The Exchange

The 2015 SHOT ( Society for the History of Technology ) conference will be held in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on October 8-11. Registration is now open, and the preliminary program has been posted. Of particular interest is a Roundtable that asks "What Role Should Technology Play in the History of Capitalism?" The organizers are W. Bernard Carlson and Jonathan Coopersmith; the discussants are Jonathan Coopersmith, Richard John, Stephen Mihm, and Barbara Hahn.     Other sessions of interest include "Industry-Academic Relations in the Second Industrial Revolution"; "Rewiring Public and Private: Computing for Public Sector and Public Interest"; "Railroad Construction, Labor Regimes, and Commerce in the Portuguese and Colonial Frontier Zones"; "Constructing Foods and Creating Tastes: Histories of Foods in Transnational Perspectives"; and "Ordering Concepts of Information Technologies."     The conference will also include a gra...

"Beyond the New Deal Order" will meet at the University of California, Santa Barbara, on September 24-26, 2015, with the goal of re-examining the scholarship in The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930-1980 , edited by Gary Gerstle and Steve Fraser and published in 1989. According to the organizers, Our conference, “Beyond the New Deal Order,” draws upon the new ways of thinking about politics, ideas, economy, gender, race and ethnicity, and the U.S. role in the world that have emerged in recent historical scholarship to interrogate the foundational suppositions put forward by Fraser, Gerstle and their co-authors more than a quarter century ago.   In addition to Gerstle and Fraser, participants include--among many others--Jennifer Armiger, Eileen Boris, Angus Burgin, Jefferson Cowie, Meg Jacobs, Jennifer Klein, Nelson Lichtenstein, William Novak, Alice O'Connor, Ellen Shermer, David Stebenne, Thomas Sugrue, and Mark Wilson. The conference program is available...

The XVIIth World Economic History Congress (WEHC) will take place next week, August 3-7, in Kyoto, Japan. The conference website now contains the complete program, as well as links to abstracts and papers. Readers can consult the full conference booklet or the program overview , which lists session titles, organizers, and times. Full session listings with presenters, as well as the links to abstracts and papers, may be found using the WEHC on-line search system .     For complete details about the conference, please consult the WEHC website . Note that the next WEHC will be held in 2018 in Boston, Massachusetts.    

A list, by no means complete, of books in business and economic history published or forthcoming between May and September 2015: Edward J. Balleisen, Business Regulation (Edward Elgar, August 2015) Marco Bertilorenzi, The International Aluminium Cartel: The Business and Politics of a Cooperative Industrial Institution (1886-1978) (Routledge, September 2015) Howard Bodenhorn, The Color Factor: The Economics of African-American Well-Being in the Nineteenth-Century South (Oxford University Press, June 2015) Dan Bouk, How Our Days Became Numbered: Risk and the Rise of the Statistical Individual (University of Chicago Press, May 2015) William Boyd, The Slain Wood: Papermaking and Its Environmental Consequences in the American South (Johns Hopkins University Press, September 2015) Martin Campbell Kelly and Daniel D. Garcia-Swartz, From Mainframes to Smartphones: A History of the International Computer Industry (Harvard University Press, June 2015) Christy Ford Chapin, Ensur...

The University of Birmingham Business School has launched a new website on "Re-Doing Business: Bankruptcy and Insolvency in History, Theory, and Policy-Making." According to the website, this project offers an alternative approach to the study of insolvency and bankruptcy. The aim is to forge a network of European scholars to analyse these issues with an approach that has three important elements of originality: a long-term view, a comparative perspective, and a focus on practices and enforcement mechanisms rather than simply on formal features of legislation.   This website is designed to act as an information hub for anybody interested in these issues, by providing up-dated links and original material on four areas: the "doing business" report; legislative changes in various countries; the economic literature on insolvency and bankruptcy; and the history of bankruptcy and insolvency. The project is a combined effort by scholars at the University of Bi...

The 2016 Asia Pacific Economic and Business History (APEBH) Conference will be held in Adelaide, Australia, on February 11-13; it will be hosted by the School of Economics at the University of Adelaide. The theme of the meeting is "Wine, Wheat and Copper? Resource booms and busts: agriculture, mining and the wider economy in historical and comparative perspective." According to the call for papers: [The] varying importance of agriculture and mining, their booms and busts, is not only a contemporary phenomenon but has been one of the main aspects of Australia’s economic and industrial development for the last two centuries. . . . Resource booms and busts also shaped international trading arrangements and exchange rate effects caused by rapid development in one sector influenced the other and the economy as a whole. The impact of the recent mining-related appreciation and depreciation of the Australian dollar on agricultural production illustrates this mechanism. Other e...

The annual meeting of SHEAR (the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic) got under way yesterday in Raleigh, North Carolina. The conference website features a section on "Panel Resources," where panelists can post information relevant to their presentations. One of the sessions of interest (see here for a more detailed list) is "Capital, Space, and Culture: New Approaches to the Political Economy of the Early Republic"; presenters in that session have posted short versions of their papers in the resource section. Members of another panel, "Teaching Capitalism in Early America," have created a "resource archive" website for their session that includes syllabi and class assignments.     The full meeting schedule can be found on the conference website.

