The Exchange

This listing covers books published from January through May 2018. The listing does not include books published simultaneously in hardcover and paper. Mehrsa Baradaran,  How the Other Half Banks: Exclusion, Exploitation, and the Threat to Democracy  (Harvard University Press, March 2018 [2015]) Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman, eds.,  Slavery's Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development  (University of Pennsylvania Press, January 2018 [2016]) Dan Bouk,  How Our Days Became Numbered: Risk and the Rise of the Statistical Individual  (University of Chicago Press, February 2018 [2015]) Christy Clark-Pujara,  Dark Work: The Business of Slavery in Rhode Island  (New York University Press, March 2018 [2016]) George Colpitts,  Pemmican Empire: Food, Trade, and the Last Bison Hunts in the North American Plains, 1780–1882  (Cambridge University Press, March 2018 [2014]) Leon Fink,  The Long Gilded Age: American Cap...

The last "new in paperback" listing covered publications through June 2017, so we are well behind. This listing covers books published from June through December 2017. A following post will cover books published from January through May 2018. The listing does not include books published simultaneously in hardcover and paper. Pierpaolo Barbieri,  Hitler's Shadow Empire: Nazi Economics and the Spanish Civil War  (Harvard University Press, November 2017 [2015]) 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: December 2017 [January 2017]) Mansel G. Blackford,  Columbus, Ohio: Two Centuries of Business and Environmental Change  (Ohio State University Press, July 2017 [2016]) Christy Ford Chapin,  Ensuring America's Health: The Public Creation of the Corporate Health Care System  (Cambridge University Press, July 2017 [2015]) Wendy Gamber,  ...

The Federico-Tena World Trade Historical Database : "The available series of world trade covered mostly the advanced world and were hopelessly outdated as they did not take into account all the research on foreign trade of the last thirty years. In contrast, our data-set uses all the most recent research we are aware of and covers almost all polities (independent countries and colonies) in the world after 1850, with few . . . exceptions. . . . For each polity we estimate series of imports and exports at current and constant prices (in 1913 dollars), both at current and 1913 borders." The data are free to use with attribution; the compilers will continue to update the series. Measuring Worth [from Samuel H. Williamson]: "There are two missions of this site. The first is to make available to the public the highest quality and most reliable historical data on important economic aggregates, with particular emphasis on nominal (current-price) measures, as well as real (...

Harvard Business School is holding a conference on "Understanding and Overcoming the Roadblocks to Sustainability" that will meet on June 14, 2018. The meeting organizers write: Over the past several decades, a vibrant scholarly community has generated thousands of empirical and conceptual studies on the complex relationship between business and the natural environment. At the same time, many large corporations have created positions of Corporate Sustainability Officer with the goal of achieving steady improvements in their sustainability performance. Despite substantial academic research and management attention, complex ecological challenges continue to grow. This unfortunate disconnect between aspirations and reality has begun to provoke some self-reflection in the business and natural environment literature concerning its impact and relevance. .  . . Recent empirical business history research appears to show that profits and sustainability have been hard to reconcile t...

The 2018 Association of Business Historians (ABH) annual conference will be held on June 29-30 at the Open University Business School in Milton Keynes. With a theme of "Pluralistic Perspectives of Business History," the conference "aims to explore the impact of gender, social class, ethnicity, and religion on business success, fraud, funding, financial markets, corporate governance, and corporate social responsibility." The preliminary program is now available.      For additional information about the conference, please see the meeting website . Note that early registration closes on June 4 ; online registration will close on June 22 .

News of interest from around the web: The Winter 2018 edition of Financial History , the magazine of the Museum of American Finance, contains articles by Susie Pak on "Where Are They Now? " on the investment firm Blyth & Co., and by Joseph Martin and the late Chris Kobrak on "Evolution of the Canadian Currency and Banking Systems." The folks at BackStory interviewed Bernard Carlson and Paul Israel about Thomas Edison's reputation. Jon Kelvey writes in Smithsonian online about "How Advertising Shaped the First Opioid Epidemic." We're saddened to report the deaths of two well-known members of the business and economic history community. Tony Corley , who died on March 15, 2018, is remembered by Mark Casson; and Frank Lewis , who died on March 14, is memorialized by Ann Carlos, Ian Keay, and Taylor Jaworski on EH.Net.  The Mapping Early American Elections team has released over eighty maps of elections for Congress’s second decade....

