I love reading. In particular, I’m a voracious consumer of nonfiction that tells me something about the world; the below list chronicles a subsample of books I’ve found insightful, informative, or enjoyable. In some cases, I’ve included a brief review of a few sentences.
Note: Books are not listed in chronological order of reading, and this list is not updated immediately after writing.
The World For Sale, Javier Blas and Jack Farchy. A whirlwind tour of physical commodity traders, deemed the last swashbucklers of global finance. These are the shops like Vitol or Trafigura that not only trade commodities (wheat, crude oil, et cetera) on futures markets, but also on the high seas. Since commodities are often found in places with weaker governance institutions (to say the least), commodity traders often work behind the scenes to “smoothen” deals in ways that some might consider unethical.
The Age of {Revolution/Capital/Empire/Extremes}, Eric Hobsbawm. This is actually a quadrilogy totaling over a thousand pages in total, focusing on two epochs. The first epoch is the “long 19th century” dating from the industrial and french-republican revolutions of the late 1700s to the eve of the first world war in 1914. The second epoch is the “short 20th century” which spans the first world war to the end of the US-USSR cold war. To summarize this oeuvre is to do it injustice. Suffice it to say that Hobsbawm has not only a masterful grasp on every single detail of Europe’s political-economic history from the late 1700s to the present day (or rather, up to the day he passed).
The Roman Market Economy, Peter Temin. Great book which describes the functioning of the ancient Roman economy. Did Rome have a proper market (in the modern sense) for grain? What was the structure of the labor market (if one could call it a market)? How can we build statistical evidence and use sophisticated arguments based on archaeological and artifactual evidence to establish the structure of Roman inflation, growth rates, and investment? Moreover, how closely did the Roman economy align with our modern intuitions for how an economy might function? Temin answers these questions and more in this surprisingly insightful book.
Debt: The First 5000 Years, David Graeber.
The Power Elite, C. Wright Mills.
Globalists and Crack-Up Capitalism, Quinn Slobodian. These two books by intellectual historian and scholar of neoliberalism Quinn Slobodian offer a view of the evolution of neoliberal and libertarian thought. The first book focuses on the little-discussed Mont Pelerin Society, while the latter book focuses on the globalized spread of neoliberal thinking in the 20th century and beyond, as well as its anti-democratic, anti-sovereigntist pushes to “crack-up” existing state structures to further the reproduction of neoliberal politico-economic structures.
Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson. A book on the historico-materialist construction of nationalism as an ideological force. Anderson (brother of long-time NLR editor and writer Perry Anderson) traces the origin of nationalism to material factors such as widespread print, higher literacy rates, transportation, and improved communication technologies (among other factors), elucidating the reason for why the 19th century was the focal point for Europe’s nationalist movements.
The Prize, Daniel Yergin. A history of oil extraction.
A History of Interest Rates, Sidney Homer. A literal long history of interest rates, all the way back to ancient Sumer!
Cybernetics: Control and Communication in the Animal and Machine, Norbert Wiener.
Theory & Design in the First Machine Age Los Angeles: Architecture of 4 Ecologies, Reyner Banham. Banham is an architecture critic, but his thinking extends much further than that. From his thinking on the “gizmo” to his identification of the urban ecologies of the city of Los Angeles (one of my favorite cities, if just for its representation of Americanist economic development), Banham elucidates the forces behind the design of our modernity.
The Power Broker, Robert Caro. The urban designer Robert Moses had an unfathomably outsized amount of decisionmaking power on the urban design and overall structure of New York City, leaving a legacy — good and bad — that any resident still has to grapple with today; this spans de-facto racial segregation to highway placement to the structure of urban parks. How was the unelected Moses, who had the unimpressive title of “New York City Parks Commissioner” for four decades, able to stay so influential for so long? And what effects of his legacy are we still dealing with? Caro writes the definite biograph. Any New Yorker who cares about being seen as an “intellectual” in polite society probably has a copy of this on their shelf.