A Brief History of - Economics Edition

What if the story of economics wasn't a dusty timeline of dead theorists, but a living, branching tree of ideas—each edition rewriting the past and predicting a different future? A Brief History of Economics: Editions is a groundbreaking series that presents economic history not as a single, linear march toward neoliberal orthodoxy, but as a series of “editions”—each volume revisiting, revising, and reinterpreting the same core historical moments through the lens of a different dominant economic paradigm.

Beginning with the pre-industrial age, the series traces how societies have answered three questions: What is value? Who creates it? And how should it be distributed? But in a radical twist, each subsequent “edition” doesn’t just chronicle the past; it uses a counterfactual framework to show how a different economic rule—say, a surviving guild system, a successful communard revolution, or a debt-based digital commons—would have reshaped subsequent industrialization, war, globalization, and crisis. By the final volumes, the series becomes a prescriptive toolkit, asking readers to choose which economic “edition” they want to write next.