This Week in Economic History #1
A weekly guide to economic history (May 26–31)
From news of the infamous “Memecoin Dinner,” where Donald Trump monetized the presidency, to recurring updates about tariffs, trade wars, and now the rise of trade crimes, it’s a strange time—like political satire coming to life. As journalists and public-facing scholars interpret every twist and turn, they’ve created a torrent of articles. And with each new wave of words that splashes into a sea of ideas, it becomes more challenging to wade through it all.
What’s even more challenging, though, is finding articles that situate current issues within their historical context. To help you save time and showcase some interesting recent work, this first issue of This Week in Economic History, includes:
Historical Highlights
Recent Essays & Reviews
CFPs, Conferences, & Upcoming Events
Funding Opportunities
Jobs
Instead of skimming a handful of updates from half-a-dozen newsletters, This Week in Economic History is a weekly digest that brings it all together. To get full access to the weekly update, consider becoming a paid subscriber.
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Historical Highlights
America’s First Copyright Law
On May 31, 1790, George Washington signed into law the first U.S. Copyright Act, establishing federal protection for authors and creating the foundations of American intellectual property rights.
Forced Transfers and Removals
On May 28, 1830, Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act, authorizing the transfer of millions of acres in the Southeast for white settlement and reshaping the economic geography of the Old South.
The Rise of an Indicator
On May 26, 1896, former journalist, Charles H. Dow, published the first Dow Jones Industrial Average. With his colleague Edward Jones, Dow previous published the Dow Jones Railroad Average, which tracked 11 stocks—primarily railroad companies such as the New York Central and Union Pacific.
Oil Discovered in the Middle East
On May 26, 1908, the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, a British Oil Company, found oil in in Persia—a region that later became known as Iran. “It's the first big petroleum find in the Middle East,” as Randy Alfred writes, “and it sets off a wave of exploration, extraction and exploitation that will change the region's — and the world's — history.”
The End of an Era
On May 26, 1927, the last Ford Model T rolled off the assembly line in Ford’s factory in Highland Park, Michigan. Around 15 million cars were produced in that factory over a period of 17 years.
In “The Model T,” their recent article for the Journal of Economic History, Shari Eli, Joshua K. Hausman and Paul W. Rhode “ask why the United States adopted the car more quickly than other countries before 1929. The answer is in part the Model T.”
Recent Essays & Reviews
Dana Frank, “Dangerous Products and People,” Boston Review
In June 1982, as employment in the U.S. auto industry continued to plummet, two white autoworkers, one of them recently laid off, started harassing a Chinese American man named Vincent Chin in a Detroit strip joint. “You little motherfucker, you’re the reason we don’t have jobs,” one of them, Ronald Ebens, spat out. When Chin, there to celebrate his upcoming wedding, confronted them, a fight broke out. Chin left the club, but the two men later found him in a McDonald’s, chased him down the street, and beat him to death with baseball bats…
Michael Kazin, “What America Made of Marx,” The New Republic
The young cigar maker in New York City attended a few socialist meetings in the 1870s. But he longed to hear “constructive” ideas about how to achieve a better life for himself and his fellow workers. Then an older craftsman, who was a veteran of the European left, offered to take him through “something tangible” that “will give you a background philosophy.” That something was The Communist Manifesto…
Adelle Waldman, “How Part-Time Jobs Became a Trap,” The Atlantic
One of the great achievements of 20th-century American labor law was to set limits on how many hours of work an employer could demand from its employees. In recent years, however, working-class Americans have become susceptible to a different sort of exploitation. Instead of assigning employees too many hours, large corporations routinely give them too few, hiring multiple part-time staff in place of one full-time worker…For millions of American low-wage workers today, the problem is not overwork—it’s underwork.
Mary Tone Rodgers review of Seven Crashes: The Economic Crises That Shaped Globalization, by Harold James, EH.net
James’s central argument in Seven Crashes is that new institutions, whether they be market innovations or state capacities, generally arise out of responses to a particular kind of disruption: supply crises associated with a crash (p. 2). He constructs the argument with a comprehensive exposition in his Introduction, followed by seven chapters, chronologically analyzing the seven titular crashes. He covers the 1840s famines, the railroad and political reunification shocks of the 1870s, the first World War, the Great Depression, the Great Inflation of the 1970s, the Great Financial Crisis of 2008-2009, and the COVID lockdowns of the 2020s…
Danny Robb, “Electric Fish and the First Battery,” JSTOR Daily
In the eighteenth century, Italian scientist Luigi Galvani connected severed frog legs to metals and made the legs dance. This led him to conclude that living things possessed an “animal electricity,” an idea he explored through other scientific experiments. But fellow Italian Alessandro Volta was doubtful, and his attempts to prove his alternative theory of electricity led him to invent the first electric battery: the “voltaic pile.”
