLLM’ business is anything other than an amusing toy. Great fun for sure, but let’s not pretend we can actually learn anything of historical interest from an LLM trained on pre-1913.

This week’s review! — Joel Mokyr’s The Enlightened Economy. A big book with a lot to say on what did, and did not, cause the British Industrial Revolution.

This week’s review! — seizing the moment to start a belated Joel Mokyr journey with The Lever of Riches. While the book’s title reminds one of a second-rate fantasy novel, it is actually anything but. In fact, Mokyr surprised (almost) all my expectations.

This week’s review! — my no doubt highly unoriginal take on an old classic, Gregory Clark’s A Farewell to Alms. Malthus, wages, and the question of whether everything is downstream of demography.

This week’s review! — Jessica Goldberg on Trade and Institutions in the Medieval Mediterranean. A book which leaves Avner Greif’s thesis in the same place as the French fleet in 1798: lying at the bottom of the Nile.

This week’s review! — on Avner Greif’s Institutions and the Path to the Modern Economy. Games, institutions, and mediaeval Jewish-Egyptian merchants. Also the closest I’ve ever come to reviewing a work of fiction…

This week’s review — THE FINAL WICKHAM POST. Sizing up the mediaeval Italian city-states properly.

This week’s review! — more Chris Wickham, this time about the mediaeval commercial revolution. What, where, why and whether it was even a thing.

This week’s review — on central bank independence and… wait no, not that! Actually a much more relevant topic: Chris Wickham’s Inheritance of Rome. On the Byzantine economy, mediaeval Egypt, and the Arab conquest.

This week’s review! — pt. 2 on Chris Wickham’s Framing the Early Middle Ages. Peasants, Pots, and Pirenne!

This week’s review! — beginning a medieval odyssey with Chris Wickham’s mammoth book, Framing the Early Middle Ages. Taxes, demesnes, slaves, and why Britain really dropped the ball in the 5th century.

This week’s review! — on Catherine Schenk’s superb The Decline of Sterling, and how sterling can and can not help us think about the dollar today (plus some personal news).

This is a wonderful discussion of my Rise and Fall of the British Nation, and the first to note the importance to it of my critique of Cain and Hopkins, which I took, along with that of Anderson and Nairn, to be richest existing analyses of the twentieth century British nation and empire.

This week’s review! — on @davidedgerton.bsky.social’s The Rise and Fall of the British Nation. Well, less of a review than a discussion of how Edgerton sheds light on the pitfalls of gentlemanly capitalism. Plus a bit about Hobsbawm the nationalist at the end!

Final maths exam next week… here we go!

Some absolutely fantastic Grossberg paintings here

This week’s review! - finishing up my look at Cain and Hopkins’ British Imperialism, on the 20th century. There’s something for everyone - expansion, decline, Sterling, and Eurodollars!

Economic historians getting creative

The Apple Music Classical app has no right being as good as it is

This week’s review! — part one of my look into Cain and Hopkin’s monumental book, British Imperialism 1688-2015. Gentlemanly capitalism, services, and who ran the British Empire (supposedly)…

For this week’s review, I read @jamestwotree.bsky.social’s new history of Taiwanese agrarian development at home and abroad, In the Global Vanguard. Land reform, Africa, and Straw Hat Diplomats!

This week’s review! — something a little bit different (and more light-hearted) to wrap up my focus on interwar monetary history, for now. Liaquat Ahamed’s very entertaining if dubious Lords of Finance!

The right to watch television should be conditional on first having seen Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation. The Peano axioms of culture.

More brilliant Minard flow-maps — here we have the impact of the American Civil War on European Cotton Imports! I can’t get enough…

This week’s review — my brief reflections on Charles Kindleberger’s World in Depression 1929-1939. I couldn’t resist thinking about our present moment… a very timely read! (With unavoidable reference to @adamtooze.bsky.social and @delong.social)

Fantastic paintings from an artist I had never heard from before. The art is what keeps bringing me back to chartbook - helps break me out of my futurism/expressionism shell!

You can’t help but fall in love with Charles Joseph Minard’s flow maps! The godfather of data visualisation.

This week’s review! - on Charles Kindleberger’s unrealised vision for the dollar system, according to Perry Mehrling.

This week’s review! - on how a changing money market changed central banking, according to Perry Mehrling. Check it out!

Central bankers need to bring back the pointy beards! Adds mystique befitting a bearer of arcane knowledge… how could anyone believe in CBI if they don’t look a little bit like wizards? (Pictured: Montagu Norman and Rudolf Havenstein)

Alright I thought no one could match Braudel in retro-chart game but Kindleberger gives it a red hot crack…

Does this debate exist online? I can’t seem to find it, but if it does, it is surely the econ version of Chomsky-Foucault!

Bretton Woods, capital controls, and collective action…. my thoughts on Eric Helleiner’s States and the Reemergence of Global Finance!

Time for urgently reading Eric Monnet — or at least, the review of his book I wrote about a month ago ;)

Likely the most scattered review I’ve written of late, but hopefully interesting nonetheless! On the spread of the central bank and what the BIS might have been.

My review of Barry Eichengreen’s Globalizing Capital — well, the first third of it, but with an eye to reading international monetary history on the most abstract level. On why the gold standard could never be replicated…