The Exchange

Enterprise & Society: The International Journal of Business History , which is published for the Business History Conference by Cambridge University Press, is looking for a book review editor to replace Richard Weiner who will step down in June 2017. The book review editor works closely with the editor of the journal, Andrew Popp, and serves as a member of the editorial board for the journal.     From its foundation, the journal's book review section has been distinguished not only by the quality of its reviews but also by the range of books that it has covered. The ideal candidate for the position will carry on and extend this tradition. S/he will be someone with broad intellectual interests and multiple networks in the field of business history and related fields. S/he will have strong administrative and organizational skills. It should be noted, however, that much of the administration of the book review process is conducted electronically. As a result, the jou...

The 2018 meeting of the Economic History Society will be held at Keele University, on April 6-8. According to the call for papers : The conference programme committee welcomes proposals on all aspects of economic and social history covering a wide range of periods and countries and, particularly welcomes 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 at the previous year's conference. The committee invites proposals for individual papers, as well as for entire sessions of 1.5-2 hours duration (no more than 4 papers will be accepted for any one session). Please note that the committee reserves the right to determine which papers will be presented in the session if it is accepted. If a session is not accepted, the committee may incorporate one or more of the proposed papers into other panels. Proposals should...

New books of interest, April-June 2017: Rosemary Feurer and Chad Pearson , eds., Against Labor: How U.S. Employers Organized to Defeat Union Activism (University of Illinois Press, April 2017) Courtney Fullilove , The Profit of the Earth: The Global Seeds of American Agriculture (University of Chicago Press, April 2017) Charles R. Geisst , Loan Sharks: The Birth of Predatory Lending (Brookings Institution Press, April 2017) David Higgins and Steven Toms , eds., British Cotton Textiles: Maturity and Decline (Routledge, May 2017) Jane Hooper , Feeding Globalization: Madagascar and the Provisioning Trade, 1600–1800 (Ohio University Press, May 2017) Julian Hoppit , Britain's Political Economies: Parliament and Economic Life, 1660–1800 (Cambridge University Press, June 2017) Katherine Rye Jewell , Dollars for Dixie: Business and the Transformation of Conservatism in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge University Press, April 2017) Geoffrey Jones , Profits and S...

Harvard Business School invites applications for its business history fellowships and grants for 2018-2019; please note the specific deadlines for each grant. 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. This fellowship 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. This fellowships will also provide an opportunity for the fellow to participate in the activities of Harvard Business School.     Applicants should submit a CV, undergraduate transcript and graduate-school record, thesis abstract, and writing sample (such as an article or a book chapter). Applicants should also...

The 23rd annual conference of the Omohundro Institute for Early American History and Culture (OIEAHC) will convene June 15-17, 2017, in Ann Arbor, Michigan, hosted by the Department of History at the University of Michigan. The conference’s theme will be “Taking Stock.” The program for the meeting has now been posted.     Sessions of particular interest include No. 3, "Everyday Economies," chaired by Christine Desan with commentary by Lindsey Regele No. 11, "Roundtable on the Moral Economy of Antislavery: Human Bondage and Economic Development in the Anglophone Atlantic" No. 19, "Centering Jamaica: New Directions in the Histories of Gender, Violence, and Illicit Trade" Several other sessions feature individual papers of interest on related topics such as slavery, gender, and empire.       In addition to panels and roundtables, the conference will feature a THis Camp on podcasting with Liz Covart, creator of Ben Franklin's World and Doing Hi...

Lots of business history material out there recently; a sampling: JoAnne Yates and her work on business communications featured prominently in a Washington Post article related to the Comey memoranda stories. That piece was followed by a supportive pair of tweets from Paul Krugman, here and here , where he notes, "Her work on the history of business communication is, by the way, fascinating and revelatory." The NEP-HIS blog has a review by Adrian E. Tschoegl of Catherine Schenk's recent BHR article, "Rogue Trading at Lloyds Bank International, 1974: Operational Risk in Volatile Markets." [Limited time free access to the BHR article here .] Geoff Jones has written an essay for the Oxford University Press blog on "Can green entrepreneurs save our planet?" based on his forthcoming book, Profits and Sustainability: A History of Green Entrepreneurship . The "JSTOR Daily" used an Enterprise & Society article by Daniel Robinson, ...

Several times in the past, we have posted links to materials on the Global Urban History Blog , which offers short articles, book reviews, and conversations relevant to field of global urban history. The scholars who manage that blog have joined with others to launch the "Global Urban History Project" (GUHP), "a meeting place for scholars interested in exploring the crossroads of urban history and global history." According to the new GUHP website, The Project was formed by merging several already existing networks of scholars from a wide range of associations and from many parts of the world. . . . The GUHP is based on a broad understanding of global urban history as encompassing any effort to think of cities as creations or creators of larger-scale or global historical phenomena. It celebrates the fact that scholars approach the intersection of urban and global history from different directions. Some travel along “transnational turns” in various subfields. ...

