The Exchange

The next Conference on the History of Management and Organizations , formerly the Accounting and Management History Conference, will be held at the Université Paris-Est-Marne-la-Vallée, March 26-28, 2014. The conference brings together researchers in accounting, management, history, sociology, law, and economics.      Papers of a historical nature on all topics are welcome, but the organizers–the Association d’Histoire du Management et des Organizations (AHMO), the Institut de Recherche en Gestion (IRG, Université Paris-Est), and the Université Paris-Est-Marne-La-Vallée, with the support of the Association Francophone de Comptabilité–would like to recommend an "axis of reflection": Innovation. For a fuller discussion of suitable topics, please see the call for papers .     The conference will start with a Ph.D. workshop on March 26, and, in the afternoon, a methodological workshop about "How to Write History," presented by Patrick Fridenson. For infor...

Jonathan Levy's Freaks of Fortune: The Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in America (Harvard University Press, 2012) garnered several major book prizes at this year's Organization of American Historians meeting. Levy's work was the recipient of the Frederick Jackson Turner Award, the Avery O. Craven Award, and the Ellis W. Hawley Prize. Readers can find a review of Freaks of Fortune by Kim Phillips-Fein at Public Books, and listen to Levy discuss the book during a HUP podcast .     At the same meeting, the OAH presented the Merle Curti Award for the best book in American social history to Angus Burgin of Johns Hopkins University for The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets since the Great Depression (Harvard University Press, 2012). Readers can find a video of Burgin discussing the book, as well as links to various other interviews and reviews, at the HUP website. Burgin's book has also been awarded the Joseph J. Spengler Best Book Prize by the History...

The Securities and Exchange Commission Historical Society has launched another of its on-line galleries, this one entitled "Wrestling with Reform: Financial Scandals and the Legislation They Inspired." Curated by Robert Colby, the site provides this overview in its introduction: The Gallery will focus on five scandals and their legislative reactions, ranging from 1910 to 2002. Wildcat securities sales in Kansas alerted a leader in the waxing Progressive movement of the need for consumer protection. Forty years later, a lone swindler exposed gaping holes in Arizona law, leading the state to bolster its securities regime with help from national regulators. The foreign payments scandals of the mid-1970s, the insider trading scandals of the late 1980s, and the accounting scandals of the early 2000s each demonstrated how, in the presence of powerful momentum provided by scandal, legislative, regulatory and executive forces may conflict, cancel each other out, or even coopera...

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.

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 Repub...

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.

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 assoc...

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 .

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...

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 .

  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, p...

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 .

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     

The European Business History Association has made some of the presentations at its 2012 annual meeting available on video. The group can be found here . Featured presenters include Steven Tolliday, Francesca Polese, Claire Lemercier, and Ray Stokes, from the session on "Reimagining Business History"; Stephen Mihm, Laura Linard, and Philip Scranton, on "Taking Business History Public"; and the dissertation session.

A sampling of recent and forthcoming books of interest in business and economic history: Aaron D. Anderson, Builders of a New South: Merchants, Capital, and the Remaking of Natchez, 1865-1914 (University Press of Mississippi, January 2013) Victoria Binda, The Dynamics of Big Business: Structure, Strategy, and Impact in Italy and Spain (Routledge, March 2013) David Blanke and David Steigerwald, A Destiny of Choice? New Directions in American Consumer History (Lexington Books, February 2013) Giovanni Dosi and Louis Galambos, eds., The Third Industrial Revolution in Global Business (Cambridge University Press, May 2013) David Farber, Everybody Ought To Be Rich: The Life and Times of John J. Raskob, Capitalist (Oxford University Press, May 2013) Paloma Fernández Pérez, La profesionalización de las empresas familiares (LID, February 2013) Charles Geisst, Beggar Thy Neighbor: A History of Usury and Debt (University of Pennsylvania Press, February 2013) Miguel A. Lopez-Morel...