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Economics Books » Economic History

The best economic history books of 2022, recommended by davis kedrosky.

Great Transformations: Writings and Research in Economic History

From a sweeping history of China covering three millennia to what econometrics papers can tell us about what made the world rich, it's been a fantastic year for economic history books. Davis Kedrosky , a student at Berkeley and publisher of Great Transformations , an economic history newsletter, picks some of his favourite economic history books of 2022.

Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century by Brad DeLong

How the World Became Rich: The Historical Origins of Economic Growth by Jared Rubin & Mark Koyama

The World the Plague Made: The Black Death and the Rise of Europe by James Belich

Pioneers of Capitalism: The Netherlands 1000–1800 by Jan Luiten van Zanden & Maarten Prak

The Cambridge Economic History of China by by Debin Ma and Richard von Glahn (editors)

1 Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century by Brad DeLong

2 how the world became rich: the historical origins of economic growth by jared rubin & mark koyama, 3 the world the plague made: the black death and the rise of europe by james belich, 4 pioneers of capitalism: the netherlands 1000–1800 by jan luiten van zanden & maarten prak, 5 the cambridge economic history of china by by debin ma and richard von glahn (editors).

T hanks for recommending the best economic history books of 2022 for us. What was 2022 like as a year for economic history books?

Shall we start with Slouching Towards Utopia by Brad DeLong ?

There are two in-jokes among economic historians—one of which is, ‘when is Brad going to finish that book of his?’ But now, three decades after he first promised it, he’s actually done! Slouching Towards Utopia is a history of what DeLong calls the ‘long 20th century,’ the period from approximately 1870 to 2010. You might be able to detect a not-so-subtle reference to Eric Hobsbawm’s book, The Age of Extremes , which is subtitled ‘the short 20th century’ and covers 1914-1991. Delong decides to extend it, for the reason that instead of focusing on the cataclysm of the two world wars and the fall of the Soviet Union, he is looking at the great enrichment that occurs over this period. It’s about the transformation of first the North Sea region, then the North Atlantic, and finally parts of the rest of the world into an economic and industrial powerhouse.

He points to three main factors that drive this transformation: the first wave of globalization during the late Victorian and Edwardian eras, the industrial research lab, and the modern corporation. These were the prime instigators of a new wave of innovation that economic historians call the second industrial revolution—when applied science began to accelerate technological progress and economic growth through new, innovative sectors like steel, chemicals, and electricity.

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For DeLong, this surge forward in living standards and technology was what allowed humanity to finally escape the Malthusian trap and achieve sustained economic growth. Had these factors not come into play, DeLong hypothesizes that we would today inhabit a significantly less populous world—with perhaps around 5 billion people—and have steampunk technologies, maybe 1895 vintage.

It’s a book of titanic scope, covering not just the economic axis, which he emphasizes, but also the effects of the wrenching social changes of the period on North Atlantic political economy and the rise of neoliberalism. He’s tying together this great economic transformation with the dynamics of this period’s most important political movements, including the rise and fall of fascism and socialism. Particularly important to Brad is the three-sided intellectual debate between the two Austrians, Friedrich von Hayek and Karl Polanyi , and the British economist John Maynard Keynes . Hayek emphasized the importance of the market as a mechanism for coordinating economic activity; Polanyi, that markets create and sell “fictitious commodities”—land, labor, and money—that should actually be protected as rights. Keynes, who advocated state intervention in defense of the market mechanism, oversaw a “shotgun marriage” between the two that resulted in the “developmental social democracy” that prevailed in the Trente Glorieuses after World War II.

By calling it ‘slouching towards utopia,’ is DeLong suggesting we could have done better?

Let’s move on to Mark Koyama and Jared Rubin’s book: How the World Became Rich: The Historical Origins of Economic Growth.

This book is perhaps the first book to extensively survey recent trends in the economic history academic literature. Over the last 20 years, as I noted above, economic history has become more aligned with economics, and particularly its empirical econometric tradition. Economic historians have become more like empirical microeconomists, using historical data to create ‘natural experiments.’ That basically means using historical situations to simulate the control and treatment groups that you might see in laboratory tests of drugs, based on what you know of the historical period, to identify some sort of causal effect. What effect did historical force X have on Y historical—or often modern-day—outcome? The canonical example that founded this literature was a 2001 paper by Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James Robinson, “The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development: An Empirical Investigation.” The paper leveraged variation in settler mortality in the developing world to show that institutions have a positive effect on economic development.