The 2015 CHORD ( Centre for the History of Retail and Distribution ) conference will be held at the University of Wolverhampton on September 10. The program and abstracts for the meeting have now been posted on the CHORD website.     On-line registration is also available, as well as lodging and meeting details. For further information, please e-mail: Laura Ugolini at l.ugolini@ wlv.ac.uk or Karin Dannehl at k.dannehl@ wlv.ac.uk .

Readers interested in the history of business regulation may want to make their libraries aware of the three-volume collection out next month from Edward Elgar Publishing: Business Regulation is edited by Edward J. Balleisen of Duke University. Priced for the institutional market, the set conveys leading scholarly ideas on modern regulatory governance since 1871. The first two volumes lay out the rationales for and critiques of technocratic governance in industrialized societies. They trace the evolution of regulatory institutions, highlighting the most recent era of globalization, deregulation, privatization and regulatory innovation. The third volume presents influential frameworks for understanding regulatory culture in action, assessing the impacts of regulatory policies, and explaining regulatory change. The table of contents is available on the Edward Elgar site.     In addition to his position in the History Department at Duke, Balleisen is vice provost...

The Editorial Advisory Board of the Business History Review has announced that the winner of the 2014 Henrietta Larson Article Award is Mary O’Sullivan of the University of Geneva for “A Fine Failure: Relationship Lending, Moses Taylor, and the Joliet Iron & Steel Company, 1869–1888” (BHR, Winter 2014). The Economic and Business History Society's James Soltow Award for Best Paper in Essays in Economic & Business History for 2015 has gone to Janice Traflet and William R. Gruver , both of Bucknell University, for “The Quixotic Quest for Fairness: The SEC’s Role in the Rise of High Frequency Trading.” The recipient of the European Business History Association Prize for the best paper presented at their annual meeting was Barbara Hahn of Texas Tech University and the University of Leeds for her paper, “Failures and Fairytales: Innovative Losers of the Industrial Revolution.”      Honorable mentions were awarded to Jacob Halvas Bjerre, Copenhagen Bu...

The previously announced "American Enterprise" exhibition at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History (NMAH) opened on July 1. Primarily a physical exhibition, it also has a web component featuring specific essays and numerous illustrations. Moving from the "Merchant Era," to the "Corporate Era," to the "Consumer Era," to the "Global Era," the exhibition "chronicles the tumultuous interaction of capitalism and democracy that resulted in the continual remaking of American business—and American life." Readers interested in the background of the exhibition can read a discussion with the exhibition project director David Allison and also see the press release .    The exhibition website also features a Flickr section of large-scale photographs of the physical exhibition. The curators have published an accompanying book, American Enterprise , from Smithsonian Books (with an excerpt available).

The Harvard-Newcomen Postdoctoral Fellowship in Business History To be awarded for twelve months’ residence, study, and research at Harvard Business School. The fellowship is open to scholars who, within the last ten years, have received a Ph.D. in history, economics, or a related discipline. The fellowship has two purposes: The first is to enable scholars to engage in research that will benefit from the resources of Harvard Business School and the larger Boston scholarly community. A travel fund and a book fund will be provided. The second is to provide an opportunity for the fellow to participate in the activities of Harvard Business School. The fellow is required to research and write a case, under the direction of a senior faculty member, to be used in one of the business history courses. The fellowship will be awarded and all applicants notified by mid-January. Salary is competitive. The fellowship will begin July 1. Applicants should submit a CV, undergraduate tran...

Geoffrey Jones of Harvard Business School published an article in "Live Mint" titled "History has its place in business: Learning from the past about the consequences of decisions should surely be part of every manager’s toolkit." In the United States recently there has been a movement, "Women on 20s," to replace Andrew Jackson (who, among other things, vetoed the rechartering of the Second Bank of the US) on the $20 bill with a woman. But the Treasury announced that it would replace Alexander Hamilton on the $10 bill, causing dismay among many, including those who began the campaign. See Brian Phillips Murphy's reaction on this MSNBC video . Former Federal Reserve chair Ben Bernanke also weighed in. The program for last month's Yale conference. "Grassroots Modernities: Nature, Agriculture, and Improvement in the Atlantic World," is available online. Also at Yale: most papers from the Yale Economic History Workshop , 2001-2011...

At the Business History Conference Annual Meeting on June 24-28, 2015, in Miami, Florida, officers announced the following recipients of BHC prizes and grants: Lifetime Achievement Award The award is bestowed every two years to a scholar who has contributed significantly to the work of the Business History Conference and to scholarship in business history. 2015 recipient: Juliet E. K. Walker , University of Texas at Austin  Hagley Prize  The prize is awarded jointly by the Hagley Museum and Library and the Business History Conference to the best book in business history (broadly defined) written in English and published during the two years prior to the award. 2015 recipient: Walter Friedman , Fortune Tellers: The Story of America's First Economic Forecasters (Princeton University Press, 2013). Affiliation: Harvard Business School  Ralph Gomory Prize  This prize, made possible by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, recognizes historical work on the effects...