The Exchange

The Centre for the History of Retailing and Distribution (CHORD) will hold a workshop on May 22, 2018, at the University of Wolverhampton on  "Retailing, Architecture and Material Culture: Historical Perspectives." Submissions are invited that explore the architecture, material environment, objects and material culture of retailing and distribution. Papers focusing on any historical period or geographical area are welcome, as are reflections on methodology and / or theory. Both experienced and new speakers are welcome, including speakers without an institutional affiliation. Both individual papers and shorter, 10-minute work in progress presentations will be considered.      To submit a proposal, please send the title and an abstract of 300 to 400 words, specifying whether the proposal is for a 10- or a 20-minute presentation, to Laura Ugolini at l.ugolini@wlv.ac.uk by March 2,  2018 .      For additional information, please see the full call...

The European Association for Banking and Financial History (EABH) has announced that its 2018 Annual Meeting will take place - in cooperation with the Fondazione 1563 per l'Arte e la Cultura della Compagnia di San Paolo - in Torino, Italy, on June 14-15, 2018. With the theme "The Social Aims of Finance," the conference will explore how financial institutions have tackled the question of their legitimacy and social usefulness by developing alternative goals and business forms for durable financial services.     The meeting will be accompanied by an archival workshop on 'good' archives. This workshop is designed for financial institutions' archivists, researchers and potential users and will reflect on the legacy of the social purposes that inspired the origins of many financial institutions and the role banks and finance played in society.      Please consult the full call for papers for additional details and a fuller explanation of the meeting theme. Pro...

As we in the United States celebrate the Thanksgiving holiday, marketing professor Samantha Cross discusses "How Advertising Shaped Thanksgiving as We Know It" in "The Conversation." She and her colleagues studied 99 years of Thanksgiving ads in Good Housekeeping magazine to find out how the success of marketing campaigns accounts for our near-universal association of turkey, cranberry sauce, and pumpkin pie with the holiday.

The Doing History podcast, edited by Liz Covart and recently brought under the auspices of the Omohundro Institute for Early American History and Culture (OIEAHC), has been producing high-quality material for several years now. Recent episodes have been focusing on the American Revolution, and the last three topics may be of particular interest to economic and business historians working in the colonial America field: The Revolutionary Economy , featuring Serena Zabin of Carleton College, author of Dangerous Economies: Status and Commerce in Imperial New York (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009) The Politics of Tea , featuring Jane Merritt of Old Dominion University, author of The Trouble with Tea: The Politics of Consumption in the Eighteenth-Century Global Economy (Johns Hopkins University Press) Smuggling and the American Revolution , with guests including Wim Klooster, Fabricio Prado, and Christian Koot In addition to links provided with each episode, additional mate...

The University of Bayreuth is holding a workshop on "Business and the Law: Historical Perspectives on Legal Change," which will take place on June 21-23, 2018. According to the organizers, The aim of the workshop is to understand legal change as a change in routines that affected the ways in which businesses and courts interpreted the "rules of the game." Such a change could manifest itself in written law or lead to a fundamentally different way of interpreting it. In both cases the focus needs to be on economic and legal practices, i.e. on the question what the law meant in its historical context and how it actually affected economic actions. We are looking for theoretical work as well as empirical case studies that help to shed light on the historical transformations of legal institutions at the intersection of businesses and the law. Travel costs and accommodation will be covered for the presenters of all accepted papers. The workshop will be organized as a...

The editors of the BHC journal Enterprise & Society have announced a new initiative to expand the content of the journal by publishing an annual 5th issue on a special topic, to be delivered online. According to Andrew Popp, Enterprise & Society editor, the goal of the 5th issue is "to significantly enhance the reach and impact of business history by creating a space in which to explore inter-disciplinary dialogue and address very large scale problems in ways that are beyond the scope of conventional original research articles and typical thematically focused special issues." Here is more from the general announcement on the Cambridge University Press website: The new fifth issue, which will be published online, will be a special issue unlike most others. Rather than seeking original research articles the aim is to generate bold, ambitious, synthetic articles that will spark debate, inspire future lines of work, and broaden audiences. Each issue will focus eit...

