Enterprise & Society: December 2013 Issue

The December 2013 issue of Enterprise & Society is now available. In addition to the articles, this issue also contains Kenneth Lipartito's presidential address and abstracts of the dissertations presented in the Krooss Prize Dissertation session at the annual meeting:

Presidential Address
   Kenneth Lipartito, "Connecting the Cultural and the Material in Business History"
Dissertation Summaries
   Gavin Benke, "Electronic Bits and Ten Gallon Hats"
   Bartow J. Elmore, "Citizen Coke: An Environmental and Political History of the Coca Cola Company"
   Caitlin C. Rosenthal, "From Memory to Mastery: Accounting for Control in America, 1750–1880"
Articles
   Hsien-chun Wang, "Revisiting the Niuzhuang Oil Mill (1868–1870): Transferring Western Technology into China"
   Madeleine Zelin, "Chinese Business Practice in the Late Imperial Period"
   Jose Galindo, "The Economic Expansion of an Elite Business Family of French Origin in Central Mexico in the First Half of the Twentieth Century"
   Tobias Karlsson, "The Dynamics of Downsizing: The Swedish Tobacco Monopoly in the 1920s"

Full access requires a personal or institutional subscription (BHC members receive the journal as part of their membership); abstracts are freely available.

CFP: “"Business History in Africa, Asia, and Latin America”

The Business History Initiative at Harvard Business School is hosting a conference on June 13-14, 2014:  "Business History in Africa, Asia, and Latin America: Integrating Course Development and New Research."
The conference will focus on course development in business history and the history of capitalism beyond the developed economies of Europe, the United States, and East Asia. It will seek to leverage existing expertise about the field from countries where it is more established, as well as the experience of other disciplines, including world history and international business. Topics to be discussed include how to integrate the latest research into teaching materials; new and innovative pedagogical methods, including web-based learning and the use of oral history; the availability of primary sources; and the different interests and requirements of students in business schools, history departments, and in graduate programs. The conference will draw on an extensive global survey of business history courses in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. It is hoped that speakers drawn from those regions will share their experience concerning the opportunities and challenges of teaching business history.

We welcome proposals for papers.  Discounted hotel rates will be available for attendees. Conference meals will be provided.  Registration is required, but is free of charge. The conference is open to educators, graduate students, and other academics with an interest in the subject.  It will be held on the campus of Harvard Business School, Boston, Massachusetts, USA.

Please send paper proposals to Walter Friedman (wfriedman@hbs.edu) by January 31, 2014. The full announcement can be viewed on the conference website.

Digital Resource: The SEC Historical Society Opens a New Gallery

The Securities and Exchange Commission Historical Society has opened a new gallery in its on-line museum: “The Mechanics of Legislation: Congress, the SEC and Financial Regulation.” It examines the Insider Trading and Securities Fraud Enforcement Act of 1988 (ITSFEA) and the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999. The gallery includes links to almost 500 primary resources, including letters from legislators such as Speaker of the House Carl Albert and U.S. Representative Richard Armey to their constituents; papers from the William J. Clinton Library; and oral history interviews with former U.S. Senator Edward Kaufman and former U.S. Representative Michael Oxley. As noted by gallery curator Kurt Hohenstein,

Over the years, financial legislation has become increasingly more complicated because our system has grown more complex. From the public’s view, the passage of legislation often appears to have come out of the blue, rapid and responsive to a public outcry for reform. In reality, much of the hard work of drafting bills, conducting hearings, building public consensus and organizing needed votes remains hidden from the public. An examination of two significant financial laws enacted in the last half-century . . . can provide insight into the process of legislating on financial affairs, and illustrate the reactive and deliberative legislating models.

CFP: “Human Trafficking in Early America”

"Human Trafficking in Early America," an interdisciplinary conference hosted by the University of Pennsylvania, and co-sponsored by the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, the Department of History at the University of Maryland, College Park, and the Department of History at Drew University, will be held on April 23-25, 2015. The co-organizers are Richard Bell (Maryland) and Sharon Braslaw Sundue (Drew). As the organizers explain, "In early America, human trafficking took many forms, engaging and displacing native, African and European populations in every decade and in every colony and state. Drawing upon a wave of new scholarship on Indian captivity, the middle passage, the domestic slave trade, child abduction and sex trafficking, this conference offers a timely opportunity to examine the cultures and shadow economies created by and elaborated around forced migration in North America and the Atlantic world before 1860."
    Paper proposals should include a brief c.v. and an abstract of no more than 500 words. Applicants should email their proposals to mceas@ccat.sas.upenn.edu by April 15, 2014. Papers must be submitted for pre-circulation byFebruary 1, 2015. Limited support for participants’ travel and lodging will be available. See the complete call for papers for additional details.

