The Exchange

The 2011 edition of BEH On-Line , a series devoted to edited essays from the Business History Conference annual meetings, is complete. Readers may freely access all of the 18 essays in this issue, as well as any of the 199 previous essays.  A cumulative author index is available. Each year's issue also includes the program and paper abstracts from that year's meeting.  BEH On-Line is the successor publication of the BHC's Business and Economic History , print collections of papers from the annual meetings.  The complete run of Business and Economic History , 1962-1999, can be accessed from the BHC website, and includes a cumulative index as well.

The American Historical Association has released the preliminary version of the program for the 2012 annual meeting, which will be held in Chicago, Illinois, on January 5-8. As announced earlier , the Business History Conference is now an AHA-affiliated organization and as such can propose sessions for the meeting (though with no guarantee of acceptance). The BHC is sponsoring three sessions in Chicago, which can be found from the BHC sessions page. They include: session 95 , "The Business of Media History: Technology, Journalism, Advertising," chaired by Pamela Walker Laird and featuring papers by Richard John , Anna McCarthy , Lynn Spigel , and James L. Baughman ; session BHC2 , "Writing History at The Wall Street Journal ," chaired by Daniel Levinson-Wilk; and session 189 , "Everyday Calculations: Varieties of Commercial Numeracy in Early America," chaired by Patricia Cline Cohen and including papers by Caitlin Rosenthal , Thomas Wickham , Molly Mc...

A conference on "The Trade in Luxury and the Luxury of Trade," focusing on the production, display, and circulation of precious objects from the Middle Ages to the present day, will be held November 22-23, 2012, at the Musée Gadagne in Lyon. The conference is being organized by the Laboratoire de Recherche Historique Rhône-Alpes (LARHRA). The organizers explain: t he objective is to reveal the richness and diversity of a phenomenon referred to as ‘luxury,’ and the progressive emergence of specialized markets. Two specific approaches will thus be developed in the conference: on the one hand, a focus on people and goods, and on the other hand, a focus on points of sale and the material and symbolic power deriving from this particular sector of the economy. Paper proposals should be sent to Alain Bonnet at the University of Nantes and to Natacha Coquery , at the University of Lyon 2. The deadline for submissions is January 1, 2012 . For a full explanation of the meeting...

In 1992 the libraries of the University of Western Ontario tried to identify the company histories scattered throughout their holdings and to pull them together in one source, Business & History at Western: A Guide to Selected Resources in the UWO Library System . This work has now been placed on-line, at an expanded and on-going site, Books about Companies . As the compilers explain, Since 1992 more company-related books have been discovered in the stacks and many more have been published. . . . The list is continually under construction and new company histories are added as they arrive. As well, we have included the company histories that are often found (but rarely indexed) in reference works or in books about industries. For example, this guide will direct you to the company histories found in The Advertising Age Encyclopedia of Advertising and to the short sketches found in The World Guide to Automobile Manufacturers .    Although the great majority of the ent...

Kevin Tennant, on his Business History blog, has posted a report on the recent British Academy of Management (BAM) meeting and the success of his and John Wilson's attempt "to revive the Business and Management History track" at this annual conference. Participants in the track included Andrew Godley, Terry Gourvish, and Stephanie Decker. The full listing can be found on the BAM program , at page 61. One promising aspect, Tennent reports, is the interest among management scholars in undertaking archival research, as demonstrated at a workshop session in which he talked about "Business Archives: why they are relevant to management academics and how to use them."    Tennent concludes that "the papers . . . , together with the workshop sessions, contributed to a healthy meeting of minds and a forging of many new networking opportunities for all involved." Tip of the hat to Andrew Smith's blog .

At its recent meeting, the Economic History Association awarded its Jonathan Hughes Prize to Ann Carlos , professor of economics at the University of Colorado and a longtime BHC member. Her research interests focus on the Canadian fur trade and on the growth and development of comparative business organizations in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. She is the author most recently of Commerce by a Frozen Sea: Native Americans and the European Fur Trade (with Frank Lewis) (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010).   The EHA awards the prize, which recognizes excellence in teaching economic history, each year at its annual meeting. The award is given in honor of Jonathan Hughes, scholar and committed and influential teacher of economic history, former chair of the Economics Department at Northwestern University. He is the author of The Vital Few: The Entrepreneur and American Economic Progress (1966; Oxford University Press, 1986...

Earlier this month JSTOR , the well-known repository of journal articles, made pre-1923 content available without charge; for materials published outside the United States, the date is 1870. The copyright term outside the United States is set at the life of the author plus seventy years, so JSTOR picked 1870 as "a reasonable date to assume that all copyright is expired." JSTOR also released a FAQ explaining the decision and usage terms.     The JSTOR homepage now contains a direct link to a search site with an option to limit one's search to free access articles, which number almost a half million; if one searches the entire site, free materials are designated by a check mark icon.      In another development, the American Historical Association announced that, as of September 1, 2011, its on-line jobs listing will be available to everyone, not only to AHA members. Nonmembers can access the ads after a simple registration process that requires cr...

