“History of Capitalism” Special Issue of JGAPE

The July 2016 volume of the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era is a special issue on "The History of Capitalism in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era," with guest editor Noam Maggor. The contents are protected by a paywall, but many readers will be able to access the material through an institutional subscription, and abstracts may be freely viewed. The contents are:

Noam Maggor, "The Great Inequalizer: American Capitalism in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era"
Eli Cook, "The Neoclassical Club: Irving Fisher and the Progressive Origins of Neoliberalism"
Rosanne Currarino, "Transition Questions"
David Roth Singerman, "Science, Commodities, and Corruption in the Gilded Age"
Ariel Ron, "Farmers, Capitalism, and Government in the Late Nineteenth Century"
Rudi Batzell, "The Labor of Social Reproduction: Household Work and Gendered Power in the History of Capitalism, 1870-1930"
Paul A. Kramer, "Embedding Capital: Political-Economic History, the United States, and the World"

CFP: St. Louis Federal Reserve and EABH Conference for Archivists and Historians

The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis and the European Association of Banking and Financial History (EABH) will co-host a two-day conference on "Innovative Solutions for Archives and Financial Crises," to meet in at the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank on May 11-12, 2017. According to the organizers, the conference

will bring together financial historians and archivists to learn from each other about innovations in archives and the use of bank and central bank archives in financial history research. Archivists will present innovations in archival work and undiscovered gems in their collections. Financial historians will present their research based on materials from commercial bank, government, and central bank archives. The conference will provide both archivists and historians the opportunity to learn about the unique materials held in central bank archives, the current state of archival work, and insights into how scholars use these collections.

The meeting will include a special "archives showcase" with brief presentations (5-7 minutes) given by archivists to highlight underused or undiscovered resources in their collections. The organizers seek presentations of about 15-20 minutes that will be of interest to both financial historians/ economists and archivists.

Please send paper proposals, including a short CV and an abstract of around 500 words, or archives showcase proposals (with a brief abstract of around 100 words) to c.hofmann@bankinghistory.org. The submission deadline is November 1, 2016. Readers should consult the conference website and the complete call for papers for more details.

Confirmed speakers to date include Harold James (Princeton & IMF Historian), Gary Richardson (UC Irvine & Federal Reserve System Historian), and Eugene White (Rutgers). On the archivist side, speakers will include Laura Linard (Harvard’s Baker Library), Chris Freeland (Washington University and "Documenting the Now"), and Jefferson Bailey (Director, Web Archiving, Internet Archive). 

A Round-Up of On-Line Reviews of Interest

Listed below is a selection of book reviews of interest that have appeared from this spring to the present from open-access sites, primarily H-Net, EH.Net, and the IHR's Reviews in History.

Larry Neal reviewed William N. Goetzmann, Money Changes Everything: How Finance Made Civilization Possible for EH.Net

Eric Jones reviewed E. A. Wrigley, The Path to Sustained Growth: England’s Transition from an Organic Economy to an Industrial Revolution for EH.Net

Paul M. Hohenberg reviewed Jürgen Kocka, Capitalism: A Short History for EH.Net

John H. Wood reviewed Peter Conti-Brown, The Power and Independence of the Federal Reserve for EH.Net

Anne Hanley reviewed William R. Summerhill, Inglorious Revolution: Political Institutions, Sovereign Debt, and Financial Underdevelopment in Imperial Brazil for EH.Net

Robert P. Rogers reviewed Samuel Bostaph, Andrew Carnegie: An Economic Biography for EH.Net

Jonathan E. Robins reviewed Richard Follett, Sven Beckert, Peter Coclanis, and Barbara Hahn. eds.,  Plantation Kingdom: The American South and Its Global Commodities, for H-Environment

Anna Johns reviewed Ronald K. Fierstein, A Triumph of Genius: Edwin Land, Polaroid, and the Kodak Patent War, for H-Sci-Med-Tech 

Sean Patrick Adams reviewed Brian Luskey and Wendy Woloson, eds., Capitalism by Gaslight: Illuminating the Economy of Nineteenth-Century America, for H-SHEAR

Anne M. Ricculli reviewed Jonathan Coopersmith, Faxed: The Rise and Fall of the Fax Machine, for H-Sci-Med-Tech