Harvard Business School will host a conference on "New Perspectives on U.S. Regulatory History: Past and Present of Public Utilities and Antitrust Law," to be held June 4-5, 2018. According to the organizers, This research conference brings together leading historians and legal scholars interested in the history and future of the U.S. regulatory tradition. . . . [The] conference seeks to reinvigorate [Tom] McCraw’s insight that interdisciplinary dialogue is necessary to understand the complexities of modern regulatory policy. The schedule is available here. Please note that registration must be completed by May 22, 2018 . For registration information, as well as details about lodging and travel, please see the conference website. Questions may be directed to regulationconference@hbs.edu .

Every two years the Journal of Policy History and the Institute for Political History sponsor a conference on policy history. According to the website, "the primary goal behind the conference has been to provide an interdisciplinary forum for presentations and roundtable discussions on policy history topics and recent policy history research." The 2018 conference will be held in Tempe, Arizona, on May 16- 19. The program , available online, features a number of sessions of interest, particularly: Session 1-A: "Risking the Republic: Federal Policy and Financial Change in the Postwar Era," with Christy Ford Chapin, Sean Vanatta, Peter Conti-Brown, commentary by Mark Rose; Panel 4-C: "Conservative Challenges to the Great Society," chair and commentator, Elizabeth Tandy Shermer; Roundtable 3-H: Roundtable Discussion of Laura Phillips Sawyer’s American Fair Trade: Proprietary Capitalism, Corporatism, and the ‘New Competition,’ 1890-1940 , with Benjamin ...

Business History will publish a special issue on "Bank-Industry versus Stock Market-Industry Relationships: A Business History Approach." The guest editors are José L. García-Ruiz, Complutense University of Madrid, and Michelangelo Vasta, University of Siena. In their call for papers , they state: "It seems clear that much can be learned about the bank-industry and stock market-industry relationships if they are addressed from a Business History perspective, which until now has been almost completely neglected."      The editors welcome contributions on the history of the bank-industry and stock market-industry relationships, especially if they use interdisciplinary and new methodologies and cross-country comparisons.  Articles should be based on original research and should not be under consideration by other journal. All articles should be submitted via ScholarOne , using the drop-down menu to select submission to the appropriate special issue. The deadline fo...

The Business History Conference is looking for a new editor for this blog, "The Exchange." For the full announcement, see our earlier post . This is a great opportunity to serve while simultaneously keeping abreast of the business and economic history scholarly world!      Applicants should send a cover letter outlining interest in and aptitude for the position together with a CV to Shennette Garrett-Scott, Chair, Electronic Media Oversight Committee, at smgscott@olemiss.edu by May 15, 2018 . Questions can be directed either to Shennette at the listed email address or to Andrew Popp, BHC Secretary-Treasurer, at andrew.popp@liverpool.ac.uk .

A sample of business historians in the news in recent weeks: In Growth Policy from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, Geoffrey Jones talks about income inequality, sustainability, and corporate social responsibility. On Xerfi Canal, Eric Godelier of the Ecole Polytechnique can be viewed talking about "The Place of Culture in Management." In a recent article in the Baltimore Sun on the need for citywide street design, Paige Glotzer of Harvard University is quoted about the research in her forthcoming book on "Building Suburban Power: The Business of Exclusionary Housing Markets" Robert Wright of Augustana University is quoted in a recent Forbes article on "Is Economics Going Back to the 1800s? Maybe So." Several business historians have written recently for the "Made by History" series in the Washington Post [behind a paywall for some]:     Shane Hamilton on "The Great American Supermarket Lie"     Jason W...

An announcement from the Newberry Library in Chicago: Now anyone with an Internet connection can access over 200,000 high-resolution images from a range of primary sources—maps, manuscripts, books, pamphlets, photographs, and artwork—documenting Europeans’ evolving conception of the Americas, early contact between colonial forces and Indigenous peoples, the expanding boundaries of the United States, and the imaginary construction of “the West.” These images come from the Edward E. Ayer Collection , one of the strongest collections regarding American Indian history and culture in the world; and the Everett D. Graff Collection , a substantial aggregation of Western Americana that ranks among the most extensive in the country. Of special interest to business historians is the large number of business directories, trade cards, receipts, account books, and merchant advertisements one can find among the items in the Graff Collection. The Ayer Collection holds fascinating items such as...

The Economic and Business History Society (EBHS) will hold its next annual meeting at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland, from May 30 to June 2, 2018; the theme is "Early Modern Origins of Growth and Business." The preliminary program is now available on the meeting website; Deirdre McCloskey will give the opening keynote address.     Online registration continues until May 7, 2018 . For additional information about travel, lodging, meeting activities, and other details, please consult the EBHS Conference website .