The Exchange

The "Money, Power and Print" group will hold its eighth biennial colloquium in Siegen, Germany, on June 7-9, 2018. The group began as an association of scholars interested in interdisciplinary studies of contemporary attitudes toward the "financial revolution" in early-modern Britain, specifically the rise of banks, paper money, joint-stock corporations, stock markets, and public debt. Over time, its focus has gradually evolved and the interest now is on how those practices developed across early modern Europe. According to the organizers of the colloquium: Papers will be distributed in advance and presented in two-hour sessions at which all colloquium participants are present. Presenters will have five minutes to summarize their paper. The remainder of each session will be given over to questions and discussion, in which the goal is to enrich our mutual understanding by eliciting insights from all of the disciplines represented at the table. Authors are ther...

In the run-up to this week's BHC meeting, new March and April books, plus a few we missed: Hannah Barker , Family and Business during the Industrial Revolution (Oxford University Press, March 2017) Hartmut Berghoff and Adam Rome , eds., Green Capitalism: Business and the Environment in the Twentieth Century (University of Pennsylvania Press, April 2017) Daina Ramey Berry , The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved from Womb to Grave in the Building of a Nation (Beacon Press, January 2017) Fahad Ahmad Bishara , A Sea of Debt: Law and Economic Life in the Western Indian Ocean, 1780–1950 (Cambridge University Press, March 2017) Paul Cheney , Cul de Sac: Patrimony, Capitalism, and Slavery in French Saint-Domingue (University of Chicago Press, February 2017) Patrick Fridenson and Kikkawa Takeo , eds., Ethical Capitalism: Shibusawa Eiichi and Business Leadership in Global Perspective (University of Toronto Press, March 2017) Peter James Hudson ...

The Maintainers is a global, interdisciplinary research network whose members share an interest in the concepts of maintenance, infrastructure, repair, and the myriad forms of labor and expertise that sustain the human-built world. The group is holding its second conference, “The Maintainers II: Labor, Technology, and Social Orders,” to be hosted at Stevens Institute of Technology on April 6-9, 2017. The program is now available.     The group also runs an occasional blog and has a mailing list to which those interested can subscribe; they also have a Twitter account . Questions may be addressed to Lee Vinsel at lee.vinsel@gmail.com .

The Business History Conference (BHC) is holding its 2017 meeting in Denver, Colorado, on March 30-April 1. The final version of the program is now available on the BHC website, including links to abstracts and a few full papers. Special sessions include an opening plenary on Thursday evening, on "The Cultures of a Business Civilization"; another on Friday afternoon, "Keywords in American Economic and Business History"; and the Krooss Dissertation plenary, on Saturday evening.     In addition, the BHC hosts a number of pre-meeting activities, including two workshops , a paper development workshop sponsored by the Copenhagen Business School, and the Doctoral Colloquium .     Advance on-line registration has closed, but attendees may register for the meeting itself in person.

The Business History Conference will hold its 2018 meeting on April 5-7 in Baltimore, Maryland. The theme of the meeting will be "Money, Finance, and Capital." The program committee--comprising David Sicilia (chair), Christy Ford Chapin, Per Hansen, Naomi Lamoreaux, Rory Miller, Julia Ott, and Mary O’Sullivan (BHC president)--explains: Historians who want to write compelling histories of capitalism must grapple with the manifold roles that money, finance, and capital have played in political, economic, social and cultural dynamics. Yet, for many years, the abstruse and elusive character of these phenomena encouraged many historians of economic life to maintain a safe distance from them. Of course, there have always been some historians willing to figure out where money, finance, and capital fit into broader histories of our societies. Still, much of what we know about currency and credit, investment and profit, bonds and futures results from highly specialized research ...

Business History has issued a call for papers for a special volume on "Indian Business in the Global World." According to guest editors Swapnesh Masrani, School of Management, University of Stirling, and Carlo Morelli, School of Social Sciences, University of Dundee: Indian business history remains a largely unexplored area of research for a European and North American academic audience. Hitherto Indian business history has largely been addressed within a dichotomy of its relationship to the rise of the domestic economic industrialization or alternatively within a context of subordination to, and exploitation by, western multinationals. Thus the relationship between indigenous development and Indian firms’ integration and growth within a wider world economy has been paid little attention. This call . . . seeks to place the development of Indian business in its wider relationships to both the Indian domestic economy and the world economy. For a fuller discussion of the...

Items of interest from around the web: The corporate archives of Woolworth's UK have been donated to the University of Reading Archives at the University's Museum of English Rural Life (MERL). Following preservation work and cataloguing, the collection will soon be accessible to researchers. The 99% Invisible website recently featured an article on "Machines for Living In: How Technology Shaped a Century of Interior Design." The Harvard Business Review has posted "When America Was Most Innovative and Why," by Ufuk Akcigit, John Grigsby, and Tom Nicholas. In other HBS faculty news, there is an interesting interview in the Harvard Gazette with David Moss about his new book, Democracy: A Case Study (Harvard University Press), which uses the case method to chart the development of American democracy; many of the nineteen cases relate directly to business history. And "Live Mint" has an interview with Geoffrey Jones of HBS on ...