That spawned a new wave of literature over the following two decades, of which this book by Koyama and Rubin is really the most accessible and comprehensive introduction. They categorize all these papers into five major categories of explanation for why economic development happens. These are: geography, institutions, culture, demography, and colonialism.

“Over the last 20 years…economic history has become more aligned with economics”

Koyama and Rubin are by no means indifferent between the five factors. This book is not just a literature review, but also presents an original theory of economic development, explaining the Industrial Revolution , the Great Divergence (the separation of incomes between the Global North and Global South over the last two centuries) and then, finally, the recent convergence of leading parts of the developing world. They believe that while geography is important, it is mediated by culture and institutions, which can act to reverse the negative curse of geography, of having (say) limited access to the sea, which one might think would inhibit a country’s ability to participate in foreign trade. The central claim revolves around the role of representative institutions in limiting the ability of executives to arbitrarily interfere with entrepreneurs and innovators—a staple argument of the ‘new institutional economic history.’ Koyama and Rubin suggest that Britain succeeded in achieving modern growth because she possessed all of the advantages often mooted by historians as the factor explaining her take-off.

Now let’s talk about The World the Plague Made by James Belich. What’s this book about?

Belich, unlike the authors of the two preceding books, is very much a historian. His interest is in the early history of globalization and the expansion of European settler economies. He takes this into studying the Black Death and its consequences. One paradoxical but widely-held view among economic historians is that while the Black Death was an absolute calamity in the short run—killing as much as half of the European population in the worst affected regions—it had positive long-run economic effects. Belich’s book is the most comprehensive survey and coherent theory of how economic development—in particular, the differentiation of Europe from the rest of the world—may have resulted from the Black Death.

His argument revolves around the stunning figure that 50% of Europeans died of the plague, revised upward from earlier estimates of a third or 30% mortality. That doubled the number of things that people owned per capita and this doubling of disposable incomes drove economic development from the demand side. People demanded more luxury goods: silk, sugar, spices, furs, gold, and also slaves. Demand for these things led to the expansion of trade from Europe because many of these goods are not found in Europe and needed to be sought from Asia and, eventually, the Americas. Manpower shortages, meanwhile, induced the development of labor-saving technologies, such as the water mill. These forces of innovation and globalization helped to turn Europe into a prosperous and commercialized society and he ties that in, at least in origin, to the Black Death.

Surely there’s a big downside to a halving of the labour force? How did people cultivate fields so they had enough food to eat?

Let’s go on to you next book, Pioneers of Capitalism by Maarten Prak and Jan Luiten van Zanden. What’s this book about and why should we read it?

This is a very interesting book about the development of the Netherlands during the early modern period, culminating in its 17th-century Golden Age. You’ve actually just done an interview with one of the authors, Maarten Prak . I find this period particularly fascinating because the Netherlands appeared to be close to an industrial revolution that never was. The region possessed a commercialized, capitalistic society with the world’s highest standard of living and a relatively advanced degree of political and economic liberalism. At the same time, there was an efflorescence of art, literature, intellectual culture, and philosophy. One good reason to find an explanation for why this happened is the paucity of data points for the pre-industrial era, in terms of episodes we can use to explain why, eventually, one country—Britain—did start to achieve sustained economic growth. The Netherlands had many of the indicators of impending development and, indeed, Britain in many ways imported Dutch institutions and culture (even its monarch!) in the years preceding the Industrial Revolution. There is good reason to believe that this cultural diffusion had some positive effect for economic growth.

So we should probably do more to understand the Netherlands. There are fewer people studying this period than there should be, just because, as an English language scholar, it’s hard to engage with French and Dutch sources. This book is an enormous contribution.

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Prak and Van Zanden are trying to explain why the Netherlands is the birthplace of modern capitalism. They want to refute three traditional arguments for why this happened: the Marxist view of enclosure and exploitation, often applied to Britain; Jan De Vries’s claim that the Dutch were free of feudalism; and, the strict institutionalist explanation—that liberal semi-democracy is better for growth than autocracy. They find all of these factors wanting. Instead, they look at the long-run origins of Dutch economic development, starting with its feudal, almost republican institutions during the late Middle Ages. They include cooperative institutions like guilds and urban associations, as well as the empowerment of independent cities in the region’s governance structure. These institutions were ultimately protected by the Dutch revolt from Spain. Whereas many other European countries during this period experienced a consolidation of absolutist rule, the Dutch managed to escape. This allowed them to preserve a relatively open society in which cities were autonomous and ruled by local merchant elites. They cooperated and competed with one another in producing an economically open society.

Last up we have The Cambridge Economic History of China, edited by Debin Ma and Richard von Glahn. What period does it cover and what sort of issues does it deal with?

