Publications

Books

• Empty Vessel: The Story of the Global Economy in One Barge. New York: Knopf, 2025 and London: John Murray, 2025. 
  • Also in translation from HarperCollins in German as Beliebige Fracht, 2026
    Hayakawa Shobo in Japanese as あるコンテナ船の物語, 2026
    Volante in Swedish (forthcoming)
    CITIC in Chinese (simplified) (forthcoming)
    Book21 in Korean (forthcoming)
    Kotob Khan in Arabic (forthcoming)
    Krytyka Polityczna in Polish (forthcoming)
    Pegasus in Turkish (forthcoming)
  • Named a Best Book of 2025 by The New Yorker
    Named a Best Book of 2025 by Kirkus
    Named the #1 Non-fiction Book of July-August by Die Zeit, ZDF, and Deutschlandfunk Kultur
    Nominated for Science Book of the Year 2026 by Bild der Wissenschaft
  • Selected Reviews and Coverage: Asahi Shimbun (Japan); AudioFile Magazine (Earphones Award); Bloomberg; The Book Review (India); Booklist; CapeTalk Radio (South Africa); C-SPAN; Deutschlandfunk Kultur (Germany); Financial Times; Finanz und Wirtschaft (Switzerland); Infobae (Argentina); The Information; Inside Times (UK); Kirkus (starred review, Best of 2025); KulturMag (Germany) Library Journal, Literary Review; London Review of Books (forthcoming); The Nation; The Nation Podcast; Neue Zürcher Zeitung (Switzerland); New York Review of Books; New York Times; The New Yorker (Best of 2025); The Nikkei (Japan); ÖRF (Austria); Okinawa Times (Japan); Publishers Weekly; The Spectator; T-online (Germany); Die Tageszeitung (Germany); Tribune Magazine; Wall Street Journal; Die Wirtschaft (Austria); Die Zeit (Germany, Best of July-August 2026)
• The Business State: Big Business, Empire, and the 20th Century British State. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2027, 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 Best Book Prize from the History and Economics Society
  • Selected Reviews: Alternatives Economiques; “La librairie de l’éco”; Contributions to Political Economy; Economic History Review; Finance and Development; Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung; History of Economic Ideas; Journal of Consumer Policy; Journal of Economic Literature; Law and Society; Open Magazine; Public Choice; The Times Literary Supplement; The Enlightened Economist

Book Chapters and Journal Articles

• “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.
• “Black Economists and the Great Migration: Considering the Meaning of the Federal Division of Negro Economics,” Modern Intellectual History, forthcoming in print; online (2024).
• “Measuring the Cost of Pollution: Economic Life, Economic Theory and the Origins of Environmental Economics,” Journal of Modern History, 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 British Business-State," Enterprise & 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

• Review of The Rulers by Cecilia Rikap, Critical AI, forthcoming.
• Review of The City's Defense by Robert Yee, European Journal of Economic History, forthcoming.
• Review of Offshore by Brooke Harrington, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, forthcoming.
• 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 58, no. 2 (2026): 301-307.
• “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 Selected 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, forthcoming.
• "Reading A.C. Pigou," Royal Economic Society Quarterly 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 10 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Safra Center, April 2020), https://ethics.harvard.edu/war-analogy.
• “Economists at Cambridge,” Visualizing Historical Networks, 2013, http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~histecon/visualizing/graphing/economists.html.