Harvard University Press imprint: 1080 books

The People’s Bank of China surpasses the Federal Reserve as the world’s biggest central bank. In the first comprehensive account of the evolution of central banking and monetary policy in reform China, Stephen Bell and Hui Feng show how the PBC’s authority grew from a Leninist party-state that once jealously guarded its control.

The world’s largest exporter of oil is facing mounting problems that could send shock waves through every major economy. Gustafson provides an authoritative account of the Russian oil industry from the last years of communism to its uncertain future. The stakes extend beyond global energy security to include the threat of a destabilized Russia.

As the United States aggressively expands its exports of liquefied natural gas, it stands poised to become an energy superpower. This unanticipated reality is rewriting the conventional rules of intercontinental gas trade and realigning strategic relations among the United States, the European Union, Russia, China and beyond, as Agnia Grigas shows.

This book considers how the civic ideals embodied in India’s constitution are undermined by exclusions based on social and economic inequalities, sometimes even by its own strategies of inclusion. Once seen by Westerners as a political anomaly, India today is the case study that no global discussion of democracy and citizenship can ignore.

In eight case studies by leading scholars in history, archaeology, business, economics, geography, and political science, the authors showcase the “natural experiment” or “comparative method”—well-known in any science concerned with the past—on the discipline of human history. That means,...

As the rest of the world worries about what a future might look like under Chinese supremacy, Luttwak worries about China’s own future prospects. Applying the logic of strategy for which he is well known, he argues that the world’s second largest economy may be headed for a fall unless China’s leaders check their military ambitions.

China’s Communist Party seized power in 1949 after a long guerrilla insurgency followed by full-scale war, but the revolution was just beginning. Andrew Walder narrates the rise and fall of the Maoist state from 1949 to 1976—an epoch of startling accomplishments and disastrous failures, steered by many forces but dominated above all by Mao Zedong.

Bethlehem PA was synonymous with steel. But after the factories closed, the city bet its future on casino gambling. Chloe Taft describes a city struggling to make sense of the ways global capitalism transforms jobs, landscapes, and identities. While residents often have few cards to play, the shape economic progress takes is not inevitable.

American liberals and conservatives alike take for granted a progressive view of the Constitution that took root in the early twentieth century. Richard Epstein laments this complacency which, he believes, explains America's current economic malaise and political gridlock. Steering clear of well-worn...

Magisterial in vision, sweeping in scope, this monumental work presents a seamless account of Japanese society during the modern era, from 1600 to the present. A distillation of more than fifty years' engagement with Japan and its history, it is the crowning work of our leading interpreter of the modern Japanese experience.

From workers' wages to presidential elections, labor unions once exerted tremendous clout in American life. In the immediate post-World War II era, one in three workers belonged to a union. The fraction now is close to one in five, and just one in ten in the private sector. The only thing big about...

Within twenty, maybe forty, years most people in developed countries will stop having sex for the purpose of reproduction. Instead, prospective parents will be told as much as they wish to know about the genetic makeup of dozens of embryos, and they will pick one or two for implantation, gestation,...

For over a century the U.S. has “improved” the peoples of Latin America by promoting everything from representative democracy and economic development to oral hygiene. How did this paternalistic practice evolve and spread globally and what are the troubling consequences for a country with a habit of giving—and for others with a habit of receiving?

Tera W. Hunter offers the first comprehensive history of African American marriage in the nineteenth century and into the Jim Crow era. She reveals the practical ways couples adopted, adapted, or rejected white Christian ideas of marriage, creatively setting their own standards for conjugal relationships under conditions of uncertainty and cruelty.