The Exchange

"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...

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 seri...

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 t...

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, co...

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 t...

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...

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 s...

The Association of Business Historians (ABH) will hold its third Tony Slaven Doctoral Training Workshop on June 26-27, 2014, immediately preceding the 2014 ABH annual conference at Newcastle University Business School; Workshop participants will be welcome to attend the annual conference. Students at any stage of their doctoral career, whether first year or near submitting, are encouraged to attend. In addition to providing new researchers with an opportunity to discuss their work with other research students in a related discipline, the sessions will also include at least one skills-related workshop.     One aim of the Workshop is to strengthen links among students working on business history and related topics in various departments and disciplines. For the purposes of the Workshop, `business history’ is therefore interpreted broadly. Students will present on a pre-circulated paper of no more than 5,000 words, and will be expected to act as discussant for another’s p...

On September 17-19, 2014, the Centre for Economic and Business History and the Institute for the Study of Slavery at the University of Nottingham will co-host a conference on "The Business of Slavery." The conference aims to bring together assessments of the contributions of enslaved people to the economy of different eras and societies and from various perspectives, including the wider economy, the slave traders, the slave holders and the slaves themselves. It will compare these assessments over chronological eras and in societies around the globe. Papers are invited which discuss themes as diverse as (but which are not restricted to); slave trading (including foreign and indigenous trades, legal and illegal trades), the economies of slave societies, the economies of the slaves themselves, (including hiring out), the use of slaves by freedmen and freedwomen, serfdom, debt bondage, prostitution, forced (including child) labour, and from chronological periods as divers...

On September 18-20, 2014, the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C., will host a conference on "Shady Business: White Collar Crime in History." The conveners are Edward Balleisen (History Department /Kenan Institute for Ethics, Duke University), Hartmut Berghoff (German Historical Institute), and Christopher McKenna (Said Business School, University of Oxford). According to the call for papers: Daniel Defoe observed in the early 18th century that "[e]very degree of business" has "its invitation to do evil." Today, hardly a day passes without the media reporting on new allegations and legal proceedings relating to supposed professional misconduct on the part of corporate executives. . . . This raises many questions. What economic, company-related, and social conditions encourage this behavior? What accounts for the apparent increase of white collar crime in some areas and its decline in others? What background information sheds light on it? W...

The Centre for Medical History at the University of Exeter will host a workshop on April 8-9, 2014, on "The Landscape of Occupations in Pre-Industrial Britain and Continental Europe, c.1400-1750." The two-day workshop is designed to bring together papers addressing any of the following four themes: Individuals, Economic Activity, and Developments in the Early Modern Economy; Gender and Occupation; Guilds, Colleges and Occupational Identity; and Rural and Urban Economic Lives. As the call for papers explains, Occupational identity and the economic activity of individuals have seen growing attention from historians and historical geographers over the past thirty or forty years. While earlier generations of historians, including Postan and Tawney, addressed occupational structure as an aspect of the general structure of agricultural and industrial production, researchers are increasingly focusing upon the question of economic activity from the perspective of the individual....

The European Association for Banking and Financial History (EABH) and Queen’s University Centre for Economic History (QUCEH) invite the submission of research papers from advanced Ph.D. students and recent postdoctoral researchers in financial history for a "New Scholars Workshop," to be held in Belfast on April 16, 2014. This one-day intensive workshop is specifically intended for new scholars in financial history, broadly defined, who wish to practice and improve their research through presentation and discussion with more experienced scholars. Participants who have a full research paper and are intending in the near future to go on the academic job market, or to submit their work to a top field journal in business, economic, or financial history, are particularly encouraged to apply. Research in any theme and methodology in banking and financial history is welcome. Comparative approaches are encouraged and co-authored papers will be accepted. The workshop’s keynote s...

Nearly a year ago we featured The Color Revolution (MIT Press, 2012) by Regina Lee Blaszczyk , who holds the chair in the history of business and society at the University of Leeds. The book has now been awarded the 2013 Sally Hacker Prize by the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT). The prize is awarded at SHOT's annual meeting to honor "exceptional scholarship that reaches beyond the academy." The citation reads in part, "Blaszczyk's beautifully, thoughtfully designed book is bound to become a standard academic reference—for historians of technology as well as for a range of other scholars—but that's only the beginning; her work is of great importance because of the exemplary way in which it reaches out to a broader audience." The full citation can be found on the Leeds faculty news website.