The Exchange

The European Business History Association (EBHA) will hold its next annual congress in Utrecht, the Netherlands, on August 21-23, 2014. The theme will be "Comparative Business History: Contrasting Regions, Sectors, and Centuries." Registration for the meeting is now open. Those interested can also find information about the preliminary schedule, keynote speakers, lodging, and other details on the Congress website .

In his presidential address before the Economic History Association, published in the June 2013 issue of the Journal of Economic History and freely available on-line here , Jeremy Atack described in detail his ongoing efforts to use Geographic Information System (GIS) techniques to create a transportation database for the United States. The essay is also featured in the blog of the Southwestern University GIS Laboratory. We have in the past on The Exchange provided links to projects using historical GIS for topics in economic and business history (see here , for example). Atack's address encourages us to feature more historical GIS examples: "Visualizing Ocean Shipping" and American whaling , both by Ben Schmidt on his blog, "Sapping Attention" "Visualizing US Expansion through Post Offices ," Derek Watkins "Locating London's Past" Atlas of the Rhode Island Book Trade in the 18th Century "History on the Move," Shane ...

Thomas Piketty 's Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century (Harvard University Press, 2014; Seuil, 2013) has garnered considerably more publicity than the average 700-page academic tome. It would be impossible to list all of the sites by and about Piketty since his book appeared in English last month; herewith a sampling of reviews, commentary, and author presentations to date: "Six Ways Thomas Piketty's 'Capital' Isn't Holding Up to Scrutiny," Forbes "Piketty's 'Capital,' in a Lot Less Than 896 Pages," HBR Blog Network "The Piketty Bubble Is More Than Hot Air," New Yorker Robert M. Solow, "Thomas Piketty Is Right," New Republic Paul Krugman, "Why We're in a New Gilded Age," New York Review of Books "A Modern Marx," The Economist "Thomas Piketty and Millennial Marxists on the Scourge of Inequality," The Nation Thomas Edsall, "Capitalism vs. Democracy," Internat...

A conference on "Port Cities in the Early Modern World, 1500-1800," will be held on November 5-7, 2015, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, co-sponsored by the McNeil Center for Early American Studies (MCEAS), the Program in Early American Economy and Society (PEAES), and Temple University. The call for papers states: In the early modern period, advances in maritime technology redrew theglobal map--not only through the "discovery" of new worlds, but by reorienting patterns of commerce and migration to transform what had been peripheries into vital nodes of exchange, power, and culture. Port cities rose to occupy a critical space, mediating between their own hinterlands and an oceanic world of circulation and exchange.  Highly local institutions and networks influenced and reacted to global networks and the movements of people, goods, fashions, ideas, and pathogens. This conference will explore comparisons and connections among ports in the age of sail. Through broa...

The Association of Business Historians (ABH) 2014 annual meeting will be held at the Newcastle University Business School on June 27-28; the theme of the meeting is "Crisis, Accountability, and Institutions." The provisional program is now available for downloading. The keynote address, on "Institutions and History: The Historic Turn in Management Theory," will be delivered by Roy Suddaby of the University of Alberta and editor of the Academy of Management Review . The meeting will close with a roundtable on "Rethinking Business History? Between Economic History and Organisational History."     For more information about registration and accommodations, please see the ABH meeting website .

The Economic and Business History Society (EBHS) will hold its next annual meeting on May 29-31, 2014, at Chancellor’s Hotel and Conference Centre in Manchester, UK. The preliminary program and other details about the meeting have now been posted. Highlights include a keynote address by Leslie Hannah, "Where Did the 'Anglo-American' Corporate Model Come From and Can It Survive the Global Financial Crisis?" and a roundtable on"Giving 'em the Business: The Intersection of Economics and the Humanities." For more detailed information, please see the conference website .

New Harmony, Indiana–home of well-known communalist experiments–will host a conference on “Capitalism & Socialism: Utopia, Globalization, and Revolution” on November 6-8, 2014. The conference coincides with the bicentennial of New Harmony’s founding by German Harmonists in 1814. New Harmony is probably best known as the site of industrialist Robert Owen’s experiment in communal living in 1825.  “Capitalism & Socialism” is a multidisciplinary conference that welcomes presenters from economics, history, political science, and sociology, as well as the humanities; both panels and individual papers may be proposed on topics related to capitalism and socialism, past and present. Proposals are due by May 26, 2014 . For more details and submission forms, please see the conference website . Questions may be addressed to Casey Harison, Director of Communal Studies, University of Southern Indiana, charison@usi.edu . 