These two colossal volumes cover much of the recorded history of China, from about 1000 BC to the present. Dutch economic history may be understudied, Chinese economic history is much more so. Chinese economic history is important, not only because China has historically been one of the world’s largest and most powerful states, but also because, up to the late Middle Ages, it had experienced precocious economic development, responsible for many key innovations that only surfaced in Europe centuries later. In these two volumes, Ma and von Glahn put together a massive collection of essays on thematic topics throughout the economic history of China.

As an early modern economic historian, I’m most interested in the first volume. There are some really fascinating essays, for example on the early development of Chinese fiscal capacity. While Western Europe had barely experienced any state formation, China was already building a fairly advanced state that collected quite a lot of taxes. The volume is influenced by the legacy of Kenneth Pomeranz’s The Great Divergence , which argues that because of ecological bottlenecks, China was unable to experience the breakthrough to industrialization that Europe did at the end of the early modern period. So the latter part—maybe two-thirds of the first volume—summarizes the research inspired by and evaluating that book, and looking at how China’s advanced market economy interacted with its agrarian institutions and its ecological resources. Pomeranz himself authors an excellent chapter on Chinese agriculture, detailing the transformation of the country’s crop mix toward cotton, tobacco, and maize; irrigation and crop rotations; and the factors contributing to stagnation during the eighteenth century.

The second volume is looking primarily at economic development surrounding the Opium Wars and the advent of Western adventurism into China, then moving on into the Communist period and, finally, its post-1978 economic transition into modern economic growth and semi-capitalist institutions. It’s animated by two fundamental questions: first, about the results (positive and/or negative) of European influence on China; and second, about the causes and nature of China’s late-20th-century growth miracle. This book is the most comprehensive survey of China’s economic history ever written and by poring through all of it, you’d be pretty close to becoming an expert.

Part of our  best books of 2022  series.

December 14, 2022

Five Books aims to keep its book recommendations and interviews up to date. If you are the interviewee and would like to update your choice of books (or even just what you say about them) please email us at [email protected]

Davis Kedrosky

Davis Kedrosky is a writer, student, and researcher at the University of California, Berkeley. He is interested in the economic history of early modern Europe and publishes the newsletter Great Transformations: Writings and Research in Economic History.

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An Economist’s Guide to Economic History

• © 2018
• Matthias Blum 0 ,
• Christopher L. Colvin 1

Queen’s University Belfast, Belfast, UK

You can also search for this editor in PubMed   Google Scholar

• Introduces the field of economic history to economists
• Calls academics into action to affect change in economics pedagogy and research
• Enables readers to think more critically about the economic ideas that are used today

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Economic History (PEHS)

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Table of contents (50 chapters)

Front matter, introduction, or why we started this project.

Matthias Blum, Christopher L. Colvin

Economics Versus History

• Christopher L. Colvin, Homer Wagenaar

Economics, Economic History and Historical Data

• Vincent J. Geloso
• Economic Theory and Economic History
• Robert P. Gilles

Economic History and the Policymaker

Economic history, the history of economic thought and economic policy.

• Graham Brownlow

Teaching Economics with Economic History

• Matthias Flückiger

Money and Central Banking

• John D. Turner

Globalisation and Trade

• Alan de Bromhead

Immigration and Labour Markets

• Sebastian T. Braun

Financial Institutions and Markets

• Meeghan Rogers

Financial Crises and Bubbles

• William Quinn

Sovereign Debt and State Financing

• Larry D. Neal

Health and Development

• Vellore Arthi

Education and Human Capital

• Sascha O. Becker

Famine and Disease

• Guido Alfani, Cormac Ó Gráda

Women and Children

• Jane Humphries
• Economic crises
• Economic policy
• Economic institutions and markets
• Global history, the Great Divergence
• Globalisation
• Casual inference
• Time series analysis
• Archival methods
• Economic history for economists
• American Economic History
• The History of Economic Thought and Economic Policy
• Teaching Economics
• Econometric Identification
• Network analysis
• Asian Economic History
• European Economic History
• Latin American Economic History
• African Economic History

About this book

Without economic history, economics runs the risk of being too abstract or parochial, of failing to notice precedents, trends and cycles, of overlooking the long-run and thus misunderstanding ‘how we got here’. Recent financial and economic crises illustrate spectacularly how the economics profession has not learnt from its past.

This important and unique book addresses this problem by demonstrating the power of historical thinking in economic research. Concise chapters guide economics lecturers and their students through the field of economic history, demonstrating the use of historical thinking in economic research, and advising them on how they can actively engage with economic history in their teaching and learning.