The European Business History Association (EBHA) will hold its next annual conference on September 6-8, 2018, in Ancona, Italy, hosted by the Università Politecnica delle Marche. The theme of the meeting will be "The Firm and The Sea: Chains, Flows and Connections."     According to the call for papers , The sea - whether considered as open ocean or as a mass of water bordered by land masses - is an enormous economic resource for mankind. Not only is it the principal way of transportation for goods and humans but it’s also a formidable source of food. Since we want to link the sea with the business unit (the firm, as well as other organizational units like clusters, networks and global value chains) the focus of the next EBHA conference will be on two units of analysis that are both extremely relevant for the sea as well as economic resources - ships and harbors.  Topics without ties to the sea or the firm will be given consideration, "provided that the prop...

New and forthcoming books of interest to business and economic historians, October-December 2017 (and a few earlier titles we missed): Leslie Berlin, Troublemakers: Silicon Valley's Coming of Age (Simon & Schuster, November 2017) Regina Lee Blaszczyk, Fashionability: Abraham Moon and the Creation of British Cloth for the Global Market (Manchester University Press, October 2017) Regina Lee Blaszczyk and Uwe Spiekermann, eds., Bright Modernity: Color, Commerce, and Consumer Culture (Palgrave, October 2017) Michael R. Cohen, Cotton Capitalists: American Jewish Entrepreneurship in the Reconstruction Era (NYU Press, December 2017) Pierre-Yves Donzé and Rika Fujioka, eds., Global Luxury: Organizational Change and Emerging Markets since the 1970s ( Palgrave, October 2017) Anne Fleming, City of Debtors: A Century of Fringe Finance (Harvard University Press, December 2017) Sarah Ruth Hammond, God's Businessmen: Entrepreneurial Evangelicals in Depression and War...

The next annual meeting of the Economic History Association (EHA) will take place in Montreal, Canada, on September 7-9, 2018. The theme for EHA 2018 is “‘From Plague, Famine, and War, Save us, O Lord’: Shocks and Disasters in Economic History.” As the call for papers explains: The age-old prayer refers to disasters that have blighted lives throughout history. The theme is an invitation for papers on the broader economic-historical aspects of such crises—environ- mental, climatic, humanitarian, economic, and other. . . . The theme of the 2018 meetings embraces topics such as the economic causes and consequences of wars and of other disasters; comparative and interdisciplinary analyses of famines and plagues from classical antiquity to modern times; analyses of the institutions that attempted to counter them; of their proximate and remoter causes (e.g. climate change); of their changing incidence over time; of the welfare gains from their eradication; and of their short- and long...

A run-down of sessions of particular interest to business historians that have current calls for papers listed on the WEHC website : "Centennial Enterprises as Sources of Innovation in Emerging Economies" "Classifying the Merchandises of the Waves of Globalisation (17th-20th Century)" "International Financial Institutions: Multilateral Investment and Development Banks since the Second World War" "Lessons from Insurance History: Markets, Regulation and Globalization" "The Institutional Foundations of Long-Distance Trade before Industrialization" "The Memory of Financial Crises across the Waves of Globalisation" Individual paper submissions to accepted sessions with open CFPs should be sent by email to organizers mentioned in the session description.

The next World Economic History Congress (WEHC) will be held in Boston, Massachusetts, on July 29-August 3, 2018. Panel proposals accepted during the second round are now online and are listed together with the first-round proposals. Panels from either round that still have open calls for papers are indicated in the listing.    Students who have completed their dissertations between June 2014 and August 2017 are encouraged to submit their theses for the dissertation panel/competition . Dissertations will be shortlisted and considered for awards in three separate categories: Ancient/medieval/early modern period; the long 19th century; and the 20th century. The three finalists in each category will be invited to present their work in the dissertation panel. Theses written in languages other than English will also be considered, although the abstract needs to be in English. The deadline for electronic submissions of the theses, along with information on past and current af...

Through its fellowships and travel grants, the Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation supports research projects that present creative approaches to the study of invention and innovation in American society. Projects may include (but are not limited to) historical research and documentation projects resulting in dissertations, publications, exhibitions, educational initiatives, documentary films, or other multimedia products. A comprehensive catalog of objects, manuscripts, images, and research materials held by the National Museum of American History (and other Smithsonian units) is available on the Smithsonian website .     The Lemelson Center invites applications covering a broad spectrum of research topics in the history of technology, invention, and innovation, but especially encourages project proposals whose topics align with one (or more) of the Lemelson Center’s strategic research and programmatic areas, including: (1) the cultivation and t...