Anya Luscombe reviewed Cynthia B. Meyers, A Word from Our Sponsor: Admen, Advertising, and the Golden Age of Radio, for JHistory

Charles McCrary reviewed Timothy E. W. Gloege, Guaranteed Pure: The Moody Bible Institute, Business, and the Making of Modern Evangelicalism, for H-AmRel

Gregory Gordon reviewed Sue Fawn Chung, Chinese in the Woods: Logging and Lumbering in the American West, for H-Environment

Manfred Berg reviewed Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism, for H-Soz-u-Kult

Tristan M. Stein reviewed Roderick Floud, Jane Humphries, and Paul Johnson, eds. The Cambridge Economic History of Modern Britain, Volume 1: 1700-1870; 2d ed., for H-Albion 

David Head reviewed Faye M. Kert, Privateering: Patriots and Profits in the War of 1812, for H-SHEAR

John Graham reviewed Roger Lowenstein, America's Bank: The Epic Struggle to Create the Federal Reserve, for H-Socialisms

Raechel Lutz reviewed Christopher F. Jones, Routes of Power: Energy and Modern America, for H-Energy

Michael Cullinane reviewed Gregory Moore, Defining and Defending the Open Door Policy: Theodore Roosevelt and China, 1901-1909, for Reviews in History

James Kwak reviewed Christine Desan, Making Money: Coin, Currency, and the Coming of Capitalism, for The Baseline Scenario

Lisa McGirr reviewed Winifred Gallagher, How the Post Office Created America, and Devin Leonard, Neither Snow Nor Rain: A History of the United States Post Office, for the New York Times Book Review

World Congress of Business History Program Update

The First World Congress of Business History, to be held in conjunction with the annual meeting of the European Business History Association (EBHA), will convene in Bergen, Norway, on August 25-27, 2016.  An updated program has now been posted, with links to papers being added as they come in.
     Mira Wilkins of Florida International University will give the opening keynote address.
     Registration and accommodation information is available on the World Congress website.

Business and Economic History at SHEAR 2016

The 2016 annual meeting of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic (SHEAR) is taking place this week in New Haven, Connecticut, on July 21-24. The conference brochure, including the program, is now available.
    The presidential plenary is a conversation with "Hamilton" creator Lin-Manuel Miranda, filmed last April with Joanne B. Freeman and Brian Phillips Murphy. The musical also features in Session 19, "A Critical Roundtable on Hamilton." Other sessions of particular interest to business and economic historians include

Session 15: "Costly Improvements: The Promises and Pitfalls of Early National Development"
Session 25: "Loopholes, Traps, and Hidden Agendas: The New Rules of Maritime Trade for the Early American Republic"
Session 38: "Baubles, Bonnets, and Banknotes: The Business of Fashioning Early America"

Individual papers include

"Coverture and Contract: Enforcing Wives’ Dependence in the Early Republic," by Lindsay Keiter, College of William and Mary (session 5)
" 'No Admittance for Unprotected Females': African American Entrepreneurial Networks and Discourses of Respectability in Antebellum New York City," by Jennifer Hull, Colgate University (session 7)
"Lunsford Lane: Entrepreneurialism and Black Manhood in Slavery and Freedom," by Craig Thompson Friend, North Carolina State University (session 14)
"Putting the Tariff Back into the Nineteenth Century," by Robin L. Einhorn, University of California, Berkeley (session 24)
"Antimonopoly, the Bank Veto, and Public Finance, 1790-1863," Richard R. John, Columbia University (session 24)
"Seeing the State’s Slaves: 'Public Hands,' Internal Improvement, and the Practice of State Slavery," by Aaron Hall, University of California, Berkeley (session 29)
"Race, Property, and Widowhood in Revolutionary Virginia: Mary Willing Byrd and Slavery," by
Ami Pflugrad-Jackisch, University of Toledo (session 30)
" 'Her title to said negroes is perfect & complete': Slavery, Marriage, and Women’s Challenges to Coverture in the Nineteenth-Century South," by Stephanie Jones-Rogers, University of California,
Berkeley (session 30)
"The Commoditization of Bodies: Physicians and the Business of Healing in the Economics of Slavery," by Savannah Williamson, University of Houston (session 48)

    SHEAR also sponsors a series of graduate research seminars--luncheon programs that "permit grad students and senior faculty to discuss common themes, important areas of research, and the challenges faced by scholars in the field." This year Ellen Hartigan O'Connor and Joshua Rothman will be co-facilitators of a session on "History of Capitalism: Capitalism, Labor, and Political Economy."
    Those unable to attend can follow along in the Twitter world at #SHEAR2016. The meeting website is www.shear.org/annual-meeting/.