Grant Opportunities at the Smithsonian's Lemelson Center

The Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation offers fellowship and travel award programs to support projects that present creative approaches to the study of invention and innovation in American society. These include, but are not limited to, historical research and documentation projects resulting in dissertations, theses, publications, exhibitions, educational initiatives, documentary films, or other multimedia products.

The programs provide access to the expertise of the Institution's research staff and the vast invention and technology collections of the National Museum of American History (NMAH).  The NMAH Archives Center documents both individuals and firms across a range of time periods and subject areas. Representative collections include the Western Union Telegraph Company Records, ca. 1840-1994 and the Earl S. Tupper Papers, documenting Tupper, and his invention, Tupperware. In addition, the NMAH Library offers long runs of historical technology serials like Scientific American and American Machinist, while the American Trade Literature collection features 300,000 catalogs, technical manuals, and advertising brochures for some 30,000 firms, primarily from 1880 to 1945.

The Lemelson Center invites applications covering a broad spectrum of research topics that resonate with its mission to foster a greater understanding of invention and innovation, broadly defined.  However, the Center especially encourages project proposals that will illuminate the role of women inventors; inventors with disabilities; inventors from diverse backgrounds; or any inventions and technologies associated with groups that are traditionally under-represented in the historical record. 

The Lemelson Center Fellowship Program annually awards 2 to 3 fellowships to pre-doctoral graduate students, post-doctoral scholars, and other professionals who have completed advanced training. Fellows are expected to reside in the Washington, D.C., area, to participate in the Center's activities, and to make a presentation of their work to colleagues at the museum. Fellowship tenure is based upon the applicants' stated needs (and available funding) up to a maximum of ten weeks. Stipends for 2014-2015 will be $575/week for pre-doctoral fellows and $870/week for post-doctoral and professional fellows. For application procedures and additional information, see http://invention.smithsonian.org/resources/research_fellowships.aspx. Researchers are encouraged to consult with the fellowship coordinator prior to submitting a proposal - please contact historian Eric S. Hintz, Ph.D. at +1 202-633-3734 or hintze@si.edu.

The Lemelson Center Travel to Collections Award Program annually awards 2 to 3 short-term travel grants to encourage the use of its invention-related collections.  Awards are $150 per day for a maximum of 10 business days and may be used to cover transportation, living, and reproduction expenses; they are intended only for applicants who reside or attend school beyond commuting distance of the NMAH. For application procedures and additional information, see http://invention.smithsonian.org/resources/research_travel.aspx. Researchers are encouraged to consult with the travel award coordinator prior to submitting a proposal - please contact archivist Alison Oswald at +1 202-633-3726 or oswalda@si.edu.

Applications for both programs are due January 15, 2014.

CFP: Economic History Association 2014

The next annual meeting of the Economic History Association (EHA) will take place in Columbus, Ohio, on September 12-14, 2014. The theme of the meeting will be "Political Economy and Economic History." The Program Committee (John Wallis, University of Maryland, chair, together with Dan Bogart, Karen Clay, and Tracy Dennison) welcomes submissions on all subjects in economic history, though some preference will be given to papers that specifically fit the theme. Papers should be submitted individually, but authors may suggest to the Committee that three particular papers fit well together in a panel. In considering the meeting theme, the organizers explain:

Politics has a massive impact on economic outcomes. States redistribute wealth, make up for market failures, and enact policies that can devastate an economy or promote long run growth.  They also provide the essential public goods of security, the rule of law, and a means of exchange. Without these, life is brutal and trade little more than barter. But what determines the laws and regulations that states adopt and the public goods they furnish? How do states arise in the first place and gain the capacity to tax? What shapes the changes in their policies and their expenditures over time? Can we distinguish the political incentives that encourage good policies rather than tragic ones? Do the answers lie with endowments, the distribution of wealth, or deeply rooted institutions? Or are they to be sought in culture and the guiding hand of history?

    Papers and session proposals should be submitted online at the EHA submission system. Paper proposals should include a 3-5 page précis and a 150-word abstract suitable for publication in the Journal of Economic History. Papers should be submitted by January 31, 2014. For more details about the meeting, please consult the full call for papers.

