The Exchange

The Program in Economic History , a part of the Economic Growth Center at Yale University, has announced the program for its conference, "Before and Beyond Europe: Economic Change in Historical Perspective," to be held February 25-26, 2011. In the words of the organizers: It is broadly held now, following Douglass C. North and others, that History matters to Economics.  This shift has contributed to a rebirth in Economic History and inspired lively debates and new and exciting cross-disciplinary exchange.  This conference aims to capture this new dynamism in Economic History by inviting scholars working on Economic History from different disciplinary angles, in different historical periods, and in many areas of the world.  Topics in the conference range from the Ancient Mediterranean to Medieval Europe, from Early Modern China to Modern Africa.  Its premise is that cross-disciplinary dialogue is best cultivated in a collegial atmosphere and by discussion ...

Catherine Fisk of the University of California, Irvine, School of Law has been awarded the John Phillip Reid Book Award of the American Society for Legal History for Working Knowledge: Employee Innovation and the Rise of Corporate Intellectual Property, 1800-1930 (University of North Carolina Press, 2009). The award is for the best monograph beyond an author’s first book published in English in Anglo-American legal history, broadly defined. The ASLH citation read in part: Catherine Fisk’s Working Knowledge is a book of many different virtues. It takes on a novel question—when, how, and why did corporations come pervasively to own and control the intellectual property created by their employees?—and it brings to bear prodigious primary research, not just in case law but in corporate archives as well. By combining these two types of sources, among others, Fisk delivers a compelling story of doctrinal development—especially in the areas of patent, copyright, and trade secrets...

A reminder that the application deadline for the 2011 Oxford Journals Doctoral Colloquium in Business History is December 1, 2010 . The Colloquium will be held in conjunction with the Business History Conference annual meeting in St. Louis . This prestigious workshop, sponsored by the BHC and generously funded by Oxford University Press, which publishes the BHC journal Enterprise & Society , will take place Wednesday evening, March 30, 2011, and all day Thursday, March 31, 2011. The Colloquium is limited to ten students. Participants will discuss dissertation proposals, relevant literatures and research strategies, and employment opportunities in business history with distinguished BHC-affiliated scholars, including at least two BHC officers. The Colloquium is intended for doctoral candidates in the early stages of their dissertation projects. To be considered for the Colloquium, applicants must provide: a statement of interest a CV a preliminary or final dissertat...

American Colossus: The Triumph of Capitalism (Random House, October 2010), by H. W. Brands, has been receiving a good deal of media attention, both critical and approving. It was reviewed by John Steele Gordon in the November 18 New York Times , and by Amity Shlaes in the Wall Street Journal on October 29. Extensive newspaper coverage includes reviews for the San Francisco Chronicle by T. J. Stiles, by Steve Weinberg for the Dallas Morning News , and by Ezra Klein for the Barnes and Noble Review (on Salon.com), An excerpt is available on the Random House site. An audio  interview of Brands by Lewis Lapham of Bloomberg is available, as are another with Michael Medved of the American Conservative University and a video podcast sponsored by the Pritzker Military Library in Chicago. The C-Span video library presents video of a panel (called "The Age of Titans") from the Texas Book Festival that includes both Brands and T. J. Stiles. Stiles is the author of The First Tyco...

The XVI th World Economic History Congress of the International Economic History Association (IEHA) will take place in Stellenbosch, South Africa, July 9-13, 2012. The organization has recently issued the second call for session proposals: Although the IEHA welcomes sessions on all topics in economic history, history of economics, demographic history, social history, urban history, cultural history, gender studies, methodological aspects of historical research, and related fields, the WEHC 2012 theme is “Exploring the Roots of Development.” The IEHA has, therefore, a particularly strong desire to attract sessions on the period before 1800 and sessions that include countries other than those of Western Europe and North America. Organisers will be given wide discretion to shape the format of sessions to be the most interesting and efficient, given the topic and the participants invited. Session proposals must be submitted via the online submission form . Those submitting proposals w...

The organizers of an international colloquium on "Merchant Practice in the Age of Commerce, 1650-1850 (no website yet available)," to be held in Paris, France, June 9-10, 2011, have issued the following call for papers: The goal of this colloquium is to explore new ways of analyzing and conceptualizing commercial activity in the preindustrial age. Commerce was central to European and colonial economies at the time, and considerable historiographical work has been devoted to its study.  Recent research, however, has tended to focus on network-building in a sociological tradition, without really dealing with more strictly economic issues such as price formation, market structures, or the nature of managerial organizations. The latter questions are thus usually left for standard economic theory to answer, with the result that tools and notions from current economic analysis, from market formation to price signals, offer and demand, managerial strategy, or profit-making...

A sampling of recently published and forthcoming books on topics of interest: Bernardo Bátiz-Lazo, J. Carles Maixé-Altés, and Paul Thomes, eds.,  Technological Innovation in Retail Finance: International Historical Perspectives (Routledge, November 2010) Michael B. Boston, The Business Strategy of Booker T. Washington: Its Development and Implementation (University Press of Florida, August 2010) Craig Miner, A Most Magnificent Machine: America Adopts the Railroad, 1825-1862 (University Press of Kansas, October 2010) Eric J. Morser, Hinterland Dreams: The Political Economy of a Midwestern City (University of Pennsylvania Press, November 2010) Monica Neve, Sold! Advertising and the Bourgeois Female Consumer in Munich, c. 1900-1914 (Franz Steiner, October 2010) Geoffrey Owen, The Rise and Fall of Great Companies: Courtaulds and the Reshaping of the Man-Made Fibres Industry (Oxford University Press, October 2010) Caroline de la Peña, Empty Pleasures: The Story of Artifici...

