The Exchange

Sven Beckert , Laird Bell Professor of History at Harvard University, has been awarded a 2015 Bancroft Prize in history for his book Empire of Cotton: A Global History by the trustees of Columbia University. He is a co-recipient with Greg Grandin, a professor at New York University, who won for The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World . The official announcement called Empire of Cotton “a masterful achievement in the burgeoning field of the study of capitalism . . . an expansive global history that also helps us rethink the history of the United States, lifting our understanding of American slavery, cotton production, the Civil War, and Reconstruction out of the parochial confines of nation-centered history. Deeply researched across four continents and cogently argued, it is a book that will have lasting value for students of the United States and the 19th-century world.”     The Bancroft Prize is awarded annually by the trustees of Col...

Edward Balleisen of Duke University will be taking over the directorship of the BHC's Doctoral Colloquium beginning with the 2016 meeting. Instituted in 2005 with JoAnne Yates as director, the Colloquium has been led for many years by Pamela W. Laird of the University of Colorado Denver.  Joanne Bailey reviews Andrew Popp's Entrepreneurial Families (Pickering & Chatto, 2012) on her blog, "Joanne Bailey Muses on History"; readers should also check the comments section for further discussion. Since its inauguration a few months ago, Who Makes Cents: A History of Capitalism Podcast , has posted nine interviews; next up is Kimberly Phillips-Fein on April 1. Long-time BHC member Ross Thomson died on February 12, 2015. He received his Ph.D. in economics from Yale University in 1976 and was for many years professor of economics at the University of Vermont. An obituary has been posted by the university. William Dalrymple has written an extended essay on th...

The Social History Society will hold its conference next week, March 31-April 2, at the University of Portsmouth. The meeting is the largest gathering of social and cultural historians in the UK.     Conference topics are divided into "strands." All include papers of interest, though the two most relevant here are "Economies, Culture, & Consumption" and "Political Cultures, Policy & Citizenship." The full program can be found on the conference website as a pdf. The plenary lecture will be given by Jonathan Hyslop on the topic "Navigating Empire: Ports, Ships, and Global History."     For those who wish to follow the conference on social media, the Twitter hashtag is #portsocialhist.

Readers will be interested in a review essay by Richard R. John, to be published in the Business History Review and currently available online as a free access article at the CUP website. Entitled "Prophet of Perspective: Thomas K. McCraw," the essay uses McCraw's last book, The Founders and Finance: How Hamilton, Gallatin, and Other Immigrants Forged a New Economy (2012), as a focus for understanding his scholarship overall. As John explains, This essay provides a brief survey of McCraw’s ideas about economic policy and capitalism. Other reviewers might have chosen different themes; possibilities include the relationship between the United States and the world, the advantages and disadvantages of biography as a literary form, and even the contrasting aesthetics of history and social science. Even so, I believe that the two I have chosen provide a revealing perspective on McCraw’s most abiding concerns. This essay has three parts. The first part provides a brief o...

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.”  Thomas Piketty , author of Capital in the 21st Century , will deliver the joint meeting's plenary address.      The preliminary program has now been posted on the meeting website. In addition to pre-meeting workshops, plenaries, receptions, and organized local activities in Miami, the conference will feature 88 regular sessions on topics broadly spanning the field of business history.             This will be the fourth joint meeting of the Business History Conference and the European Business History Association.

The Association of Academic Historians in Australian and New Zealand Business Schools (AAHANZBS) will hold its seventh Annual Conference on November 2-3, 2015 in Auckland, New Zealand. The Business and Labour History Group (B&LHG) of the Work Research Institute, Auckland University of Technology (AUT) University Business School will host the meeting, which will have the theme "Global Business Practices in Historical Perspective" Submissions are invited for papers addressing the conference theme, including papers relating to accounting history, business history, economic history, labor history, management history, marketing history, tourism history, transport history and other areas of interest relating to historical research in business schools. Papers / panel suggestions around teaching and pedagogy relating to business and labor history are also welcome, as are papers from researchers outside business schools who have an interest in these fields of study. Both abs...