The Hagley Library and Museum has recently revised and expanded its digital exhibition, "The DuPont Company on the Brandywine." The exhibit, which features many illustrations from Hagley's holdings, can be accessed by topics categorized by "People," "Place," or "Product." As the curators say, "These sources provide a detailed account of the nineteenth century history of the E.I. du Pont de Nemours and Company, the du Pont family, key company administrators and investors, company employees, DuPont's customers, and early gunpowder-making processes and equipment." The revised site includes interactive maps, such as one that details the local sale of powder , 1804-1806. In addition, a Primary Sources page provides links to a selection of DuPont Company manuscripts and archives that have been digitized and are available online.

The Network of Interdisciplinary Research in Family Firms (NIRFF) is,as the website explains, an academic network composed of scholars from different scientific disciplines and countries who share a common interest in exchanging knowledge about methodologies and theories related to family businesses, in a virtual and informal way. Our common goal is to share scientific tools that significantly improve the analysis of particular case studies and above all that favour the comparison and the elaboration of general conclusions. The network offers information about distinguished scholars from different disciplines and countries specialized in the study of family businesses, in order to promote possibilities for: contact, organization of activities, knowledge exchange, and debate. The group's website, based at the University of Barcelona, offers information about new research, publications, conference appearances, and other initiatives relating to the study of family firms in busin...

The September issue of Historically Speaking , the bulletin of the Historical Society (THS), features a forum entitled "Ten Years After: Reflections on Kenneth Pomeranz’s The Great Divergence " (full title: The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton University Press, 2000). As explained in the introduction, the forum consists of papers from a panel hosted by the Economic History Association at the 2011 meeting of the American Historical Association in Boston. The five panelists have revised their papers for Historically Speaking . Philip Hoffman, Peter Coclanis, Jan de Vries, and R. Bin Wong comment on The Great Divergence , and Kenneth Pomeranz responds.    Historically Speaking is available to non-THS members via Project Muse, usually accessible through college and university libraries; brief abstracts are available to all.

A workshop on "Information, Intermediation, and Financial Markets" will be held at the University of California, Riverside, on January 20-21, 2012. It will center on a discussion of the historical development of information management and intermediation in financial markets before the creation of modern banks. According to the call for papers, The workshop will bring together research on different parts of the world and different times in history to compare and connect the many complementary forms of financial intermediation that have supported the historical development of financial markets and economic growth.  Please consult the full call for papers for a more detailed exposition. Those wishing to contribute a paper should submit an abstract and short bio before September 30, 2011 , to Christiaan van Bochove ( C.J.vanBochove@uu.nl ). The workshop organizers are Juliette Levy, University of California, Riverside; Ghislaine Lydon, University of California, Los Angeles; ...

The All-University of California Economic History Group , the School of Social Sciences at the University of California, Irvine, and the Department of Economics at UC Irvine will jointly sponsor a conference on "Transport, Institutions, and Economic Performance: Historical Perspectives," to be held December 9-10, 2011, at UC Irvine. According to the call for papers, This conference will examine the interaction between politics, law, and transport performance as well as the complex relationship between transport and economic development. The goal is to bring together scholars studying different transport technologies and in different parts of the world  throughout the long time span from 1600 to 1950. We welcome in particular papers on direct and indirect impacts of transport innovation, the political economy of transport subsidy and regulation, organization of transportation firms, and transportation and the location of economic activity. . . . We especially welcome paper...

Railroads and the Transformation of Capitalism is the newest exhibit from Baker Library's Historical Collections . Using the Harvard Business School library's extensive materials, the site "explores the continuing research in the history and role of railroads in creating not only the foundations of modern business, but also a system of modern capitalism that survives to this day." The exhibit is divided into several sections, including foreign and U.S. railroads, finance, management, and mergers and syndicates. The site also contains a "Research Links" page that provides greater detail about Baker's holdings relevant to railroad history.

The September 2011 issue of Enterprise & Society is now available on the Oxford University Press website. Full text access requires a subscription (included in BHC membership), but the abstracts are accessible by all.   Contents include: Milena Veenis Cola in the German Democratic Republic. East German Fantasies on Western Consumption V. Necla Geyikdagi French Direct Investments in the Ottoman Empire Before World War I Hugo van Driel and Bas Koene The Rhetoric of Restraint: The Struggle for Legitimacy of the Dutch Temporary Work Agency Industry, 1961–1996 Adrian R. Bell and Richard S. Dale  The Medieval Pilgrimage Business as well as nearly 40 book reviews.