On June 23, 2017, Queen's University Centre for Economic History , Queen's University Belfast, will host a Frontier Research in Economic and Social History (FRESH) meeting. FRESH meetings are aimed at researchers in any field of economic and social history and build on the concept that scholars present their ongoing research at an early stage--normally before it becomes available as a working paper, and certainly before it is published in books or journals. The main aim of the meetings is to gather researchers in a friendly and collegial environment where they can present their research and receive constructive criticism from their peers. The broad theme of the Belfast meeting is “Institutions, Capitalism and Economic History.” The keynote speaker will be Avner Offer, Chichele Professor Emeritus of Economic History at the University of Oxford.      For further information about the Belfast FRESH meeting, please contact the local organizers: Graham Brownlow ( gr...

The Association of Business Historians (ABH) is meeting at the University of Glasgow on June 29-July 1, 2017; the theme for the conference is "The Human Factor in Business History." The program has now been posted. Among sessions of particular interest are one organized by Jeff Fear, Catherine Schenk, and Andrea Schneider in honor of Chris Kobrak, featuring Schenk's paper on "Rhenish Capitalism and Globalisation: Deutsche Bank in London and New York 1989-1999," and a plenary on "The Professionalisation of Business History."     Registration and venue details are available on the ABH website . Note that early bird registration ends on May 21, 2017 .

Montréal, l’avenir du passé (MAP) is Canada’s oldest and largest historical GIS. The project team has been working on a new phase, which will be available for use in the coming month. In anticipation of that release, one of the project's leaders, Robert C. H. Sweeney, has written an essay for NICHE (Network in Canadian History & Environment), explaining the enhancements to the site: This exceptionally rich resource consists of four distinct elements: a new cartography of all properties in the city in 1903, detailing who owned what; an index of all household heads in the 1901 census linked to this map at the lot level; a 30% sample of the complete manuscript census returns of the city’s households; and a geo-referenced vector map of all 101,353 buildings in the city in 1912. These research tools for understanding Edwardian Montréal build on MAP’s earlier layers for 1880, 1846 and 1825, which are available online .  In detailing the work of the MAP group, Sweeney also dis...

The Conference on Historical Analysis and Research in Marketing (CHARM) is holding its biennial meeting in Liverpool, UK, at Liverpool John Moores University on June 1-4, 2017. The theme for this year's meeting is "Explorations in Globalization and Glocalization: Marketing History Through the Ages." The program for the event has now been posted on the CHARM website. Registration and accommodations information can be found on the meeting website . The CHARM meeting is preceded by a doctoral workshop ; the program and more information about that can be found on the meeting website as well.      Questions may be addressed to Jacqueline Wachholz .

The journal Business History has published a call for submissions for a special issue on "Health Industries in the Twentieth Century." According to the guest editors, Pierre-Yves Donzé and Paloma Fernández Pérez, the objective of this special issue is to contribute with a longitudinal, business history approach, to the analysis and understanding about the construction of health industries and services throughout the world since the 1900s. This volume will illustrate the role of path dependence and the diversity of models followed in different countries by which health was transformed, from local services, into a fast-growing business. Second, the articles to be included in the special issue will also emphasize the impact of the diverse institutional frameworks that contributed to define national health systems. Third, this special issue aims to shed new light about the emergence of new therapeutic agents and new frames of care and culture, and the influence of new actors ...

Legal scholar Zvi S. Rosen, in cooperation with the Law Library at George Washington University, has tracked down and coordinated the scanning of hundreds of pre-1870 U.S. copyright records . The GW Law Library is hosting the materials and has created a research guide.      Until mid-1870, copyright registration duties were handled by the local U.S. District Court of the author or proprietor, while the work itself was deposited in various places; in 1870, all copyright activities were consolidated in the Library of Congress. At that point the early records were supposed to be transmitted to the Library of Congress, but, as Rosen writes, "it’s been fairly well-known that a substantial number of records never made it to the Library, and these records have generally been assumed lost." Rosen describes his interest and the process he followed in unearthing many of the pre-1870 records, on his blog, " Mostly IP [Intellectual Property] History."    ...

The Economic and Business History Society (EBHS) will hold its 42nd annual meeting in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, on May 25-27, 2017. The preliminary program has now been posted on the conference website . The keynote address, to be delivered at the EBHS banquet on May 26, will be presented by Price Fishback, Thomas R. Brown Professor of Economics at the University of Arizona. His topic will be "The Latest News about the New Deal."     Details concerning registration and accommodations for the meeting are posted on the EBHS website .