The National Museum of American History (NMAH) at the Smithsonian Institution has announced a search for a curator of business history. This is a new full-time permanent position, classified GS-13 ($90,823.00 to $118,069.00). The museum is looking for a business historian with curatorial experience (with a history of technology, public history, and social history perspective more than an economic history cliometrician). Ideally the candidate will have an interest in expanding collections and preparing exhibitions as well as a record of academic publications and speaking. The emphasis will be on U.S. history post-World War II. One major responsibility will be continuing to build on the opportunities offered by the upcoming American Enterprise exhibition. The expectation is that the individual will work with active companies, so the ability to undertake oral history projects and archival collecting as well as artifact collecting will be important.     The full job descriptio...

March is Women's History Month, so we set out below a few of the many on-line resources available, particularly those with relevance to business and economic history: US government sources organized and linked The Museum of American Finance has posted on-line some materials from its "Women of Wall Street" exhibit. One of the themes at FRASER, the Federal Reserve's historical archives, is "Women in the Economy." Cambridge University Press is providing open access for the month to a large collection of articles related to women in history, includingwork by Sara Evans, Angel Kwolek-Folland, Ann Carlos and Larry Neal, and Margaret Walsh. The National Women's History Museum has several on-line exhibits, including "Entrepreneurial Women" and "Women in Industry." Wells Fargo has a web exhibit on "Women Making Financial History." HSBC has an exhibit series on "Women in Banking," beginning with 1907-19...

The Center for the History of Business, Technology, and Society at the Hagley Museum and Library in Wilmington, Delaware, will hold on conference on "Doing Business across Borders" on November 6, 2015.      The Center invites proposals for original papers on the way business activities (broadly conceived) have forged connections across the boundaries of nations, colonies, and empires. The papers should be historical and rely on empirical research to locate these episodes in discrete places and times, and preferably trace multidirectional relationships generated in the process of crossing borders. Business activities may include the movement of goods, services, ideas, capital, technology, and people, and include commercial diasporas organized around ethnicity, religion, or family; entrepreneurship; multinational firms; illicit practices (e.g. smuggling and piracy); family businesses and networks; and state-chartered entities. Scholarship developed under the rubric...

Beginning with the March 2015 issue, Enterprise & Society has both a new editor and a new publisher: Andrew Popp of the University of Liverpool assumes the editorship; the journal is now published by  Cambridge University Press . Readers who are Business History Conference members may access journal content from the BHC website when they are logged in. The table of contents for the March issue includes: Daniel Levinson Wilk , "The Red Cap's Gift: How Tipping Tempers the Rational Power of Money" Robert Crawford , "Relocating Centers and Peripheries: Transnational Advertising Agencies and Singapore in the 1950s and 1960s" Emre Balikçi , "Turkey’s Small Capital, A Player from the Start: Relations with the State and Big Capital" Gabriel Winant , " 'Green Pastures of Plenty from Dry Desert Ground': Nature, Labor, and the Growth and Structure of a California Grape Company" David M. Higgins and Mads Mordhorst , "Bringing H...

Guest editors Hinrich Voss, Sierk Horn, and Jeremy Clegg, all of the University of Leeds, have issued a call for submissions for a special issue of Business History on "The Evolution of Embeddedness and Adaptation of East Asian Businesses in Europe." According to the call for papers, The influx of East Asian enterprises into Europe has a long history. Japanese business engagements in Europe stretch back for over more than 100 years and have, in this period, constantly evolved and adapted. Early Taiwanese investments date back to the 1950s and Korean firms have explored European markets since the mid-1970s, when car manufacturer Daewoo opened its first trading office in Germany. Foreign direct investment (FDI) by multinational firms often plays a key role in the economic development of host nations by enhancing human capital, conferring technology spillovers, and competitiveness  – and the evidence is that Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese investments have benefited Europ...

The Federal Reserve Archival System for Economic Research (FRASER) was created in 2004 as a data preservation and accessibility project of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. FRASER’s mission is to safeguard and provide easy access to economic history—particularly the history of the Federal Reserve System. The site contains a very large selection of historical materials; one easy point of entry is the "Browse by Theme" section. In addition to materials pertaining to each Federal Reserve bank, topics include "Depressions and Panics," "Gold, Silver, and Greenbacks," and "Women in the Economy." The site also contains a collection of the primary sources used by Allan Meltzer for his History of the Federal Reserve and a Finding Aid for Record Group 82 , the Records of the Federal Reserve System at the National Archives. One can also browse by title, author, or date.     Those wishing to receive notices about FRASER materials can subscribe to...