The Exchange

The Canadian Business History Association/Association canadienne pour l'histoire des affaires (CBHA/ACHA) has announced that registration is open for its first annual conference, which will be held at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto on May 5-6, 2016. The theme of the meeting is "From Public Interest to Private Profit: The Changing Political and Social Legitimacy of International Business." The program is available here . According to the meeting website, This conference of historians, business historians, management scholars, and business practitioners will study the corporate entity as it has changed over the past four centuries. Corporations started their lives as social, political, as well as commercial entities. By the nineteenth century, corporations became less accountable to the societies and states and became more self-consciously economic, private, and financial organizations. Since then, many interests have attempted to reintro...

The editors of the American Historical Review and Past and Present have created a "virtual journal issue" on "Slavery and Anti-Slavery in the Atlantic World" ; all the included articles will be freely available for downloading for "a short period of time."     The issue consists entirely of previously published articles, except for a new introduction by the editors (Rob Schneider and Matthew Hilton) "tracing the evolution of the field through the pages of both journals." Among the essays of particular interest are those by Thomas Haskell in the AHR on "Capitalism and the Origins of the Humanitarian Sensibility"; by Seymour Drescher on Dutch capitalism and antislavery; and, in Past and Present , by Mark Smith on plantation capitalism in the antebellum South.

"The Maintainers: A Conference" will take place at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey, on April 7-9, 2016. The program has now been posted. According to the organizers, All speakers share an interest in the concepts of maintenance, infrastructure, repair, and the myriad forms of labor and expertise that sustain our human-built world. Presentations will cover a wide variety of technologies and practices, including software, spaceflight, trolleys, meteorology, digital archives, and the politics of funding for infrastructure.       The conference keynote speaker will be Ruth Schwartz Cowan, professor emerita in the History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania.     Registration is required and can be accomplished on-line at the conference website. Questions may be directed to Lee Vinsel .

The next event in "The Enterprise of Culture" project is a one-day conference, to be held on March 10, 2016, on "Harnessing Uncertainty: Social, Cultural and Economic Capital in Fashion." The meeting will look at "the current state of fashion against the backdrop of an uncertain world." According to the organizers, the conference will provide a platform for speakers and delegates to question assumptions about the contemporary fashion industry and to scrutinise the place of fashion amidst some of the dominant global issues of today. Speakers from the UK, USA and the Netherlands will discuss topics such as sustainability, Chinese identity and fashion, fashion blogging as labour and leisure, new perspectives on the suit, challenges and opportunities facing fashion designers, the European fashion business since 1945 and conscientious fashion. A round-table will consider conference themes in more depth and will open the floor for debate.      Open to ...

The February 2016 issue of the American Historical Review features an extensive literature review essay by Kenneth Lipartito on "Reassembling the Economic: New Departures in Historical Materialism." According to the abstract, "This new materialism offers a way for historians to bring markets, finance, capital, technology, corporations, and other economic features of the past back into the historical narrative." Update : This article is now (2/24/16) freely available at this link as a PDF and here as an HTML file. The Hagley Library and Museum have received from Alan and Ann Rothschild their huge collection of over 4,000 patent models , making the Hagley's collection second only to that of the Smithsonian in the United States. In other Hagley news, the library has opened an Oral History Project Office , designed to establish an ongoing oral history capacity at Hagley. The 2016 American Antiquarian Society Summer Seminar on "The History of the Boo...

“Southern Capitalisms” is a graduate student conference to be held on March 4-5, 2016, at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. The program for the meeting has now been posted on the conference website. Session topics include "Crossing Borders: The Mechanisms of Capital Expansion"; "Migrant Entrepreneurs"; "Black Bodies, Capital, and Ideas in Motion"; "Artistic Entrepreneurship: Contesting and Creating Narratives";"Envisioning Southern Growth";  "Precarity and Coercion: Southern Labor Regimes"; "Governing Production: The Politics of Land Expropriation, Food, and Labor"; and "Internal Improvements: Institution-Building in the 'South'." The keynote speaker for the conference will be Julia Ott of the New School. Conference organizers are Paige Glotzer and Jessica Levy, both Ph.D. candidates in the Department of History at Johns Hopkins University. For additional information, please...

The 52nd Congress of the Business History Society of Japan will take place at Chuo University in Tokyo on October 8-9, 2016. The theme for the meeting will be "Innovation and Entrepreneurship: New Perspectives on Business History." From the call for papers :      The BHSJ’s first-­ever English sessions were held during the 50th annual meeting in 2014, and generated fruitful, international discussions between Japanese scholars and those from other parts of the world. To further enhance international exchange, the BHSJ decided to organize English sessions every two years starting in 2016. The English sessions will take place concurrently with the regularly scheduled Japanese sessions at the annual meeting.     The organizers’ aim is to foster cross-­disciplinary knowledge exchange by bringing together scholars who incorporate the themes of innovation and entrepreneurship into their research on business history, economic history, management and economics....