Blum and Colvin bring together important voices in the field to show readers how they can use their existing economics training to explore different facets of economic history. Each chapter introduces a question or topic, historical context or research method and explores how they can be used in economics scholarship and pedagogy. In a century characterised to date by economic uncertainty, bubbles and crashes,  An Economist’s Guide to Economic History  is essential reading.

For further information visit http://www.blumandcolvin.org

“Economists have much to gain from studying economic history seriously. This excellent volume explains why, elaborates what this entails, and demonstrates the potential for synergies between economics and economic history. The result is a compelling manifesto.” (Nicholas Crafts, Professor of Economic History, University of Warwick, UK)

​“The list of contributors to this project is truly impressive, as is the breadth of the topics covered. The result is a terrific teaching resource that will give students a good sense of the many ways in which economic history can help economics come alive.” (Kevin H. O’Rourke, Chichele Professor of Economic History, University of Oxford, UK)

Editors and Affiliations

About the editors, bibliographic information.

Book Title : An Economist’s Guide to Economic History

Editors : Matthias Blum, Christopher L. Colvin

Series Title : Palgrave Studies in Economic History

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96568-0

Publisher : Palgrave Macmillan Cham

eBook Packages : Economics and Finance , Economics and Finance (R0)

Copyright Information : Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2018

Softcover ISBN : 978-3-319-96567-3 Published: 18 December 2018

eBook ISBN : 978-3-319-96568-0 Published: 08 December 2018

Series ISSN : 2662-6497

Series E-ISSN : 2662-6500

Edition Number : 1

Number of Pages : XXVII, 479

Number of Illustrations : 18 b/w illustrations

Topics : Popular Science in Economics , Learning & Instruction , Economic History , History of Economic Thought/Methodology , Political Economy/Economic Systems , Economic Theory/Quantitative Economics/Mathematical Methods

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Ritwika Patgiri

July 8th, 2021, book review: the economic history of colonialism by leigh gardner and tirthankar roy.

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Estimated reading time: 10 minutes

In  The Economic History of Colonialism ,  Leigh Gardner and Tirthankar Roy offer a new historical account of the relationship between economic development and colonialism, showing how diverse processes of colonisation impacted on patterns of economic growth. Seeking to understand the roots of growth as well as poverty and inequality in formerly colonised nations as well as the origins of the environmental challenges we are facing in the current century, this book offers a nuanced study of the economic history of colonialism and its lasting legacies, finds  Ritwika Patgiri .

The Economic History of Colonialism . Leigh Gardner and Tirthankar Roy. Policy Press. 2021.

Understanding the Economic Legacy of Colonialism from a Diversity Perspective

Economic inequality is a reality of the world that we live in today. Many economic historians tend to agree that the root of most of this economic inequality is a path-dependent outcome of many historical processes, European colonialism being one of the most important ones . Leigh Gardner and Tirthankar Roy’s The Economic History of Colonialism is a reminder of the economic impact of this colonial legacy. However, by taking into consideration how the process of colonisation was diverse, they show that it was this diversity rather than the shared colonial legacy that shaped patterns of growth. The book contains ten essays or chapters on various aspects of the economic history of colonialism, starting from understanding the link between colonialism and the emergence of large gaps in terms of per capita incomes between countries.

Two transformations shaped the world – as Europeans conquered 84 per cent of the globe between 1492 and 1960, trade and industrialisation benefitted some regions with sustained growth while others were not at the receiving end of this (1). The book explores the complexity of the colonial process in different regions, leading to different experiences, and suggests that there is no linear narrative of colonial rule and economic change.

The diversity of the experiences of various colonies raises the important question of whether there can be a general account or theory of colonialism. The authors find that there is a general theory of the origins of colonialism which is a combination of European expansion and the local conditions of the regions that were colonised. The book explores four distinct pathways of the origins of colonialism that have emerged as a result of this combination – the political or the militaristic route (this route involved invasion or imposition without definite economic gain in sight, like in the case of Algeria in the early nineteenth century); the commercial path (which can also be called the maritime route, in which merchants had more agency and involved trading partnerships with local merchants and traders rather than outright conquest, like in India from the late eighteenth century); the inland settler pattern (settler-led colonisation or governments with the intention of resettlement like the Portuguese traders and missionaries settling in seventeenth-century southern Africa); and the island settler pattern (plantation societies emerging not as a result of a grand plan, like in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans).

