The Exchange

The final program of the World Economic History Congress , meeting in Boston on July 29-August3, 2018, is now up on the WEHC website. In addition to the many sessions, there will be three plenaries (plus the IEHA General Meeting): Sevket Pamuk will speak at the opening plenary on "Waves of Globalization and the Economic Historian." Thomas Piketty will give a keynote lecture on "Rising Inequality and the Changing Structure of Political Conflict." Jane Humphries and Claudia Goldin will speak at the closing plenary on "The Role of Women in Economic Growth": Humphries on "From the Wings to Centre Stage: Women and Economic Growth and Structural Change in Europe during the Pre-Industrial and Industrial Eras," and Goldin on "A Long Road: The Quest for Career and Family." Jan De Vries will serve as discussant. The Congress will also include special sessions on specific book titles, dissertation competition sessions, and two poster sess...

This week in the NEPHIS blog , Helena Varkkey (University of Malaya) comments on "The Emergence of an Export Cluster: Traders and Palm Oil in Early Twentieth-Century Southeast Asia" by Valeria Giacomin (Harvard-Newcomen Fellow in Business History), Enterprise and Society  19, (June 2018): 272-308. The editors of Enterprise & Society have made this article freely available for a limited time; the link is also available on the NEPHIS blog site.

The 2019 conference of the Economic History Society (EHS) will be held on April 5-7 at Queen's University Belfast. The conference program 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. The committee invites proposals for individual papers, as well as for entire sessions of 1.5-2 hours duration.     Papers should be submitted online via the link on the meeting website. For additional information, including details for submitting proposals for the "new researcher" sessions, please consult the EHS meeting website . The deadline for both regular and "new researcher" proposals is September 3, 2018 .

The "Runaway Slaves in Eighteenth-Century Britain" project has created a searchable database of well over eight hundred newspaper advertisements placed by masters and owners seeking the capture and return of enslaved and bound people who had escaped. Many were of African descent, though a small number were from the Indian sub-continent and a few were Indigenous Americans. The principal sources for this project are English and Scottish newspapers published between 1700 and 1780. Although some have been digitized, the poor quality of surviving newsprint makes digital text searching unreliable, so project researchers have surveyed thousands of newspaper issues in archives all over Britain, some in their original print form as well as many more on microfilm or digital form. The database contains full transcriptions of the advertisements, and when possible photographic reproductions.      The project is a product of the Department of History at the University of Glasgow, h...

The 100th anniversary meeting of the Agricultural History Society will be held in Washington, D.C., on June 6-8, 2019; the theme will be “ Power in Agricultural History.” According to the call for papers, Power, in its multiple guises—whether political, social, economic, or physical—is embedded in every aspect of agricultural production, food and fiber marketing and consumption, and rural society and culture. The organizing theme is meant to encourage historians who refuse to accept that the current and future conditions of farms, food systems, and rural society and culture are the result of autonomous logics. Session proposals should include a two-hundred-word abstract for each paper and a one-page CV for each panel member; individual paper proposals should consist of a two-hundred-word abstract and a one-page CV. All proposals should be submitted electronically in MS Word format to the program committee by email at: aghist2019@gmail.com . Deadline for submissions is September ...

The Economic History Association (EHA) is meeting in Montreal, Canada, on September 7-9, 2018; the preliminary program has now been posted as a webpage, with more details available in the brochure version .  The theme of the meeting is “ 'From Plague, Famine, and War, Save us, O Lord': Shocks and Disasters in Economic History.” In addition to regular sessions, there will also be a plenary chaired by Gregory Clark on “Deaths of Despair and the Failure of American Capitalism,” featuring Anne Case and Angus Deaton of Princeton University, and Cormac O’Grada will present his presidential address, titled “The Next World and the New World: Relief, Migration, and the Great Irish Famine.”     The EHA conference website also includes registration, transportation, and lodging information. Note that pre-registration will close on August 15 . Questions may be addressed to Jari Eloranta, EHA meeting coordinator, at elorantaj@appstate.edu .

News of interest from around the web: On BackStory radio, a new program on "The Shock of the New: The Legacy of the 1893 World's Fair" in Chicago; among those interviewed: Bernard Carlson and Robert Rydell. Sharon Murphy can be heard discussing her current research on slavery and banking on Rhode Island Public Radio. A short interview with Harry Stout about his book, American Aristocrats: A Family, a Fortune, and the Making of American Capitalism , with John Fea on his blog, "The Way of Improvement Leads Home." The Business History Review is offering free access to a collection of "Editors' Picks" articles . Interesting online exhibition at the James Ford Bell Library at the University of Minnesota: "Trade and Commerce in 17th-Century England: Proclamations."  Tiffany Gill , associate professor of Africana Studies and History at the University of Delaware, has been named the school's inaugural Cochran Scholar. At ...

