Who Makes Cents?: A History of Capitalism Podcast

Take a moment and picture the average person who came North during the Great Migration. Chances are good that you conjured someone who was African-American and working-class, bound for a city in search of a job, say, in a factory or in domestic service.  But as Kendra Boyd’s new book, Freedom Enterprise, reveals, the Great Migration also saw entrepreneurs moving to the urban North in search of opportunity. Once they arrived in places like Detroit, these businesspeople had to navigate a fraught landscape that was profoundly structured by race and racism.   Today's episode tackles everything from female entrepreneurs, to illegal hustling, racial uplift, and urban renewal. The boxer Joe Louis even makes an appearance. And we’ll grapple with a big and vexed question: Can you overcome racial capitalism by being a Black capitalist?

What do energy consumers owe energy producers? What does it mean to be a citizen in a coal-fired democracy? In this month's episode, guest Trish Kahle reckons with the costs and benefits of coal from the perspective of American coal miners in Appalachia. Starting at the turn of the 20th century, Kahle outlines miners efforts to articulate and, later, revise a coal-fired social contract, one capable of delivering them the benefits of citizenship. Thus, Kahle shows how miners, throughout the 20th century, endeavored to leverage their position as energy producers to make claims on the U.S. government and American citizens, more broadly, related to a range of citizenship rights. These included the right to occupational safety, health, and housing, all of which were, at various points, threatened by coal companies and the U.S. government's failure to protect miners and their families from the devastation wrought by coal.

How do you write the history of something as abstract, as placeless, and as vast as the globalization that has remade our world over the past several decades?  If you’re Ian Kumekawa, you make those immaterial forces concrete by telling the story of one object: a hulking 94-meter-long steel barge he calls “The Vessel.”  From housing for oil roughnecks in the North Sea, to a barracks for British soldiers in the Falklands, to a jail docked on a Manhattan pier, the Vessel reveals how the murky world of offshore capitalism is in fact embodied in tangible things. It always involves real people living and working in real places.  This one ship, then, helps us to see the too-often-invisible material reality of global capitalism at the close of the twentieth century.

This month's episode looks at the history of Chinese industrialization by focusing on Anshan Iron and Steel Works or Angang, located in Manchuria. Long portrayed as the quintessential model of Mao-era socialist industrialization, Angang, as Koji Hirata shows, was, in many ways, built on the material and ideological foundations laid by imperial Japan and nationalist China. Moving forward in time, Hirata analyzes Angang’s role in the making of socialist China, including revealing the relativley understudied political tensions that existed within China's largest state-owned enterprise (SOE) between factory directors, who answered to Beijing, and local party officials in Anshan; the political education of workers; and much more. The episode concludes by taking a long look at Anshan's shifting fortunes—and Manchuria, more broadly—amid a series of reforms during the late 20th century, and its transformation into a Chinese Rustbelt.

It's now been over a decade since the New York Times declared that the history of capitalism was in full swing at American universities. This podcast also just celebrated its 10 year anniversary. With those milestones in mind, we wanted to take the temperature of the very folks driving the field forward into new and exciting directions. To do that, your co-hosts hit the road, interviewing attendees at the 2025 Business History Conference in Atlanta. Listen to find out what's on the mind of some of the leading historians in our field.