The book also tries to understand the interconnectedness of globalisation and colonialism. The authors reject the claim that globalisation was a one-sided exchange between the colonies and the colonial power. The book also pays attention to the dynamics of growth and development in the colonies during the colonisation and subsequent decolonisation periods. The book further iterates that colonial states did not merely exploit or benefit from the local population. It is suggested that the interests of colonial governments might not necessarily be antithetical to economic growth in their colonies: ‘Colonialism offered little in the way of political or civil rights to most indigenous inhabitants of the colonies, although there were opportunities of social mobility which may have given some individuals greater political voice than they had under pre-colonial systems, which were in many cases neither democratic nor egalitarian’ (69). Even minimal colonial interventions in education and healthcare played a role in improving the standards of living for at least some sections of the people living in some of the colonies.

Image Credit: Building of a railway bridge in Sri Lanka (then ‘Ceylon’). Crop of photograph ‘CO 1069-573-22’ from The National Archives UK , No Known Copyright Restrictions 

But this did not mean colonialism aimed for the development of all sectors or all sections of society. In fact, most of the time, the consequences of a colonial policy were either unintended or surpassed their intention. The case of railways can be understood in this context. Irrespective of the intent, the construction of railways led to a reduction in transport costs, hence opening up new possibilities for the production of exports in regions that were not previously connected to ports. Railways also contributed to internal market integration in larger colonies like India.

However, the railways, along with the new technologies in transportation and farming, also led to rising unequal access to markets and increased the vulnerabilities of colonial economies. With better transportation and farming technologies, colonies saw opportunities to increase the incomes of both producers of exports and suppliers of food and labour services to exporters. But this growth through trade made these colonies more susceptible to economic reversal when prices fell. For example, when cocoa prices declined in the 1930s, poorer farmers were forced to sell their trees, accelerating inequality in Caribbean island colonies (68). Colonial governments were also uninterested in encouraging development in the manufacturing sector in the colonies.

If the economic benefits and costs of colonialism were mixed, why did these colonies exist? Was it just for the sole purpose of serving power and prestige? Did the possession of colonies repay the cost of maintaining them? It is also noteworthy that apart from the economic costs and benefits, colonialism has also led to social and psychological effects, or the ‘imperial experience’ as termed by A.G. Hopkins (1988, 234), which are often excluded by economic historians. The authors provide no conclusive answers to these questions, but rather explore how the drive to prestige and power did not intentionally aim for a particular consequence. The economic legacies of the colonies remain a product of a combination of colonial policies and indigenous factors.

The book then delves into areas less commonly featured in economic history debates. In most of the previous colonies, it is important to understand the role of colonialism in shaping environmental discourses and policies. Imperial history and environmental history often overlap, leading to a distorted form of environmental history. Approaches like the post-colonial and colonial environmentalism dictate the scholarship in this area. The former maintains that environmental policies of regulation are a form of extending power over indigenous people; according to the latter, state regulations stem from theories of ecological balance and human action can upset this. However, the authors mention that this scholarship remains incomplete as it does not take into account all the regions that witnessed indirect and limited colonial rule.

The book finally concludes with a chapter on decolonisation, which often remains ignored in the economic literature on colonialism. Gardner and Roy have argued that it is not just the ‘high points of colonial rule’ but also the end of the empire that are as much a product of the European expansion of power and policies and indigenous factors. Some regions saw a peaceful transfer of power, while others witnessed conflict as an immediate aftermath of decolonisation. The transfer of power was crucial as it offered opportunities as well as risks, the choice of retaining close ties with imperial businesses or looking to rival powers for trade and commerce.

Along with the historical roots of poverty, growth and inequality in the colonies, the book also attempts to understand the origins of the environmental challenges that many of the emerging countries are facing in the current century. The book gives a nuanced view of how colonial rule was not merely intended as an exploitative tool but was a combination of the empire’s desire for power, the intended or unintended consequences of their policies as well as local factors. While most of the past literature on the economic history of colonialism has looked at the exploitative motive or the policies of the empire in question, this book attempts to provide a new understanding of the process which has had a lasting legacy for the Global South even today.

Note: This review gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics and Political Science. The LSE RB blog may receive a small commission if you choose to make a purchase through the above Amazon affiliate link. This is entirely independent of the coverage of the book on LSE Review of Books.

About the author

Ritwika Patgiri is a doctoral student in the Faculty of Economics of the South Asian University, New Delhi. Her research interests lie in rural non-farm sector and rural transformation, gender, political economy and economic history.