The Economic History Society (EHS) will hold its annual meeting at Royal Holloway, University of London, on March 31-April 2, 2017. The program , which includes links to the full text of a number of the papers, is now available on the conference website. It . The conference features a plenary lecture , delivered by Professor Tim Hatton (University of Essex), "Heights and health since 1870: the long and the short of it"; and the Tawney Lecture, presented by Professor Bishnupriya Gupta (University of Warwick), "Falling behind and catching up: India’s transition from a colonial economy."       Readers can also find a link to the conference booklet , which contains abstracts of the new researchers' and academic session papers.

The National Museum of American History at the Smithsonian has launched a new web exhibit on "The Advertising Business." According to the introduction, The advertising business shaped the relationship between producers and consumers. Starting with newspapers, advertising financed media in the U.S., ensuring that it all became commercialized. Advertisers defined the benefits of consumption for Americans, linking products to personal improvement, convenience, and national progress. Admen and a few adwomen developed selling expertise that manufacturers and retailers came to rely on and that made consumption a central part of American life. The well-illustrated exhibit is divided into five chronological segments, from the 1750s to the present day. Topics addressed include patent medicines, racial and gender barriers and stereotypes, the rise of branding, the uses of direct mail, and critiques of advertising.

The 9th edition of the EBHA (European Business History Association) Summer School will take place in Ancona (Italy) from Monday, September 4, to Saturday, September 9, 2017. It is organized jointly by the European Business History Association (EBHA), the Università Politecnica delle Marche, and the Italian Association for Business History (ASSI). Students will be accommodated in the beautiful town of Ancona to debate and discuss their research with leading international scholars.        The theme for the school will be "Business History: Debates, Challenges and Opportunities." The school will focus on theoretical, methodological and practical issues which are of relevance for advanced research in business history. The main aim of the school is to provide students with a full understanding of the newest trends in research in the field and to provide a friendly atmosphere in which to discuss their preliminary findings with leading scholars as well as among their pe...

The Business History Conference is sponsoring a panel at the 2017 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Genders, and Sexualities , to be held at Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York, on June 1-4, 2017. The BHC panel is session 1243, "Gendering and Re-gendering Market Actors, 1870-1950." Chaired by Pamela Walker Laird, the session features papers by Aiala Levy, Daniel Levinson Wilk, and Mark J. Crowley.      Other sessions of interest include: 1182: "Black Women and Global Capitalism in the Post War Era" 1543: "Gender, Wealth, and Women's Economic Strategies in the Anglo-Atlantic World" 1509: "Pocketbook Power: Women's Consumption and Activism in the Late Twentieth Century" 1323: "Bodies under Capitalism" 1355: "Black Women and Their Property: Comparing 18th and 19th-Century Brazil and Africa" 1130: "Racialized and Gendered Experiences with Consumer Capitalism" 1803: "The Politic...

The African Economic History Network (AEHN), in association with the Laboratory for the Economics of Africa’s Past (LEAP) at Stellenbosch University, Harvard University’s Center for African Studies , and Economic Research Southern Africa , announces a call for papers for the seventh annual meeting of the AEHN, which will be held on October 25-27, 2017, in Stellenbosch, South Africa. The conference theme is "Innovation and the African Past."     Papers on all aspects of African economic history are welcome, but preference will be given to those that pertain to the conference theme. Abstracts of 500 words should be submitted to leap@sun.ac.za no later than May 15, 2017 . Some funding will be available for graduate students and faculty from Africa. Those in need of such funds should so indicate in their proposal emails.

A number of BHC members and their work have recently been featured in non-academic venues: Edward Balleisen was interviewed on the Ralph Nader Radio Hour about his recent book , Fraud: An American History from Barnum to Madoff (Princeton University Press, January 2017). There is also a print interview with Balleisen on the Christian Science Monitor website. A book by Wendy Gamber , The Notorious Mrs. Clem: Murder and Money in the Gilded Age (Johns Hopkins University Press, July 2016), was considered in a review essay in the Times Literary Supplement [gated]. The book was also mentioned in Marilyn Stasio's "New True-Crime Books for Fall" in the New York Times Book Review . Sharon Ann Murphy wrote about her research on money in the early American economy for Time magazine. Her new book is Other People's Money: How Banking Worked in the Early Republic (Johns Hopkins University Press, February 2017). Marc Levinson and his recent book , An Extraordinar...

In December, we highlighted the sessions at the upcoming Organization of American Historians (OAH) meeting that were sponsored by the BHC. This post is a follow-up, listing sessions and papers of interest but not BHC-affiliated. [Note: OAH sessions are not numbered or linked, so references are to the page location on the program PDF.] "Coming to the Table: Agribusiness and Food Systems in the Twentieth Century," p. 51 "State Formation, Capital, and Governance: Managing Urban Inequality, 1880–1980," p. 54 Assessing the Damages to 'Human Capital': Law, Labor, and Affective Bonds in Historical Perspective," p. 54 "Economic Circulations in the Early American Republic," p. 66 "Racism in American Political Economy: A Critical and Historical Assessment," p. 67 "Reconstruction and American Capitalism," p. 72 "Historians of Capitalism and Labor—A Conversation," p. 74 "Bodies, Agents, and Exchange: Legal an...