Preliminary Program: History of Capitalism 2.0 at Cornell

The second conference on "Histories of Capitalism," v. 2.0, organized under the auspices of the History of Capitalism Initiative, will take place on  September 29-October 1, 2016, at the ILR School's Conference Center. Whereas the first meeting focused specifically on American capitalism, the second encourages "panels and papers that incorporate non-U.S., regional, transnational, or global histories." Plenary speakers include Juliet Walker, Marcus Rediker, Emma Rothschild, and Jedidiah Purdy.
    Registration is now open, and a preliminary version of the program has been released. For more details, please see the conference website.

Program Available: Japanese Business History Conference International Sessions

The 52nd Congress of the Business History Society of Japan (BHSJ) 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." The program for the English-language sessions (termed "international sessions") has now been posted on the conference website. According to the organizers,

To further enhance international exchange, the BHSJ decided to organize English-language 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. 

Meeting registration is open; advance registration concludes on August 31. Please consult the website for additional details.

EHA Program Brochure Available

The 2016 annual meeting of the Economic History Association (EHA) will take place in Boulder, Colorado, on September 16-18; the conference theme is “economic history and economic development.”  The program brochure has now been posted on-line. Highlights include a Friday plenary session with Gustavo Franco, who will speak on “Money, Institutions and Development: Brazil’s Experience in the Late 20th Century,” and a plenary round table on “Beyond Institutions,” featuring Albert Fishlow, John Wallis, Gillian Hadfield, Nathan Nunn, and Christopher Udry.
     Information about registration and accommodation can be found on the meeting website; note that the advance registration deadline is August 22, 2016, and that the group rate at the hotel expires on August 23. Questions may be addressed to the meeting coordinator, Jari Eloranta.
    Abstracts and links to papers will be available on the EHA website closer to the conference date.

New Books of Interest: Mid-Summer Edition

Herewith a list—by no means complete—of new and forthcoming books of interest in business and economic history for the period late April–August 2016:

Martin Allen and Matthew Davies, eds., Medieval Merchants and Money: Essays in Honour of James L. Bolton (IHR Publications, June 2016) 

Terry L. Anderson, ed., Unlocking the Wealth of Indian Nations (Lexington Books, June 2016)

Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman, eds., Slavery's Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development (University of Pennsylvania Press, August 2016)

Mansel G. Blackford, Columbus, Ohio: Two Centuries of Business and Environmental Change (Ohio State University Press, August 2016)

Youssef Cassis, Richard S. Grossman, and Catherine R. Schenk, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Banking and Financial History (Oxford University Press, July 2016)

Béatrice Craig, Female Enterprise: Behind the Discursive Veil in Nineteenth-Century Northern France (Palgrave Macmillan, August 2016)

Heather Dalton, Merchants and Explorers: Roger Barlow, Sebastian Cabot, and Networks of Atlantic Exchange, 1500-1560 (Oxford University Press, August 2016)

Marc Flandreau, Anthropologists in the Stock Exchange: A Financial History of Victorian Science (University of Chicago Press, August 2016)

Winifred Gallagher, How the Post Office Created America (Penguin, June 2016)

Erin M. Greenwald, Marc-Antoine Caillot and the Company of the Indies in Louisiana: Trade in the French Atlantic World (Louisiana State University Press, June 2016)

Darren E. Grem, The Blessings of Business: How Corporations Shaped Conservative Christianity (Oxford University Press, June 2016) 

Pamela Haag, The Gunning of America: Business and the Making of American Gun Culture (Perseus/Basic Books, April 2016)

Kenneth G. Hirth, The Aztec Economic World: Merchants and Markets in Ancient Mesoamerica (Cambridge University Press, July 2016)

