Taming the Octopus has a cover
And it’s now available for pre-order
Hello,
I started this newsletter several years ago, before the Substack trend took off, because I had just started revising my doctoral dissertation into a trade book. My plan was simple: I would give updates to friends, family, and interested readers on my progress along the way. That was a short lived idea—I haven’t sent an update since December 2020!
The process of completing a book on the history of the large business corporation in the twentieth century turned out to be a far more engrossing process than I could have imagined. Rewarding and even fun sometimes, yes, but it challenged every ounce of my ability as a historian, researcher, and writer. I soon lost the energy to make updates on my progress, in part because there were long stretches when it felt like I wasn’t making any progress. So it usually goes with big creative projects. For three years, it’s been a near constant labor not really of revision, but of rewriting almost every sentence I already had written for the dissertation as well as researching and writing entirely new sections of the manuscript.
The exciting news is that my work on the book is finally coming to an end. I finished copyedits earlier this summer and I expect to complete the proofing process later this year. Now the fun work of sharing this labor of love is just getting started.
Today I want to share three things: the book cover, the publication date, and where to pre-order.
If you haven’t signed up, here’s your chance:
The design and marketing team at W.W. Norton & Company did an amazing job and I am thankful to them. I love this cover.
One of the reasons I am excited about the cover is that I always had the image of the octopus in mind when I was working on the manuscript. The octopus was originally a political image used by progressives early in the twentieth century to convey the dangers associated with the concentration of economic power. Even though the corporation isn’t novel or freakish to us in the way that it was to the generations that first called it the octopus, populist anxieties about corporate threats to democracy and to the American people stubbornly persist. I think the cover does a good job of conveying that reality.
One of the challenges of writing a book about the history of business—and, in this case, the history of an institution, the large publicly traded corporation—is that the subject makes for difficult storytelling. Good stories are always about people doing things, getting into conflicts, being changed by them, and experiencing unintended consequences—stories are about people. But the business corporation is a bureaucracy and most of the historical writing about it is very abstract, focused mainly on the institutional structure of things and the material conditions that shaped them.
Material conditions and structures are important—and there’s plenty of that in the book—but I wanted to make this a story of the struggle on the part of activists, executives, regulators, and others to make this institution accountable—to domesticate the very thing that many doubted was even capable of being domesticated. I’ll be sharing a little bit about those characters here and I can’t wait for you to read about them in the book.
Speaking of reading the book, the second thing I want to share is that I have a publication date: February 20, 2024.
That’s about seven months away, which seems like a long time, but it gives me time to get the word out about the book. As you probably know, much of book promotion these days is dependent on algorithms that Amazon and other companies use to suggest a book to people who might be interested in a related subject and to put titles higher on lists and searches.
That’s one reason I’m sending this email out now: to get the word out and encourage you to pre-order. Orders for the book in the months leading up to publication make a big difference on Amazon, which, despite it being an evil commercial empire, is still a company writers like me depend on to sell books. So, please pre-order and consider sharing this email with friends.
A few more things…
Taming the Octopus is a work of history, but the questions that it tries to answer about corporate power and social responsibility are in the headlines every day. I’ve been interviewed recently by several journalists about corporate culture wars over Pride Month, ESG, and other topics:
I talked with Greg Sargent of the Washington Post recently about conservative opposition to Target’s initial promotion of LGBTQ products for Pride Month. I am quoted in his critical op-ed on the subject.
I also appeared on Vox’s “Today, Explained” podcast with journalist Noel King discussing how the history of the corporation helps us understand conflicts over popular brands—and how our changing political culture is intensifying these fights.
Finally, I talked Emily Stewart at Vox about the backlash to so-called Woke Capitalism and the possibility that conservatives might establish their own competing institutions. “It depends on what the product is and whether there’s an obvious alternative to that product,” I said. “You’re not going to be able to pop up overnight and create an alternative Target company.”
As my work on the book has winded down, I’ve had the chance to write about other subjects for The Hedgehog Review, where I am senior editor.
Earlier this year, I wrote a review of theologian David Bentley Hart’s Tradition and Apocalypse: An Essay on the Future of Christian Belief. Here’s a taste: “Tradition is something we think about more clearly when it’s slipping through our fingers. In the play Fiddler on the Roof, Tevye the Dairyman becomes ever more vociferous (and anxious) about the preservation of tradition even as the customs of his beloved Jewish village in Ukraine are being remade and undone before his very eyes. For many of us, the family, friends, and social conditions that made those big Thanksgiving dinners or block parties so special come to be understood more completely only after they have become an old memory. ‘Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone?’ sang Joni Mitchell in 1970.”
For the summer issue, I also wrote a review. This one of New York Times journalist David Gelles’s book on the now-infamous General Electric CEO Jack Welch and the transformation of American capitalism over the last four decades. I write about how it’s difficult to tell the history of bureaucratic organizations like corporations and that we need to ground those stories in narratives about actual people. The storytelling impulse, however, sometimes leads journalists and historians to cast people as villains and heroes, which almost always makes for bad history. You can read about that in “How Not to Tell Stories About Corporate Capitalism,” which is now behind the paywall but available to subscribers. It will be out from the paywall on Friday.
That’s all, and more than enough for now. If you like this, please subscribe. I’ll be in touch soon.
My Twitter account is here.
The website is at www.kyleedwardwilliams.com.