The Business History Initiative at Harvard Business School is hosting a conference on June 13-14, 2014: "Business History in Africa, Asia, and Latin America: Integrating Course Development and New Research." The aim of the conference is to leverage existing expertise about the field from countries where it is more established, as well as the experience of other disciplines, including world history and international business. Topics to be discussed include how to integrate the latest research into teaching materials; new and innovative pedagogical methods, including web-based learning and the use of oral history; the availability of primary sources; and the different interests and requirements of students in business schools, history departments, and in graduate programs. The program has now been posted.      Registration is available on-line, with a deadline of May 31, 2014 . The conference is open to educators, graduate students, and other academics with an ...

The Richard Robinson Business History Workshop at Portland State University will hold a three-day conference on "The Cultural History of Money and Credit" on May 22-24, 2014. The program is now available on the PSU website. The meeting begins Thursday evening with a keynote address by Mark Metzler of the University of Texas at Austin: "Recurring Debt Crises and the Contours of Global History," followed by three sessions on both Friday and Saturday.The conference is co-sponsored by the Department of History and the Friends of History. For more information, please contact hstchair@pdx.edu .

The Sixteenth Berkshire Conference on the History of Women will be held at the University of Toronto, Canada, on May 22-25, 2014; the conference theme is "Histories on the Edge." The final program is now available. Of particular interest to business and economic historians will be Session 22P: "Working Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe and the British Atlantic" Session 28RT: A roundtable on women in science featuring Margaret Rossiter and Ruth Schwartz Cowan Session 39RT: "Gendering Bodies in Employment and Legal History" Session 48P: "On the Edges of Trade: Women, Commerce, and Space in the 18th-Century Anglo-Atlantic World" Session 74RT: "Women and Gendered Labour History" Session 80RT: "Domestic Work on the Edge: Transnational Labour, Global Research" Session 83RT: "Gendering and Queering the Corporate Person" Session 92P: "Things of the Edge: Materiality and Early Modern Trade Routes"...

The 2015 joint meeting of the Business History Conference and the European Business History Association will be held in Miami, Florida, on June 24-27. The theme of the meeting will be “Inequalities: Winners and Losers in Business.” In the call for papers , the Program Committee challenges business historians of all stripes to historicize the economic, political, cultural, and social processes by which inequality has taken hold, ebbing and flowing over time. Business is central to those processes. The very word "inequality" suggests injustice and unfairness, subjugation and lack of opportunity. But in fact, there are many different inequalities, and their historical significance depends upon how societies have regarded and valued difference. . . . By inviting a broad historical exploration of the many inequalities that affected and have been affected by business, both positively and negatively, the conference hopes to illuminate more clearly the complexities involved in...

For many centuries, the East and the West have been entangled in dense networks of communications and commerce. Yet only in our current age of globalization, influenced by a generation of media theorists shaped by the emergence since the 1970s of digital media, has it become customary to interpret these networks as a distinctive social relationship with a pervasive and enduring influence on culture, economics, politics, and international relations. For these theorists, media is more than a representation: in addition, and more fundamentally, it is an institutional practice laden with cultural meaning.      Media scholars in Asia, Europe, Australia, and North America from disciplines that include but are not confined to history, sociology, political science, literature, anthropology, geography, and media studies share a commitment to increasing our understanding of these networks so as to enhance mutual understanding, foster a common research agenda, and nurture an ...

The European Historical Economics Society (EHES) has recently started a blog, called "Positive Check" (after the concept advanced by Thomas Malthus). Its aim is "to promote European research and training in economic history." It publishes posts from events organized by the Society, articles published in the journal European Review of Economic History , interviews with leading scholars in economic history, and other news related to the Society's aims and those of its members. Recent posts include a Q&A with Dan Bogart of UC-Irvine, incoming co-editor of the European Review of Economic History , and a summary of a new working paper by Natacha Postal-Vinay. The editor of the blog is Kerstin Enflo of Lund University.