Jürgen Kocka and Marcel van der Linden, eds., Capitalism: The Reemergence of a Historical Concept (Bloomsbury Academic, August 2016)
 
Myrddin John Lewis and Roger Lloyd-Jones, Arming the Western Front: War, Business and the State in Britain, 1900-1920 (Routledge, June 2016)

Steven Marks, The Information Nexus: Global Capitalism from the Renaissance to the Present (Cambridge University Press, July 2016)

Franco Malerba, et al., Innovation and the Evolution of Industries: History-Friendly Models (Cambridge University Press, July 2016)

Joel Mokyr, A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy (Princeton University Press, August 2016)

Tracy Neumann, Remaking the Rust Belt: The Postindustrial Transformation of North America (University of Pennsylvania Press, June 2016)

Werner Plumpe, German Economic and Business History in the 19th and 20th Century (Palgrave Macmillan, July 2016)

Daniel Lord Smail, Legal Plunder: Households and Debt Collection in Late Medieval Europe (Harvard University Press, June 2016)

Mark R. Wilson, Destructive Creation: American Business and the Winning of World War II (University of Pennsylvania Press, August 2016)

John Wong, Global Trade in the Nineteenth Century: The House of Houqua and the Canton System (Cambridge University Press, July 2016)

CFP: “Rise and Decline of Retail Banking,”

On November 24-25, 2016, the Gesellschaft für Unternehmensgeschichte (GUG) and the European Association for Banking and Financial History (EABH) will hold a joint conference in Frankfurt on “The Rise (and Decline) of Retail Banking, 1960s to 2020s.” The program committee consists of: Joost Jonker (Amsterdam University), Dieter Ziegler (Ruhr-University Bochum), Carmen Hofmann (EABH), and Andrea Schneider (GUG). Please consult the call for papers for a full discussion of the aims of the meeting.
     Each paper proposal should include a one-page abstract, a list of 3 to 5 keywords, and a one-page CV. The deadline for submissions, to be sent to Andrea Schneider at ahschneider@unternehmensgeschichte.de, is August 15, 2016. Questions may also be addressed to Andrea Schneider.

Program Available for "History and Organization Studies" Sessions at EGOS 2016

The European Group for Organizational Studies (EGOS) is about to convene (July 7-9) its 2016 meeting in Naples, Italy. EGOS has a number of standing working groups (SWGs), including one on "History and Organization Studies (SWG08)"; group organizers are responsible for specific sessions at the meeting. The SWG08 convenors for 2016 are Dan Wadhwani, Matthias Kipping, and Stephanie Decker. The "History and Organization Studies" program sessions can be viewed here on the EGOS meeting site.

CFP: Economic History Society 2017

The 2017 meeting of the Economic History Society (EHS) will be held on March 31-April 2 at Royal Holloway, University of London. The submission window for all types of presentations--academic, new researcher, and poster--is now open; please follow the appropriate links on the EHS conference website to submit a proposal. According to the organizers,

The conference program committee welcomes proposals on all aspects of economic and social history covering a wide range of periods and countries and, particularly, papers of an interdisciplinary nature. Scholars are not expected to present a paper in more than one session (including as a co-author) and, when slots are limited, priority will be given to those who did not present a paper in an Academic session at the previous year's conference. Those currently studying for, or who have recently completed, a PhD should submit a proposal to the New Researcher session.

    The deadline for papers is September 5, 2016; for posters, November 21, 2016. Questions may be addressed to Maureen Galbraith.
    Additional information will be posted on the EHS conference site as it becomes available.

Conference: PEAES “Re-Union of Interests” Program Available

The 2016 annual conference of the Program in Early American Economy and Society (PEAES), to be held in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on October 6-7, will commemorate the publication of Cathy Matson and Peter Onuf’s 1990 work, A Union of Interests: Political and Economic Thought in Revolutionary America. Taking Matson and Onuf’s book as the point of departure, the meeting "will analyze and evaluate the field of political economy a quarter century later and showcase exciting new directions in the study of early North American political economy." The program is now available on the conference website; participants include Brian Murphy, Gautham Rao, Jessica Lepler, and Sharon Ann Murphy. John Larson of Purdue University will deliver the opening keynote address.
    For more details and registration information, please see the conference website.