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The first British gravestone in the American colonies, a slab of black limestone with an engraving of a knight.

America’s Oldest Surviving Tombstone Probably Came From Belgium

How researchers analyzed limestone to determine the age and origins of the grave maker, which marked the final resting place of a prominent Jamestown colonist.
by Sarah Kuta via Smithsonian on September 25, 2024
Factory cloth samples.

Chinese Production, American Consumption

The convergence of economy and politics in the Sino-US relationship via Jonathan Chatwin’s “The Southern Tour” and Elizabeth O’Brien Ingleson’s “Made in China.”
by Kate Merkel-Hess via Los Angeles Review of Books on July 28, 2024
A top hat with poppies and the words "Merchants of Addiction", and pictures of wealthy American opium smugglers.

The Blue-Blood Families That Made Fortunes in the Opium Trade

Long before the Sacklers appeared on the scene, families like the Astors and the Delanos cemented their upper-crust status through the global trade in opium.
by Amitav Ghosh via The Nation on January 23, 2024
Whole Wheat Shell Pasta on Grey, by artist Rachel Doom, 2019.

Wielding Wheat

A new history makes a case for the world-ordering power of wheat.
by Daniel Immerwahr via New York Review of Books on July 1, 2022
WPA poster for the City of New York Department of Docks, showing smokestack of ship and cargo being loaded.
Exhibit

International Trade

Histories of how money and commodities have flowed across borders, from the slave-based economies of maritime empires to contemporary globalization.
A naval cap with Soviet and American flags beneath the Pepsi logo

The Doomed Voyage of Pepsi’s Soviet Navy

A three-decade dream of communist markets ended in the scrapyard.
by Paul Musgrave via Foreign Policy on November 27, 2021
Detail of Anti-Slavery Picnic at Weymouth Landing, Massachusetts (c1845) by Susan Torrey Merritt. Courtesy the Art Institute of Chicago

New England Kept Slavery, But Not Its Profits, At a Distance

Entangled with, yet critical of, colonial oppression and the evils of slavery, the true history of Boston can now be told.
by Mark A. Peterson via Aeon on May 3, 2021
original

Zones of Doubt

What we can learn about trade policy from a misbegotten 19th century effort to quantify the chemical properties of wool.
by David Singerman on October 2, 2018
Donald Trump holding up a bill he signed.
partner

Ceding Power to the Executive is Backfiring on Free-Trade Advocates

Liberal Democrats sidestepped Congress to bring free trade to the U.S. Now, Trump is able to do the same thing to destroy it.
by Jennifer Delton via Made By History on June 7, 2018

'Trade Wars Are Good'?

Three past conflicts tell a very different story.
by Marc-William Palen via The Conversation on March 5, 2018

James Madison Would Like a Few Words on Trade Wars

The fourth president tried all kinds of sanctions to open markets, but still ended up in the War of 1812.
by Noah Feldman via Bloomberg on March 5, 2018
The port of Canton

China and the American Revolution

Explaining the global impact of British-Chinese relations during the colonial period.
by Simon Hill via Journal of the American Revolution on December 7, 2017
Lithograph of a sea otter on a beach, by J. Webber, as illustration for James Cook's Voyages.

Viewpoints on the China Trade

Even within itself, the China trade was a complex, multisided, many-splendored thing.
by John Demos via Commonplace on January 1, 2005
U.S Custom House.

Lessons from Early America’s Tariff Wars

The 1790s debate shows that, even when they aim at moral goods, tariffs abet cronyism and corruption.
by John C. Pinheiro via Law & Liberty on April 23, 2025
Elon Musk holds a chain saw as he shakes hands with Argentine president Javier Milei at the Conservative Political Action Conference.

The Method in the Far Right’s Madness

How today’s far right manages to combine the call for economic freedom with pseudoscience about natural hierarchies of race and IQ.
by Quinn Slobodian, Bartolomeo Sala via Jacobin on April 13, 2025
A worker removes bottles of American-made Jack Daniel's whiskey from a shelf at the Liquor Control Board of Ontario (LCBO) Queen's Quay store in Toronto, Canada.
partner

The History Behind Canadian Boycotts of American Whiskey

A global marketplace has shaped the U.S. whiskey industry for a century, even as it brands itself distinctly American.
by E. Kyle Romero via Made By History on April 8, 2025
A bread line on New York's Lower East Side in 1930.