Readers who have not visited the "Who Makes Cents?" podcast site for some time will find a number of interviews of interest; for example, Joshua Clark Davis on activist business in the 1960s and 1970s Bryant Simon on the Hamlet fire and the politics of chicken Mehrsa Baradaran on her recent book about the history of the racial wealth gap and the role of black banks Kim Phillips-Fein on fiscal crisis and austerity politics in New York City Christy Chapin on the centrality of insurance companies to American health care LaShawn Harris on black women and the informal economy Daniel Amsterdam on the business campaign to expand government spending Eric Rauchway on how FDR and Keynes ended the Depression Beginning in April 2018, new episodes are also available on the Verso blog .

The "Transcontinental Railroad" website was created by the Linda Hall Library with support from the BNSF (Burlington Northern Santa Fe) Foundation. It offers visitors a brief history of the building of the transcontinental railroad, as well as general information on the history and technology of nineteenth-century railroads. Most important, it offers full text access to the Linda Hall Library’s extensive collection of nineteenth-century railroad periodicals .     Check here for more digital exhibits from the Linda Hall Library, which specializes in materials related to science, engineering, and technology.

A selection of (ungated) reviews of books in business and economic history: Charles O'Kelley reviews Naomi Lamoreaux and William Novak, eds., Corporations and American Democracy , for Jotwell. Loïc Bonneval reviews Alexia Yates, Selling Paris: Property and Commercial Capital in the Fin-de-Siècle Capital , for Books and Ideas. J. W. Mason reviews Mark R. Wilson, Destructive Creation: American Business and the Winning of World War II , for Dissent . Jason DeParle reviews Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America , for the New York Review of Books . Diane Coyle reviews William Deringer, Calculated Values: Finance, Politics, and the Quantitative Age , for her "Enlightened Economist" blog. Chris Corker reviews Paolo Di Martino, Andrew Popp and Peter Scott, eds., People, Places and Business Cultures: Essays in Honour of Francesca Carnevali , for EH.Net. Gail Triner reviews Kurt Mettenheim, Monetary St...

The Society for Historians of the Early American Republic (SHEAR) will hold its annual meeting in Cleveland, Ohio, on July 19-22, 2018. The preliminary program has now been posted online. In addition to the many individual papers on business and economic history, readers of this blog may be particularly interested in Session 12, "Labor Markets Created By, For, and In Women," chaired by Ellen Hartigan-O'Connor Session 17, "States of Speculation: Western Lands and the Forging and Fracturing of the Early Republic," chaired by Christopher Clark Session 22, "Morality and Markets: Regulating Capitalism in the Early Republic," chaired by Whitney Martinko Session 27, "Metal, Machinery, and Manpower: Free and Coerced Labor in the Early Industrial South," chaired by Frank Byrne Session 46, "Family, Labor, and Capitalism," chaired by Scott Sandage Sesson 52, "Financial Opportunity and Adversity in the Not-So-Old South," c...

The Smithsonian Institution has launched a new exhibition titled "Cultivating America's Gardens," which will run in its physical form through August 2018. In addition to displaying many beautiful images, the online component of the exhibition has a section called  "Gardening as Enterprise."  The segment covers selling seeds and plant breeding and features many illustrations of seed catalogs and trade cards.     Those with a special interest in this topic might also take a look at the Smithsonian's main seed and nursery catalog site , as well as its "American Seed and Nursery Industry" page , which provides bibliographies and biographical information about many in that industry.

Most major U.S. research libraries and centers have fellowship programs; in the United States, meta-lists include the Association of Research Libraries membership list and the National Archives list of presidential libraries ; see also "Research Grants at Presidential Libraries."  Looking ahead to the 2019-2020 academic year, we provide a (very) partial listing of major research organizations that offer fellowships. American Antiquarian Society Fellowships American Philosophical Society Fellowships Baker Library Fellowships , Harvard Business School Bancroft Library Fellowships , University of California Berkeley Beinecke Library Fellowships , Yale University Clements Library Fellowships , University of Michigan David Library of the American Revolution Fellowships Folger Shakespeare Library Fellowships Hagley Museum and Library Fellowships Harry Ransom Center Fellowships , University of Texas Austin Houghton Library Fellowships , Harvard University Hunting...