New Books In Economics

There are as many New Deals as there are books on the subject. Yet only recently have historians begun to dig into the international dimensions of the New Deal. Kiran Klaus Patel is one of those historians, and his book, The New Deal: A Global History (Princeton University Press, 2016), is an impressive crack at showing the transnational intertwinements and comparisons that made up the New Deal’s moment. Patel locates the United States in a vast network of modernizing states who experienced a shared crisis in the years after 1929, developed national policies to address the crisis, and looked to other states in search of inspiration or out of fear. As late as 1938, for instance, Roosevelt was requesting Nazi labor statistics to help refine his own administrations planning. Patel shows how the New Deal shaped the world and, more importantly, was shaped by the world. The book provides fresh contributions to a range of different topics, such as the global Great Depression, the Good Neighbor Policy, the deve