“The Enterprise of Culture” Research Project Launched at Leeds

A new three-year collaborative research project on the business history of fashion, based in the School of History at the University of Leeds, has been awarded €1m funding from the HERA II (Humanities in the European Research Area II) Joint Research Programme. ‘The Enterprise of Culture’ "seeks to explore the relationships among fashion as a cultural phenomenon and a business enterprise, and to examine the transmission of fashion as a cultural form across national and international boundaries by intermediaries such as educational institutions, media outlets, advertisers, branders, trend forecasters, and retailers." The principal investigators are from the universities of Leeds (project leader Regina Lee Blaszczyk), Erasmus Rotterdam (Ben Wubs), Oslo (Véronique Pouillard Maliks), Heriot-Watt (Robert MacIntosh), St. Andrews (Barbara Townley), and Newcastle (Alan McKinley).
    Over the next three years, the Enterprise of Culture team will hold a series of workshops, conferences, and public programs. The group of historians and management scholars has a strong commitment to public understanding and will work closely with non-academic institutions, including the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Centre for Business History in Stockholm, the Marks and Spencer Company Archive in Leeds, and the sponsors of fashion-textile trade fairs throughout Europe.
     Readers in the vicinity of Leeds are alerted that the Project will hold a launch event on December 5, 2013. Featuring talks from a panel of European researchers alongside fashion professionals, curators, and archivists from the V&A Museum, the Centre for Business History (Stockholm), and the M&S Company Archive, this event offers an insight into the business history of fashion. Open to anyone with an interest in the business history of fashion, this event is particularly aimed at academics, post-graduate students, curators, archivists, fashion designers, textile-related organizations, and wider public audiences. The full program is available here. The event is free but places are limited. To book or for further information, please email Fiona Blair at enterpriseofculture@leeds.ac.uk or phone +44(0)113 343 1910.

CFP: “Green Capitalism: Exploring the Crossroads of Environmental and Business History”

The Center for the History of Business, Technology, and Society and the German Historical Institute–DC are co-sponsoring a conference on "Green Capitalism? Exploring the Crossroads of Environmental and Business History," to be held October 30-31, 2014 at the Hagley Museum and Library in Wilmington, Delaware.
This conference hopes to point to fresh opportunities for joining the insights of environmental and business history. The organizers

are especially interested in providing historical perspectives on a question of obvious relevance today: Can capitalism be green–or at least greener? Our title– “Green Capitalism?”– is admittedly drawn from contemporary discourse. But we are convinced that history can provide invaluable insights into the complex and changing relationship between business and the environment.

Conference planners are currently accepting proposals for papers that "consider in specific historical contexts the extent to which the business enterprises that are central to capitalism operated in an environmentally sound or detrimental manner by the way they dealt with their refuse, by managing their use of resources, and mitigating or ignoring any harmful impact on those who handled their products or were affected by their waste." The full call for papers is available here.
    Proposals may be up to 500 words in length, and should include a summary of the paper’s argument, the sources on which it draws, and the larger historiographic context or contemporary debates with which it engages. A short c.v. or resume should accompany the proposal. The deadline for receipt of proposals, which should be sent via email to Carol Lockman, clockman@Hagley.org, is May 1, 2014. Presenters will receive travel support to cover most costs to attend the conference.

Two Web Exhibits from the Historical Society of Pennsylvania

Among several digital history projects, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania has two that are of particular interest to business and economic historians.

    The first, "Closed for Business: The Story of Bankers Trust Company during the Great Depression," describes the rise and fall of Bankers Trust Company, the first large bank to fail in Philadelphia during the Great Depression. The site includes:

• 320 digitized primary source documents, including documents about the bank's operation, letters from depositors desperate to get access to their funds after the bank's failure, and newspaper clippings about the aftermath of the bank's failure;
• biographies of some of the people and organizations highlighted in the documents;
• contextual essays (including one by R. Daniel Wadhwani) about the history of Bankers Trust Company, the Great Depression in Philadelphia, and the 1930s banking crisis in Philadelphia; and
• an educators' page with ideas about how to use the resource in the classroom.

The second exhibit, Preserving America's Freedom, explores the complicated history of American freedom through 50 documents in the Society's collections; of specific interest is the section on "Economic Freedoms." Exhibiting selected documents and images, the site also contains essays by well-known historians, including Eric Foner, Walter Licht, and Thomas Sugrue,

Program Available: “Trading Medicines: The Global Drug Trade in Perspective”

There will be a half-day workshop entitled "Trading Medicines: The Global Drug Trade in Perspective" on January 10, 2014, at the London School of Economics. The workshop has been organized by Claire Griffin (Cambridge) and Patrick Wallis (LSE) and is supported by the Wellcome Trust, the Economic History Society, and the Royal Historical Society. The program and abstracts of the papers are available here. According to the organizers,

This half-day workshop examines the supply and reception of medical drugs during the creation of an early modern global market from the sixteenth through to the eighteenth centuries. It addresses a key question in the history of medicine: how did early modern globalisation impact medicine in Europe? The workshop explores developments across various European nations, their empires, and global trading networks. Papers will focus on the broad sweep of medical commodities that were exchanged, taking a long view and considering as many different substances as possible, in order to build a big picture of developments across the early modern period.

There is no attendance fee, but registration is required. To register, please email Clare Griffin at cg315@cam.ac.uk.