ABH 2013 Meeting Program Has Been Posted

The Association of Business Historians (ABH) will meet at the Lancashire Business School, University of Central Lancashire, on June 28-29, 2013. The meeting program is now available on-line. The conference theme is "Business History in the 21st Century," focusing on "innovative approaches to conducting business history in the new millennium." The keynote address will be given by Thomas Haigh, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, who will speak on "Taking Care of Business History: Challenges and Opportunities for the 21st Century."
    The program for the Tony Slaven Doctoral Workshop in Business History, held in conjunction with the meeting on June 27-28, has also been posted.
    Please see the ABH website for information about registration and accommodations.

SHEAR Meeting Program Now Available

The Society for Historians of the Early American Republic (SHEAR) will hold its annual meeting in St. Louis, Missouri, on July 18-21, 2013.  The program has now been posted on the conference website. Many sessions will be of interest to business and economic historians; for example:

Session 4: "Crappy Goods, Stolen Goods, and Cutthroat Razors: Consumer Good Lifecycles and New Narratives of Capitalism"
Session 24: "Crafting Confidence: Commercial Actors and Risk Management in Early America's Marketplace"
Session 31: "Interactions between American Merchants and the British Empire in the Atlantic Colonies, 1780-1830"
Session 37: "In Banking, the Local Is the National and the National Is the Local"
Session 40: " 'Gone to Hell in a Hand Basket': The Search for Stability in the Market Economy"
Session 41: "Lobbying in the Age of Sectionalism"
Session 49: "Property, Politics, and  Economics in Early Republic State Formation"
Session 50: "Banks a Lot: Perspectives on the Early Republic's Capitalistic Culture"

Information about registration and other details can be found on the SHEAR meeting website.

OAH “Corporations” Plenary Available on Video

A plenary session at the Organization of American Historians annual meeting in San Francisco, California,  "Corporations in American Life," was filmed by the History News Network and is now available online. The speakers were Naomi Lamoreaux (Yale University); Richard White (Stanford University); Bethany Moreton (University of Georgia); Karen Ho (University of Minnesota); and Peter James Hudson (Vanderbilt University). For other business history-related sessions, see our earlier posting on the 2013 OAH meeting.

Francesca Carnevali, 1964-2013

It is with great sadness that we report the passing of our colleague Francesca Carnevali, who died on May 18, 2013, after a long illness. Francesca was senior lecturer in economic history at the University of Birmingham, a former trustee of the Business History Conference, and former associate editor of Enterprise and Society. Her most recent publication, co-authored with Lucy Newton, appeared in the March 2013 issue of E&S: "Pianos for the People: From Producer to Consumer in Britain, 1851-1914."
    Andrew Popp of the University of Liverpool has written the following appreciation:

Francesca . . . was amongst the most talented of her generation of business and economic historians. Having taken her PhD at the London School of Economics Francesca went on to obtain a post in the Department of History at the University of Birmingham. She published many books,chapters, and articles on a range of subjects, from European banking to industrial districts, trade associations, social capital, and the British and American jewellery industries. Most recently she had been working with Dr Lucy Newton of the University of Reading on the production, marketing, and consumption of household goods in Britain. Her work always displayed the highest qualities of historical scholarship; rigorous, clear-sighted and elegantly written.
    Francesca also always showed great collegiality, serving for many years on the Council of the Economic History Society and on its Executive Committee as Chair of the Women’s Committee. She was responsible for organizing the annual conference of the Economic History Association in 2002 and of the Association of Business Historians in 2008. . . . In so many ways her passing will be a great loss to the international business and economic history communities.

For more of Andrew's eulogy, please see the EBHA Facebook site. It is also posted on a memorial blog set up by the Association of Business Historians. In addition, a site has been created where donations may be made to Cancer Research UK in honor of Francesca.

EBHS 2013 Annual Meeting Program Now Available

The program for the next annual meeting of the Economic and Business History Society (EBHS) has now been posted. The organization will meet in Baltimore, Maryland, on May 23-25, 2013. The conference will include a keynote address by historian Louis Galambos and a guided tour of Oriole Park at Camden Yards.
   For additional information, including conference registration, please see the EBHS meeting website.

