Manchester Capitalism is a series of books, which develop the foundational argument and more broadly follow the trail of money and power across the systems of our financialised and elite dominated capitalism where ordinary citizens increasingly lack essentials. The books analyse who gets what, when and why in a research based and solidly argued way that is accessible for the concerned citizen.  The aim is to go beyond critique and re-frame our problems so as to offer solutions about what is to be done.

We publish one or two books each year. Our two new titles for 2023-4 are When Nothing Works by the FERL team of researchers (June 2023) and Culture is Not an Industry by Justin O’Connor (January 2024). Both books in different ways develop the foundational argument, as does the next book in the series. This will be Kevin Morgan’s The Public Plate about food in schools, hospitals and prisons.

Our academic editors are Julie Froud and Karel Williams and our commissioning editor at Manchester University Press is Kim Walker. The editors are excited by the constructive radicalism of what we are publishing and eager to discuss proposals for books which will build the series.  In the first instance, interested authors, experienced or neophyte, should contact julie.froud@manchester.ac.uk for advice, encouragement and feedback.

We have a back catalogue of a dozen titles which are all in print. These include several essential titles for anyone interested in the development of foundational thinking. The first essential is Foundational Economy, a definitive statement of the foundational argument when it was published in 2018 and now available in a new edition which reviews subsequent developments up to 2022. The other key text is The Spatial Contract (2020) by Schafran et al which for the first time focused the foundational argument on place and introduced the concept of reliance system.

The series also includes analyses of single systems. Here we have Tom Haines- Doran’s Derailed (2022) which analyses the mess that UK rail privatisation created and argues about how to fix that mess. Stuart Hodkinson’s Safe as Houses (2019) presented a scrupulously researched study of PFI financed public housing regeneration schemes in London and showed that the Grenfell tragedy of 2017 was no accident.

But the series also ranges more broadly across two other related themes, elite domination of the institutions of power and the malign influence of many kinds of popular and expert thinking about the economy. We have published two high profile critiques of unaccountable elites and their mentality by Aeron Davis.  His Bankruptcy, Bubbles and Bail Outs (2022) is an interview based, inside history of the UK Treasury since 1976> This follows up his general argument about unaccountable, Reckless Elites (2019) who cost us all so dearly.

On economics, we have published Jack Mosse’s ethnography, The Pound and the Fury (2021) which documents the nature and limits of the widely held “pot of money” concept of the economy.  And that was followed by the Rethinking Economics team’s programmatic Reclaiming Economics (2022) which offers an expert alternative to mainstream economics.   

Delving further into the back list, our all- time best seller is the Econocracy (2016) by the then recently graduated students who founded Rethinking Economics when challenging the mainstream teaching of economics in the University of Manchester. While a neglected classic What a Waste (2014) analyses how outsourcing went wrong in the UK and shows that some of those who taught at the University could think critically and presciently.

All books are available from booksellers or directly from Manchester University Press https://manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/series/manchester-capitalism/