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An African History of Africa by Zeinab Badawi review – an insider’s take

The journalist and broadcaster offers a refreshing corrective to narratives imposed on the continent by others

T here is no shortage of big tomes about Africa written by old Africa hands – those white journalists, memoirists, travel writers or novelists who know Africa better than Africans. This genre, lampooned by Binyavanga Wainaina’s satirical essay How to Write About Africa , weaves together stories that exalt the continent’s landscape but decry its politics, that revere its wildlife but patronise its people, that use words such as “timeless”, “primordial” and “tribal” when explaining Africa’s historical trajectories.

Zeinab Badawi’s An African History of Africa is a corrective to these narratives. Ambitious in scope and refreshing in perspective, the book stretches from the origins of Homo sapiens in east Africa through to the end of apartheid in South Africa. It is informed by interviews Badawi conducted with African scholars and cultural custodians, whose expertise, observations and wisdom are threaded through the book.

Badawi is among a distinguished coterie who have the resources, networks and bona fides to pull off a work such as this. Born in Sudan and raised in England, she is best known as a broadcast journalist for Channel 4 News and the BBC. Such is her clout that in 2009 she landed an exclusive interview with then Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir when he became the first sitting head of state to be indicted for alleged war crimes by the international criminal court. Since 2021, she has served as president of Soas University of London.

This, her first book, emerged from a nine-part documentary series for BBC World News. Badawi’s opening ploy – “Everyone is originally from Africa, and this books is therefore for everyone” – is followed by nearly 500 pages of dense, often fascinating historical detail. She recounts the epic ruling lineages and dynastic rivalries of north Africa, centuries before the birth of Christ; the fraught expansion and syncretic incorporation of the Abrahamic faiths into the social fabric of the horn of Africa; the rise of the west African kingdoms that powered the global economy when Europe was reeling from the Black Death in the late middle ages; the underappreciated accomplishments of African world-building as memorialised in the majestic stone ruins of southern Africa’s hinterlands. She pays assiduous attention to gender throughout, often pointing out the overlooked ways women have shaped the world around them. She slips into the present tense when discussing the imprint of slavery and colonialism on Africa’s development and on contemporary debates about how we reckon with the past.

But, for its many accomplishments in conveying the dynamism and diversity in Africa’s long history, this book may frustrate readers inclined to either more scholarly or more literary writing. The book’s panoramic historical view comes at the expense of a new, original argument. Badawi’s prose is limpid without being lyrical. Even her presence on the page is fleeting. We see flashes of her experience and discoveries when researching the book but she doesn’t indulge in more intimate self-revelation. The lack of a dramatic arc gives the book the feel of a compendium.

Still, I am reminded of Teju Cole’s recent novel Tremor , a meditation on how African art, culture, resources and people have shaped a western world that knows so little of Africa. The narrator asks: “How is one to live in a way that does not cannibalise the lives of others, that does not reduce them to mascots, objects of fascination, mere terms in the logic of a dominant culture?” Badawi’s book is one answer. The very act of telling African history from an African perspective and by making this history accessible to a wide audience is an assertion of dignity and an invitation to learn more. As Badawi puts it: “I hope I have demonstrated that Africa has a history, that it is a fundamental part of our global story, and one that is worthy of greater attention and respect than it has so far received.” She most certainly has.

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A Body Made of Glass review: A very personal history of hypochondria

Millions of people experience symptoms many doctors dismiss as imaginary, but why? Caroline Crampton's moving first-person account is very revealing

By Elle Hunt

17 April 2024

The distinction between “real” and imagined illness is under debate

ARTHUR TREES/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY

A Body Made of Glass Caroline Crampton (Granta)

Picture someone with hypochondria. It may be a friend who keeps an inventory of symptoms and ailments, is never without a doctor’s appointment and turns up armed with the latest from Google. Some doctors label such people disparagingly as the “worried well”, those whose demand on medical services is seen to outweigh their need.

But a new book challenges that derogatory and outdated view of hypochondria – now more commonly known as health…

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Apodaca: Huntington Beach Library pros must not be usurped by City Council

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The precise moment of birth for public libraries in the U.S. is open for debate.

Considerable credit is often given to Benjamin Franklin. Books were relatively scarce in Colonial America, so Franklin and other well-heeled contemporaries, seeking access to more titles, pooled their resources and founded a membership-funded library. After the Revolution, he donated a collection of books to a Massachusetts town, leading to what some believe was the nation’s first public library.

Others give that designation to the first totally tax-supported library, which was established in Peterborough, New Hampshire, in 1833, whereas the Darby Free Library in Pennsylvania, founded as a subscription library in 1743, claims to be the oldest U.S. library in continuous service.