Following is a list of books of interest to business and economic historians published or forthcoming from January through March 2016 (and a few we missed in late 2015): Ross Bassett , The Technological Indian (Harvard University Press, February 2016) Michael D. Bordo and Mark A. Wynne , eds., The Federal Reserve's Role in the Global Economy: A Historical Perspective (Cambridge University Press, March 2016) Catia Brilli , Genoese Trade and Migration in the Spanish Atlantic, 1700–1830 (Cambridge University Press, March 2016) Christian Christiansen , Progressive Business: An Intellectual History of the Role of Business in American Society (Oxford University Press, January 2016) Peter Conti-Brown , The Power and Independence of the Federal Reserve (Princeton University Press, January 2016) Simon Cordery , The Iron Road in the Prairie State: The Story of Illinois Railroading (Indiana University Press, December 2015)   James W. Cortada , All the Facts: A Histo...

The just-launched Scottish Business History Network "aims to connect all those - both individuals and organisations - with an interest in Scottish business history and business archives. Membership is free and open to anyone with an interest in business archives and business history in Scotland and beyond, with a view to encouraging partnerships and the building of links between allied sectors." The site now contains a number of brief archival case studies, "developed to show how a wide variety of businesses, archives and heritage organisations have used their business archive collections." A number of others are available on the Scottish Council on Archives website.    For more information, please see the network's website .

The 2016 Asia Pacific Economic and Business History (APEBH) Conference will be held at the University of Adelaide in Adelaide, South Australia, at the end of this week, on February 11-13. The theme of the conference is "Wine, Wheat and Copper? Resource booms and busts: agriculture, mining and the wider economy in historical and comparative perspective."       The conference program has recently been posted; abstracts and, in some cases, full papers are linked from the program.       The 2016 Noel Butlin lecture will be given by Kym Anderson of the University of Adelaide, where he is the George Gollin Professor of Economics. His topic will be "Mining’s Impact on Australia’s Agricultural Competitiveness: Past and Prospective." In addition, Jari Eloranta will deliver the keynote speech at the conference dinner, on  the topic, “The Awkward Dance between Economic and Business History: Methods and Topics for Future Collaboration.”...

A reminder that the British Academy of Management  (BAM) "Management and Business History Track" will run again this year, at the BAM meeting in Newcastle on September 6-8, 2016. Track co-chairs are Kevin Tennent and Sasha Hodgson. Fully developed paper submissions, as well as shorter developmental papers (1-2,000 words) and workshop submissions, are welcome. The submission deadline is February 29, 2016 . The track call says, in part: This track aims to encourage the growing number of management and business historians who work in business schools and social science departments to engage in constructive debate with a wide range of management scholars. The 2016 conference theme, ‘Thriving in Turbulent Times’, is an ideal opportunity to explore the value of historical study for management research. Histories of organizations, industries and institutions give us the opportunity to understand how managers have responded to turbulent times in the past, whether it be through ...

The Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation announces the creation of the Arthur Molella Distinguished Fellowship at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History (NMAH). The Center seeks to appoint an experienced author or senior scholar from the history of technology, science and technology studies, business history, museum studies, STEAM education, or an allied field. The specific arrangement is flexible: the Molella Distinguished Fellow may use the funds as a sabbatical supplement; for several short-duration visits; for a single residency focused on research and writing; or for a series of lectures leading to a major publication. The Molella Distinguished Fellow will be encouraged to participate in the intellectual life and programmatic activities of the museum; to take advantage of the expertise of the museum’s research staff; and to consult the Institution’s vast invention and technology collections. The Lemelson Center will assist in arrang...

The editors of the Business History Review , published by Cambridge University Press, are providing open access to a number of recent articles . Included are: Naomi R. Lamoreaux, Kenneth L. Sokoloff, and Dhanoos Sutthiphisal, "Patent Alchemy: The Market for Technology in US History" Espen Storli, "Cartel Theory and Cartel Practice: The Case of the International Aluminum Cartels, 1901–1940" Mary O'Sullivan, "A Fine Failure: Relationship Lending, Moses Taylor, and the Joliet Iron & Steel Company, 1869–1888" Richard R. John, "Prophet of Perspective: Thomas K. McCraw" Mira Wilkins, "The History of Multinationals: A 2015 View" Alain Verbeke and Liena Kano, "The New Internalization Theory and Multinational Enterprises from Emerging Economies: A Business History Perspective" Pierre-Yves Donzé, "Siemens and the Construction of Hospitals in Latin America, 1949-1964" B. Zorina Khan, "Inventing Prizes: A...

The Organization of American Historians (OAH) will hold its 2016 annual meeting on April 7-10 in Providence, Rhode Island. The complete program brochure is now available on-line. We highlighted several business and economic history sessions in an earlier post , but the full program includes many other sessions of interest. [Note that the OAH program does not supply session numbers or links to abstracts, so the sessions are identified here by the page number on which they appear in the program.] Sessions sponsored or co-sponsored by the BHC:    p. 28: "Financial Leaders of the Early American Republic"    p. 37: "Capitalism in the Countryside: Farmers, Families, and the Marketplace"    p. 53: "Temporalities of Agriculture and Capitalism"    p. 56: "Law, Finance, and Institutional Leadership: New Perspectives on the History of Financialization"    p. 56: "The Business of Leadership"    p. 63: "Who Remade the Modern Ameri...