Books like As Gods among Men by Guido Alfani

Jared Diamond explains how geography, biology, and human ingenuity shaped the world’s unequal societies in his Pulitzer‑winning study of civilization and social evolution.

A practical, policy‑oriented textbook that uses models and country examples to explain economic development, updated with the latest research and data for students with limited economics background.

David S. Landes explores the historical forces that have shaped global wealth and poverty, arguing that open societies driven by work and knowledge, especially through invention, have led to economic and military success.

Ruchir Sharma distills economics into ten practical rules, offering a guide to spotting the political, economic, and social shifts that shape everyday life in a rapidly changing world.

Polanyi's Great Transformation assesses the causes of capitalist instability in the mid twentieth century. The stability of the nineteenth century, he says, comes from four institutions: the gold standard, the liberal state, the balance of power, and the self-regulating market. Capitalism itself depends on treating as commodities three things which are in their essence not commodities: labor, land, and money. He deems these "fictitious commodities." Each of these three commodities is bought and sold in markets, but in fact are fundamentally different from ordinary commodities. Polanyi argues that capitalism's core institutions lead to an inherently unstable society that is increasingly forced to intervene in the disorder caused by markets in order to allow markets to continue to function. The transition from organic social values wherein human relations are privileged over exchange to modern capitalism is what Polanyi deems the "Great Transformation" that is the core feature of world capitalism.