However we choose to mark the foundational moment for public libraries, it’s clear that from the earliest days in our nation’s history, great value was placed on making a wide variety of books available to all comers. That core belief has served us well, even as public libraries have evolved and solidified their place as exemplars of our democratic ideals and robust centerpieces of civic life.

I’ll come back to this point, but first let’s examine a little more historical context.

In our nation’s younger days, men from elite families often saw it as their mission to bring education to the masses through the library movement, while wealthy women typically served as volunteers. Those elite underpinnings began to change, particularly after the 1876 founding of the American Library Assn., the first and largest professional library organization in the world.

Over the years, educational and professional standards for library workers were developed and systems were designed to improve operations. The first library school, at Columbia University, was founded. Women began taking bigger roles. Libraries started appearing in smaller towns, rural destinations and harder-to-access areas. They transformed into indispensable community hubs.

Initially, much of this expansion was made possible by one man, industrialist Andrew Carnegie, who funded thousands of public libraries. But as the 20th century dawned, the philanthropic model was increasingly replaced by a public funding model, further enabling a corps of educated, passionate librarians to fan out across the country, improving access to books through the establishment of central libraries and small branches in previously underserved neighborhoods.

There were some darker aspects of this growth. Some libraries were segregated. And some were complicit in censorship.

By the 1950s, however, the ALA had taken a strong anti-censorship stand , and for the most part modern public libraries have striven to make their collections as broad and diverse as possible. In communities across the country, these institutions — funded primarily by the people, for the people — stand as stewards of free thought and expression.

What could be more American than that?

That’s a question I would like to put to four members of the Huntington Beach City Council, who appear intent on returning to a time when censorship and avoidance of diverse viewpoints often went unchecked.

These council members, who constitute a majority on the seven-member council, have led an effort that would result in bans or restrictions on certain books they deem objectionable, undoubtedly those with LGBTQ+ or racial themes. They plan to establish a committee of political appointees that would have the final say on which titles are included in the city’s public library collection, overriding decisions made by trained librarians and the desires of many city residents.

That’s bad enough, but there’s more. Now these council members say they are considering handing over operational control of the public library system to a private, for-profit company.

Apparently some months ago Huntington Beach was approached by its former mayor, Mike Posey, who now works for Library Systems & Services, which bills itself as the nation’s only company focused on operating public libraries.

Library Systems has worked aggressively to win contracts to run public libraries across country, including in a few Southern California cities, in part by promising operational efficiencies. But controversy has followed it in some communities, where critics complain that the company’s first loyalty is to its investors, and contend that it cuts costs by decimating staff and baring library shelves.

Notably, Fullerton decided to pass on a suggestion to turn library operations over to the company.

Huntington Beach’s current mayor, Gracey Van Der Mark, who has spearheaded the effort to establish the library review committee, said the city should consider a proposal from Library Systems because of potential cost savings.

But many city residents see this as yet another attempt by Van Der Mark and other council members to wrest control over the public library and its staff because of their personal objections to some types of books.

Outsourcing government operations to the private sector can be appropriate in certain circumstances. But in the case of the Huntington Beach public library, alarmed residents can only shake their heads in dismay at yet another attempt to fix something that isn’t broken — a well-run, beloved institution that brings value to the community it serves.

It’s long past time for the Huntington Beach City Council to listen to the fervent pleas of their constituents, put their backward-looking agenda and extreme ideologies aside, and end the assault on the public library. History will be watching.

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Patrice Apodaca is a former Los Angeles Times staff writer and is coauthor of “A Boy Named Courage: A Surgeon’s Memoir of Apartheid.” She lives in Newport Beach.

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A history of hypochondria wonders why we worry

In ‘a body made of glass,’ caroline crampton writes about the ways in which society has thought about diagnosis and delusion.

In the late 14th century, a spate of patients scattered across Europe developed an unusual delusion: They came to believe that their bodies were made of glass. Those suffering from this bizarre affliction were terrified of shattering — at least one of them insisted on sleeping in heaps of straw so as to prevent any mishaps. But to modern-day hypochondriacs, this archaic phobia might represent both a fear and a perverse fantasy. A glass person would be perilously breakable, but her condition would also be blissfully transparent.

The journalist Caroline Crampton often wishes that she could see her own insides. She is as desperate for knowledge of the darkest corners of her anatomy as she is terrified of her fragility. “I am a hypochondriac,” she writes in her new book, “ A Body Made of Glass: A Cultural History of Hypochondria .” “Or, at least, I worry that I am, which really amounts to the same thing.” She has suffered from this secondary malady since she was diagnosed with the primary malady of Hodgkin’s lymphoma as a teenager. After months of treatment, her doctors assured her that she was in remission — but a year later, the disease returned. Crampton beat it again, but her anxiety lingers to this day. Is her apprehension irrational?