The German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C. (GHI) is seeking contributors for a massive project "aimed at fostering research into the cornerstones of the American experience." Immigrant Entrepreneurship: German-American Business Biographies, 1720 to the Present will, according to the Institute, consist of approximately 250 biographical articles of first- and second-generation German-American entrepreneurs, contextual essays that explore the wider business and immigration themes of the period, and a complementary website providing a wealth of additional material. . . . The project will trace their lives, careers and business ventures from colonial times to the present, integrating the history of German-American immigration into the larger narrative of U.S. economic and business history and situating the American past in a transnational framework. Key questions that will be addressed include the importance of business strategies, knowledge transfer, forms and source...

Readers may be interested in the Smithsonian Institution's Collections Search Center website, which allows visitors to "search over 5.4 million records with 460,000 images, video and sound files, electronic journals, and other resources from the Smithsonian's museums, archives & libraries." One can search by typing in a term or by using the headings provided, including "Type," "Place," "Name," "Culture," or "Datasource." Each of the headings is further subdivided; "Type," for instance, includes books, paintings, trade catalogs, and a huge number of other types of material. Just as an example, a simple search on "railroads," limited to results with online media, calls up nearly 2,000 items; one on "steel" returns over 4,400. Tip of the hat to the American Historical Association blog .

The German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C., announces the publication of its latest reference guide, Business History in the United States: A Guide to Archival Collections . Compiled by Dr. Terry Snyder, the director of the library division at Hagley Museum and Library, the guide provides an overview of holdings of interest to business historians from nearly 200 libraries, archives, and museums from across the United States. Each entry provides pertinent contact information and an overview of the entire collection and of the noteworthy business collections. The listings are arranged geographically by city and state, and there is also an index of individual and business names for easy navigation. The guide is available free of charge. Interested researchers can contact Mrs. Bärbel Thomas at the German Historical Institute to have a copy mailed to them (though the number of hard copies is limited), or it can be viewed and downloaded from the GHI web site . The online vers...

Atrium, Guinness Storehouse The European Historical Economics Society will hold its next meeting in Dublin on September 2-3, 2011. The EHES welcomes conference paper submissions in all areas of economic history. Potential participants should send an abstract of 500 words as soon as possible, and no later than January 31, 2011 , to Kevin O'Rourke— kevin.orourke@tcd.ie . All submissions will be reviewed by the Conference Scientific Committee, and decisions will be made by March 31, 2011. Accepted papers must be submitted in completed form no later than August 1, 2011. The conference will take place at the Guinness Storehouse in Dublin.

The International Committee for the History of Technology will hold its annual meeting in Glasglow, Scotland, on August 2-7, 2011.  The main theme of the meeting will be "Consumer Choice and Technology." The aim is to examine the interaction of technology and consumer behavior in a historical perspective, with a primary focus on factors steering consumption and how consumers by their choices have influenced technological development. The transition from agrarian society to consumer society is one of the epoch-making phases in human history that can be studied from various aspects and contexts. ICOHTEC welcomes individual paper and poster proposals as well as the submission of compact and coherent sessions. The symposium program will include scientific and plenary sessions, poster presentations, business meetings and general assemblies of the organizing societies, excursions, social events such as receptions, a formal banquet, and pre- and post-conference trips. We especi...

A one-day conference on the history of tobacco and tobacco advertising will be held at the School of History at the University of Nottingham on May 18, 2011. Expressions of interest and abstracts for papers are welcomed. Please send these and any questions to Andrew Newnham . The deadline for abstracts is November 30, 2010 .

Applicants are sought for up to two $10,000 fellowships for doctoral thesis research in American business or economic history. These fellowships are available largely through the generosity of the late John E. Rovensky . The Rovensky Fellowship program is administered by the University of Illinois Foundation. Applicants must be working toward a Ph.D. degree with American business or economic history as the area of major interest. Fellowship recipients must be enrolled in a doctoral program at an accredited college or university in the United States. Preference will be given to applicants who are preparing for a career in teaching and research and who will have completed all graduate course work prior to the fall of 2011. Awards are non-renewable and may not be taken simultaneously with an Economic History Association graduate dissertation fellowship. Application forms may be found on the web at http://www.thebhc.org/awards/rovenapp.html ; the full announcement is at http://www.theb...

Mira Wilkins, professor of Economics at Florida International University, will present a guest lecture at the Centre for Evolution of Global Business and Institutions (CEGBI) at the University of York School of Management on November 24, 2010, at 5:15 p.m. Her topic will be "The International Confronts the Comparative: The Historical Role of Multinationals." The abstract: There seems to be an uneasy companionship between the globalization literature and the literature on economic comparisons between nations. It is simpler to study change by comparing nations than by considering interactions within the whole complex world. Research on the historical role of multinational enterprises offers a lens that leads to new understanding. The lecture addresses: how the history of multinational enterprise (one aspect of globalization) helps us in explaining the convergence and divergence in the course of economic growth and development of nations and, in turn, the successes (and failur...

The annual meeting of the Economic History Association will be held in Boston, Massachusetts, September 9-11, 2011.  The theme of the meeting is "Crises and Turning Points." In the words of the conference organizers: If the global economic and financial crisis has a silver lining, it is that recent events have heightened awareness among policy makers and the general public of the importance of economic history.  Crises – economic, financial, social, demographic, environmental, and political, to name only a few – are a hardly perennial.  An understanding of their history is essential to begin to understand what if anything is distinctive about the recent experience.  The history of crises continues to be studied from a number of perspectives: in terms of their causes and their consequences, in terms of their changing incidence, in terms of their short-term impact and their longer-term implications for the development of economies and societies.  This c...