Trump Tariffs Conjure Specter of Smoot-Hawley Act, a Depression-Era Blunder

The 1930 tariff bill hurt exporters and provoked other countries to enact their own tariffs as the U.S. economy grappled with the Great Depression.
by Andrew Jeong via Washington Post on April 8, 2025
Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Franklin D. Roosevelt, Free Trader

A little understood part of the New Deal.
by John Ganz via Unpopular Front on April 4, 2025
Floor of the New York Stock Exchange.

Regime Change in the West?

Where amid this turmoil does neoliberalism stand? In emergency conditions it has been forced to take measures.
by Perry Anderson via London Review of Books on March 25, 2025
A Ford truck is loaded with ivory tusks in Essex, Connecticut.
partner

The Blood on the Keyboard

The history of ivory-topped piano keys and the invisible human suffering caused by our cultural commodities.
by Marina Manoukian via HNN on March 25, 2025
Aerial view of Oakland.

The Future Happens in Oakland First. That’s a Cautionary Tale for Global Cities

International trade boomed with the city’s early adoption of technological and economic changes, but Black neighborhoods became ‘sacrifice zones.’
by Lois Beckett, Alexis C. Madrigal via The Guardian on March 22, 2025
Thousands of shipping containers at the terminal at Port Elizabeth, New Jersey.

No Tariffs Without Representation

Executive trade power has gone too far.
by Erik Matson via Law & Liberty on March 19, 2025
Shield with the words "For European Recovery Supplied by the United States of America."

Soft Power

What it means, why it matters, and where it started.
by Lindsay M. Chervinsky via Imperfect Union on March 15, 2025
Henry Carey.

The Thinker Who Explains Trump’s Tariffs

Henry Charles Carey is arguably the most influential economist in American history.
by Adam Rowe via Compact on March 4, 2025
Poster reading "Basta Buitres," or "Enough Vultures," calling for Argentina to unite against the United States.

How the US Courts Rewrote the Rules of International Trade

How the American legal system created an economic environment that subordinated the entire world to domestic business interests.
by Brett Christophers via The Nation on March 3, 2025
Canadian and American flags.
partner

Using Tariffs to Try to Annex Canada Backfired in the 1890s

Instead of compelling Canada to become an American state, the 1890 McKinley Tariff drove Canada into British hands.
by Marc-William Palen via Made By History on February 6, 2025
Donald Trump and Xi Jinping, flanked by the U.S. and Chinese flags.

Back to the ’80s?

Trump, Xi Jinping, and the tariffs.
by Andrew Liu via n+1 on January 30, 2025
A group of indigenous Pacific Islanders forced to work on a sugar plantation, with a white overseer in the background.

How ‘Blackbirders’ Forced Tens of Thousands of Pacific Islanders Into Slavery After the Civil War

The decline of Southern industries paved the way for plantations in Fiji and Australia, where victims of “blackbirding” endured horrific working conditions.
by Shoshi Parks via Smithsonian on December 5, 2024

The Second Abolition

Robin Blackburn’s sweeping history of slavery and freedom in the 19th century.
by Manisha Sinha via The Nation on November 19, 2024
An artistic collage juxtiposing a transatlantic slave ship with a tenement in Harlem.

How the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Continues to Impact Modern Life

A new Smithsonian book reckons with the enduring legacies of slavery and capitalism.
by Jennifer L. Morgan via Smithsonian on November 7, 2024
Shipping container labeled "China Shipping," overlaid on political cartoon showing a tariff slowing supply of medicine to a drip.

Trump Loves The 1890s But He’s Clueless About Them

The tariffs he keeps babbling about didn’t make that decade great. They helped usher in a depression.
by Eric Rauchway via The Bulwark on October 23, 2024
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