100 Books Like Revolution in Development

This book shows how trade has long connected people and societies all over the world, from miners in Potosi, to coffee growers in Yemen, and traders and shippers from Fujian.

Topik and Pomeranz reject a Eurocentric approach to the history of international trade and they put real people back into the story. The engaging vignettes in this collection are not primarily about politics, but they make clear why trade is political and polarizing.

The workings of international trade powerfully affected people’s lives, for better and for worse, and so people reacted strongly to trade, as committed champions and tireless opponents.

Irwin’s history of US trade policy from the colonial period to the early 21st century will convince you that you cannot write about domestic and international politics without writing about tariffs and trade.

Because international trade affected people, regions, and sectors of the economy in different ways, trade policies elicited support and opposition. Given the importance of the United States to the global economy, it is crucial to understand how trade policy has been mired in politics.

While Irwin’s study focuses on the United States, there is no reason to think trade is less combustible elsewhere. 

If you can get past the title, this book is a model for how to write about international economic diplomacy.

Gardner connects technical matters like tariffs, exchange rates, quantitative restrictions, and loans to ideology, the status of nations, and relations between states. Set in the 1940s, it follows American and British efforts to set up the IMF, World Bank, and GATT.

Although officials believed that the highest political stakes were connected to trade – the peace and security of the world were at issue – they fought constantly about trade. 

This revisionist book rejects the established view that the Soviet Union opted out of the global economy to develop a parallel and exclusive communist economic system.

Despite a Cold War logic in which communist and capitalist economic systems were understood to be incompatible and engaged in a zero-sum competition, Sanchez Sibony shows that Soviet officials and leaders wanted to be engaged in the global economy, at least partly. They wanted imports; they were less keen to export.

This doesn’t make the global economy less political or ideological, but it means the Cold War alone does not explain how economics and politics interacted with one another in the formulation of Soviet foreign economic policy. 

This eBook, developed by faculty members from top institutions, is available for free from the developers’ website, offers several online resources, it's frequently updated, translated to several languages, and has been widely adopted in several countries.

The book includes both the usual topics for courses on introduction to microeconomics and introduction to macroeconomics, using a similar writing style as other introductory textbooks (assumes no mathematical background), thus being accessible to a wide range of students.

Unlike similar books, however, it structures topics differently: instead of presenting chapters according to the main tool or concept being introduced, chapters are presented according to real-world problems.

While this can help motivate each chapter, it may require some adapting from the instructor’s teaching style.

This book presents one of the most thoughtful and—to me—convincing accounts of the relationship between globalization and economic growth.

The author rejects the simple dichotomies offered up by “pro-globalizers” and “anti-globalizers,” arguing that successful development tends to require experimentation, pragmatism, and the adaptation of policy tools to local contexts.

This empirically grounded perspective not only explains a great deal of variation in the fortunes of developing countries but also complements and extends key principles of economics. 

This is one of the most influential books on economic globalization written in the last decade, and it will certainly continue to be crucial to understand the future of globalization.

Rodrik’s Globalization Paradox pinpoints the key policy trade-offs in a globalized economy: If policymakers opt for “hyper-globalization” while insisting on national decision-making, they could find their societies in the “golden straitjacket” of global capitalism.

Alternatively, they could give up sovereignty to democratically legitimized “global governance”.

As the latter is difficult to achieve and often unacceptable to national policymakers, Rodrik argues for limiting hyper-globalization.

The existence of a globalization paradox as well as Rodrik’s conclusion, has been hotly discussed, but the ongoing debate only proves the importance of his book.

Hillman, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and director of the Reconnecting Asia Project, wrote a very topical book on China’s Bridge and Road Initiative (BRI), calling it “the project of the century.” Indeed, the BRI encompasses a projected $1 trillion in spending on new roads, railways, telecommunications, and other critical infrastructure, aiming to bind together the Eurasian landmass and Africa (key for natural resources) into a trade and investment zone dominated by Beijing. What I found the most noteworthy was the following: “Xi’s vision is constrained by neither geography nor even gravity. Since its announcement, the BRI has stretched into the Arctic, cyberspace, and outer space.”

Hillman readily acknowledges China making mistakes (over-lending to credit-challenged countries in particular) and that going forward Beijing will need greater skill, lower expectations, and a heavy dose of modesty to make it work. For anyone interested in major… show more.

Quite simply the best survey of 20th-century international political economy out there. I assign it to my students and turn to it whenever I need a brief refresher on things.

How exactly did the classic gold standard collapse? Why again did Latin American countries turn autarkic after World War II? What was the role of foreign direct investment under Bretton Woods? Why did labor suffer in the 1970s, and why did finance boom in the 1980s?

Frieden has the answers, and he presents them in a supple narrative and with a commendably sharp sense of politics.

It’s impossible to understand the modern economy without grasping the importance of debt, and no one understands debt better than Ann Pettifor.

Pettifor spent more than a decade campaigning to cancel the unjust and unpayable debt of African, Asian, and Latin American countries – debt that was causing mass impoverishment and robbing people of their rights and livelihoods. Then she turned her attention to the damage that debt was doing in the West, predicting the financial crash of 2007-8.

For Pettifor, the problem started in the early 1970s, when the financial system was ‘freed’ by politicians from the constraints which had forced it to behave in a more reasonable way up to that point. Pettifor argues that we won’t be able to deal with our economic problems until we constrain our banks once more.