EBHA Summer School Deadline Approaching

The 7th EBHA (European Business History Association) Summer School will take place in Ancona, Italy, September 1- 5, 2013. The school aims to provide doctoral students with an overview of relevant research results and of innovative tools and methodologies in the field of business history. It is organized jointly by the European Business History Association (EBHA), the University of Ancona, and the Italian Association for Business History (ASSI). Students will debate and discuss their research with leading international scholars. The theme of this year's school is "Business History: Debates, Challenges, and Opportunities," focusing on theoretical, methodological, and practical issues of relevance for advanced research in business history. The main aim of the school is to provide students with a full understanding of the newest trends in research in the field and to provide a friendly atmosphere in which to discuss their preliminary findings with leading scholars as well as among their peers. The program features both lectures and seminars given by faculty and student presentations of their research projects.
    The organizers will cover all local costs (accommodation and food), but participants are expected to pay their own travel expenses. Participation will be limited to 15-20 Ph.D. students. Those interested in attending the summer school should send the following documents by e-mail to the academic organizer, Francesca Polese (francesca.polese@unibocconi.it)

•  a brief CV (not exceeding one page); 
•  a summary of their dissertation project, not exceeding three pages;
• (if possible) an example of their work in progress, e.g. a draft chapter or a working paper 

The deadline for applications is May 19, 2013 has been extended to May 24, 2013. Participants will be notified by June 15, 2013.

Deadline Extended: Summer School in Digital Resources Management

The European Association for Banking and Financial History e.V. has extended the registration deadline for its International Summer School for Archivists, which will take place on June 23-27, 2013, in Venice, in cooperation with the Intesa Sanpaolo Group Archives. The theme of the meeting is "Ready or Not? Enhancing Digital Resources Management." The new registration deadline is May 27, 2013. The program for the summer school is available on the meeting website, where those interested can also find course descriptions, faculty information, and registration materials. For additional information, please contact Gabriella Massaglia.

Program Available for the 2013 PEAES Conference: “Ligaments”

 

The next annual conference of the Program in Early American Economy and Society (PEAES) will be held October 24-25, 2013, at the Library Company of Philadelphia. The theme will be "Ligaments: Everyday Connections of Colonial Economies."
    All interested individuals are invited to attend. Papers presented by fifteen scholars at this conference will "explore how imperial subjects accomplished the daily buying and selling, producing and exchanging, that sustained their households, communities, and long-distance networks. . . . The conference overall will investigate the pragmatic economic linkages and mutual obligations forged by men and women, rich and poor, as well as the breakdown of those linkages and obligations."
     The conference program is now available on the PEAES website, as well as a conference brochure. The papers for the conference will be precirculated in early October; to obtain them, and to register for the conference, please complete the registration page at the conference website.
    For further information, please contact Cathy Matson, PEAES director, at cmatson@udel.edu.

David Rumsey Maps Now Available through DPLA

The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), which opened its virtual doors last month (see here for initial statement), has announced that it has partnered with the David Rumsey Map Collection to make over 38,000 digital images of maps and related materials available through the DPLA portal. Rumsey’s online collection of maps is free to the public and is updated monthly. All of the online maps are searchable via the DPLA. For example, if one searches the DPLA portal for "David Rumsey railroads," 4,221 results are returned, including maps from commercial atlases, military surveys, travelers' guides, directories, and a host of other resources useful to business and economic historians; the reproduction above is the "Map of the State of New York with the Latest Improvements. Showing All The Canals & Railroads, & c. 1845,"which can be found here.

Business History Topics on the British Library History Blog

The British Library publishes blogs on a number of academic topics that relate to its holdings.  In late 2011, the Library initiated a history blog, "Untold Lives."  If one searches the "commerce" tag, for example, results include posts on:

• the establishment of trading relations between the English East India Company and Japan (2013 is the 400th anniversary of that event--see also the Japan 400 website) 
• Forbes and Co., one of the world's oldest businesses
• Australian Aborigines and Indonesian traders
• Black London workers for the East India Company

A search on "work" leads to a post on the first western entrepreneur in Afghanistan