Noah Smith, “Globalization Did Not Hollow out the American Middle Class,” Noapinion
But the master narrative of protectionism is simply much more myth than fact. Yes, Chinese import competition hurt America a bit in the 2000s. But overall, globalization and trade deficits are not the main reason that manufacturing’s role in the U.S. economy has shrunk. Nor has globalization hollowed out the middle class — because in fact, the middle class has not been hollowed out.
Tommaso Giommoni, Gabriel Loumeau, and Marco Tabellini, “Extractive Taxation and the French Revolution,” CEPR
Extractive taxation is considered one of the main causes of the French Revolution. This column exploits regional variations in the French salt tax, which accounted for 22% of royal revenues in 1780, to document that areas of France burdened by a higher tax rate experienced more revolts in the years leading up to the Revolution. These effects were amplified by droughts that increased food prices and activated latent discontent. It suggests that when taxation is imposed without representation, it can become a catalyst for popular unrest, especially after negative economic shocks.
Popular on TEH
Gavin Benke, “Asking Enron Why 25 Years Later”
Peter Coclanis, “The Wright Stuff”
Stephen Campbell, “Bankrolling the Republic”
Charlotte Moy, “What Was the Lowell System?”
Podcasts & Interviews
Charles Hecker on Zero Sum: The Arc of International Business in Russia (Oxford UP, 2025), Economic & Business History Podcast
Latin American Development Since Independence, The Economic History Podcast
Erik Baker on the Entrepreneurial Century, Who Makes Cents? A History of Capitalism Podcast
Q&A with Caitlin Rosenthal, “Capitalism, Slavery, and Power over Price”
CFPs, Conference & Upcoming Events
June 13: Public Debt & Financial Stability: From the Spanish War of Succession to the Present Day
June 27: 52nd Annual Meeting of the History of Economics Society, Richmond, Virginia (Registration closes: June 13, 2025)
July 15, 2025 (deadline): Call for papers for a new Special Issue in the Journal of Transport History.
July 28: 20th World Economic History Congress (WEHC), taking place in Lund, Sweden. Register here.
September 4-6: 4th International Conference on Indian Business & Economic History The call for submissions is open till June 10, 2025.
September 25-26: Political Economies of Mining in the Early Modern Word
October 3: Playing with Scale: Digital Mapping at Hyde Park Barracks
October 9-11: 2025 Pennsylvania Historical Association Annual Meeting
October 10: Hagley Library Fall Conference: The Power of Energy (Call For Papers deadline is June 1, 2025)
October 23-24: Business and the Natural Environment in the History of Central and Eastern Europe
November 20-21: From Insurance to Chartered Companies: New Developments in the History of Business, Slavery, and Colonialism
Funding Opportunities
Hagley Library Oral History Grants (Deadline: June 1, 2025)
British Academy / Leverhulme Small Research Grants (Deadline: June 4, 2025)
Royal Historical Society Masters’ Scholarships (Deadline: June 6, 2025)
H. Roger Grant Award for Outstanding Scholarship in Railroad History (Deadline: July 1, 2025)
Jobs
The Historical Economics and Development Group (HEDG), Department of Economics at the University of Southern Denmark (SDU) invites applications for a three-year Assistant Professorship in Economic History, starting 1 September 2025. Deadline: June 1, 2025.
Tenured or tenure-track position in Economic History, Faculty of Political Science and Economics, Waseda University (Shinjuku, Japan). Deadline: July 24, 2025.
Princeton University, Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts, Associate Research Scholar. Deadline August 5, 2025.
University of California - San Diego, Lecturer in Economics 2024/2025 Academic Year. Deadline August 31, 2025.
Part-Time Faculty- ECN 203 Economic Ideas and Issues (Summer Session 1), Syracuse University (Online). No Deadline.
University of Michigan - Ann Arbor, National Center for Institutional Diversity, Research Fellow, Inclusive History Project. No Deadline.
Tulane University Global Humanities Fellow. No Deadline.
Asian University for Women, Postdoctoral Fellow in Humanities (Andrew W. Mellon Fellow). No Deadline.