Research and CV

Selected publications. A full CV is available for download here.

Books

Empty Vessel: The Story of the Global Economy in One Barge. New York: Knopf, 2025 and London: John Murray, 2025.
Also forthcoming with

  • HarperCollins (in translation) in Germany as Beliebige Fracht, 2026
  • Hayakawa Shobo (in translation) in Japan
  • Volante (in translation) in Sweden
  • CITIC (in translation) in China
  • Book21 (in translation) in South Korea
  • Kotob Khan (in translation) in Egypt
  • Krytyka Polityczna (in translation) in Poland
  • Pegasus (in translation) in Turkey

The Business State: Big Business, Empire, and the British State. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, forthcoming.

The First Serious Optimist: A.C. Pigou and the Birth of Welfare Economics. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017.

  • Winner of the Joseph J. Spengler Prize for the Best Book in the History of Economics

Journal Articles and Book Chapters

“Between Empire and Nation-State: Flags of Convenience and the Unit of the Offshore,” in preparation.

“Expansion and Protection: Interwar British Business Elites and the Empire,” in Business Elites and the Organization of Capitalism 1900-1945: Creators of Democracy, Captains of Industry, or Extractors of Value?, ed. Patrick Fridenson and Knut Sogner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).

“A Few Millions were Neither Here nor There: Empire, Exports, and the British Business-State after World War I,” in preparation.

“‘The Problem Alike of Statesman, Race Leader, and Philanthropist”: Economic Thinking and the Division of Negro Economics,” Modern Intellectual History, forthcoming in print.

“Measuring the Cost of Pollution: Economic Life, Economic Theory and the Origins of Environmental Economics,” Journal of Modern History 96, no. 2 (June 2024): 332-361.

  • Winner of the Craufurd Goodwin Prize for the Best Article in the History of Economics (2025)

“Imperial Schemes: Empire and the Rise of the British Business-State,” Enterprise and Society 23 no. 4 (December 2022): 928-937.

“Historical Network Analysis” in John Scott, Peter Carrington, John McLevey, eds., SAGE Handbook on Social Network Analysis (London: Sage Publishers, 2023).

“Meat and Economic Expertise in the British Imperial State During World War I,” The Historical Journal 62, no. 1 (March 2019): 171-194.

Reviews and Review Essays

Review of The Measure of Progress by Diane Coyle and The Measure of Economies edited by Marshall Reinsdorf and Louise Sheiner (Review Essay), History of Political Economy, forthcoming.

Review of Offshore by Brooke Harrington, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, forthcoming.

“Lessons from Environmental and Economic Crises,” (Review Essay), Enterprise and Society 25, no. 2 (June 2024).

Review of Free Market: The History of an Idea by Jacob Soll, History of European Ideas 49, no. 2 (2023).  

“Reconsidering the History of Political Economy” (Review Essay), Modern Intellectual History 20, no. 3 (September 2023).

Review of A.C. Pigou and the Marshallian Thought Style by Karen Knight, History of Political Economy 53, no. 1 (February 2021): 166-167.

Other Publications

“Power Hangs by a Literal Thread” (Review of Web Beneath the Waves by Samanth Subramanian, Los Angeles Review of Books, October, 2025.

“Sean Vegezzi’s VCBC Archive,” in Storefront for Art and Architecture Reader, 2025.

“Reading A.C. Pigou,” Royal Economic Society Newsletter, October 2022.

“Imperial Legacies and World Heritage,” Visualizing Climate and Loss, Center for History and Economics, 2021.   

“We Need to Revisit the Idea of Pigou Wealth Tax,” Financial Times, June 8, 2020, .

with Charles S. Maier. “Responding to COVID-19: Think Through the Analogy of War.” Safra Center COVID-19 Rapid Response White Paper. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, Harvard University, April 2020.

“Economists at Cambridge,” Visualizing Historical Networks, 2013.