“A Body Made of Glass” proposes that it is and it isn’t. On the one hand, Crampton often experiences symptoms that she later recognizes to be psychosomatic; on the other, her hyper-vigilance after her supposedly successful first cancer treatment enabled her to spot a suspicious lump the second time. “My fears about health are persistent and at times intrusive,” she concedes, “but they are not necessarily unwarranted.” She concludes that “diagnosable illness and hypochondria can coexist.” Although “we tend to think of hypochondria as shorthand for an illness that’s all in your head,” the people most worried about their health are very often the people who have the most reason to be.

Unfortunately, many of us have cause to brood on the indignities of embodiment. Crampton writes that “a serious illness is much easier to cope with if it can be slotted into a familiar structure with a beginning, middle, and end,” but she knows that the comforts of recovery and resolution are denied to the ever-increasing number of patients with chronic or autoimmune conditions. Like those conditions, hypochondria is “a plotless story.”

“Without a firm diagnosis for my unreliable symptoms, I am stuck in the first scene of the drama, endlessly looping around the same few lines of dialogue,” Crampton writes. “The compulsion to narrativize this experience is always there, but always thwarted.” There is no satisfying ending, no definitive interpretation of a vague pain or a mysterious twinge.

Indeed, there is no absolute agreement about what qualifies as diagnosis and what qualifies as delusion. In a society riddled with biases, credibility is not apportioned equally, and marginalized populations are often dismissed as hysterical. A host of studies have demonstrated that doctors are less likely to listen to women and non-White people, and Crampton knows that she is “taken more seriously in medical examinations” because she is White and upper middle class. The prejudice cuts both ways: Patients, too, rely on “irrelevant details like confidence, carriage, and body language” to determine whether a physician is trustworthy.

And of course, sickness itself — and therefore hypochondria — is a culturally specific construct that is always subject to revision. The catalogue of medically reputable diseases expands and contracts as research advances and outdated theories are debunked. “It is now possible to test for conditions that were previously undetectable,” Crampton writes. The novelist Marcel Proust was regarded by his contemporaries (and even his father) as deranged because he took such strenuous precautions to avoid fits of coughing, but contemporary medicine might have vindicated his concerns. One century’s hypochondriac is another’s confirmed patient.

In 1733, the physician George Cheyne described hypochondria as a “disease of civilization.” According to Crampton, he meant that it was “a consequence of the excesses of an imperial and consumerist society that had abandoned the simplicity of earlier human existence in favor of an indulgent diet and inactive lifestyle,” but hypochondria is also a disease of civilization because it increases as our knowledge does. The more we understand about the myriad ways our bodies can fail, the more we have to fear.

Because the boundaries delineating hypochondria from verifiable sickness are not fixed, it is difficult to pin down either notion with precision. Crampton acknowledges that her topic of choice “resists definition, like oil sliding over the surface of water.” She is right that hypochondria is a shifting target, but her refusal to venture even a provisional characterization can make for frustrating reading.

“A Body Made of Glass” is a product of impressively thorough research, but it is sometimes circuitous and digressive to the point of frenzy. It blends memoir and literary criticism with micro-histories of subjects of varying relevance, among them the emergence of quack medicine and the medieval theory of the humors.

“Hypochondria” is an old word but a relatively new concept, and it is not always clear whether Crampton’s book traces the history of the phenomenon or the history of the term. Sometimes, her concern is etymological: She informs us that the word first appeared in the Hippocratic Corpus, a collection of medical tracts produced and disseminated in ancient Greece, where it referred to “the place where hard ribs give way to soft abdomen.” Elsewhere, however, Crampton discusses not language but terror in the face of mortality. Her wide-ranging reflections touch on such eminences as John Donne, Molière and Charles Darwin, all of whom had both palpable ailments and debilitating anxiety about their palpable ailments. (It’s difficult to have the former without the latter, it turns out.)

Still, “A Body Made of Glass” is full of fascinating forays. If it is hard to read for its claims or conclusions, it can still be read for its many sobering observations about sickness — a misfortune that will eventually befall even the heartiest among us. After all, as Crampton darkly notes, “hypochondria is merely the human condition with the comforting fictions stripped away. Whether we choose to think about it all the time or not, we are all just one freak accident away from the end.”

Becca Rothfeld is the nonfiction book critic for The Washington Post and the author of “All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess.”

A Body Made of Glass

A Cultural History of Hypochondria

By Caroline Crampton

Ecco. 321 pp. $29.99

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