In “Brokers of Empire Japanese Settler Colonialism in Korea, 1876–1945″ Jun Uchida explores the forgotten story of Japanese settlers on the Korean peninsula. Uchida’s research, based on previously unused materials in multi-language archives, reveals the life and history of one of the largest colonial communities in the twentieth century and the policy of empire-state building behind it. Carl Wennerlind returns a few centuries back to England to discover the intellectual context within which the financial revolution was conceived. His new book “Casualties of Credit: The English Financial Revolution, 1620–1720″ shows that money lending has always been related to trust, public opinion, and violence. Michael McCormick goes even further in the past rehabilitating and reinterpreting one of the most neglected and extraordinary sources from Charlemagne’s revival of the Roman empire: the report of a fact-finding mission to the Christian church of the Holy Land. In “Charlemagne’s Survey of the Holy: Wealth, Personnel, and Buildings of a Mediterranean Church between Antiquity and the Middle Ages Land” McCormick studies the ambitious project of Charlemagne to build and run a Christian Empire in the time of decline of the old Church in Palestine. The idea of free trade and laissez-faire was popular among political thinkers in Enlightenment Europe, but this doesn’t mean that mercantilism and nationalist policies, especially the extensive tariffs and other intrusive market interventions, were abandoned. In “Translating Empire Emulation and the Origins of Political Economy“ Sophus Reinert shows the competition between the European powers and how they emulated the British practices of trade expansion and wealth accumulation.