Please note - these are NOT required readings. Dr. Gwaltney will let you know what to look at and what to ignore.
These books offer excellent material for the class project as well as fodder for intellectual growth:
- Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations : A Modern-day Interpretation of an Economic Classic (an interpretation for the modern day world of finance, business and economics).
- Agriculture and the Confederacy : Policy, Productivity, and Power in the Civil War South
- Asian Economic Systems
- Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the Making of a New World Order
- Bitter Feast : Amerindians and Europeans in Northeastern North America, 1600-64
- The Canon in the History of Economics : Critical Essays
- Capitalism and the Historians (a collection of essays about the antagonism of intellectuals towards capitalism, published in the 1950s)
- Collision Course : Endless Growth on a Finite Planet
- The Company of Strangers: a Natural History of Economic Life
- The Corporation That Changed the World : How the East India Company Shaped the Modern Multinational
- Cotton and Race in the Making of America : The Human Costs of Economic Power
- Crime, Gender and Consumer Culture in Nineteenth-Century England
- The Economic Aspect of the Abolition of the West Indian Slave Trade and Slavery
- Economic Thought : A Brief History
- Econocide : British Slavery in the Era of Abolition
- Empire, Colony, Postcolony (presents the historical, political and ideological dimensions of colonialism, imperialism, and postcolonialism, with clear explanations of these categories, which relate their histories to contemporary political issues.)
- Explorations in Austrian Economics
- The Great Land Rush and the Making of the Modern World, 1650-1900
- Greed, Lust and Gender : A History of Economic Ideas (This book brings women's work, their sexuality, and their ideas into the center of the dialectic between economic history and the history of economic ideas.)
- Inequality and Instability : A Study of the World Economy Just Before the Great Crisis
- Intellectual Journeys of Recent, Mostly 'Defunct' Economists
- Karl Polanyi : A Life on the Left
- Labor Visions and State Power : The Origins of Business Unionism in the United States
- Lineages of Despotism and Development : British Colonialism and State Power
- Malthus (a biography)
- On the Causes of Economic Growth : The Lessons of History (argues that a robust manufacturing sector has been the key to strong growth in the past).
- Poverty in America : A Handbook (now in its third edition, this book analyzes poverty in America, with new material on the impact of the Great Recession)
- Progressive Inequality (an alternative analysis of the Progressive Era)
- River of Dark Dreams (a tale of cotton and slavery in the American South)
- Selfishness, Greed and Capitalism : Debunking Myths About the Free Market
- Sharing the Prize (the economics of civil rights)
- Socialist Fun : Youth, Consumption, and State-Sponsored Popular Culture in the Soviet Union, 1945–1970
- Truth, Errors, and Lies: Politics and Economics in a Volatile World (a critique of the trend of simplification of complex economic and social issues).
