Conventional wisdom holds that landed elites oppose democratization. Landlords' political and economic influence may weaken with development, while commercial, financial and industrial elites grow stronger. Yet economic growth doesn't just alter the balance of forces; to the extent that landowners no longer need to control agricultural labor, it can actually change their political preferences. This occurs when landowners can substitute technology for labor.

In Dance of the Trillions, David Lubin tells the story of what makes money flow from high-income countries to lower-income ones; what makes it flow out again; and how developing countries have sought protection against the volatility of international capital flows. The book traces an arc from the 1970s, when developing countries first gained access to international financial markets, to the present day.

Chinese perspectives of the early atomic age, before the emergence of the People's Republic of China in 1949, remain poorly understood, especially within the International Relations field. Historical accounts have largely drawn from American, British and Soviet sources. This research, based on a British Academy Research Grant (SG171630), starts in 1945, when atomic weapons were first used by the United States against Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan.

The last decade has seen a surge of interest in economic inequality and widely read books about its social and political consequences by Thomas Piketty, Anthony Atkinson, and Larry Bartels. Yet most scholarship focuses on incomes, neglecting the massive inequalities that exist and are widening in the ownership of assets: from residential to financial wealth.