The Exchange

The Center for the History of Business, Technology, and Society at the Hagley Museum and Library is recruiting for a twelve-month Research Fellow and Intern to take up duties as soon after September 1, 2018, as possible. The position requires approximately two days per week of work which must be conducted at Hagley, and permits the Fellow to make use of a private office for his/her own research activities. It may be held in conjunction with other employment (e.g., teaching or fellowships) so long as those duties do not interfere with Hagley responsibilities, especially Thursday events. Responsibilities include: To be present at Hagley on average two days per week, including attending and assisting as assigned at the Center’s author talks, seminars, conference, and brown bags; Conduct research interviews with visiting scholars that will be included in the Center’s "Stories from the Stacks" program; Obtain and edit blog articles from visiting scholars that will appear i...

A joint call for papers has been issued for "Investigating Mid-Atlantic Plantations: Slavery, Economies, and Space," to be held in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on October 17-19, 2019. The Program in Early American Economy and Society  (PEAES) at the Library Company of Philadelphia, the Stenton Museum , the McNeil Center for Early American Studies   (MCEAS),   Cliveden of the National Trust, and the Graduate Program in Historic Preservation at the University of Pennsylvania seek proposals to contribute scholarly findings at a conference exploring the creation and development of plantations in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century mid-Atlantic region. According to the call for papers: A real-world challenge to Thomas Jefferson’s vision of an agrarian republic of (white) smallholders, plantations were sites of concentrated wealth and exploitation. More familiar in a Southern context, mid-Atlantic plantations had their own forms, meanings, and relationships. This confer...

The editors of the Scandinavian Economic History Review have issued a call for papers for a special issue on "The quest for competitive markets: exploring competition and collusion in theory and practice in historical perspective."     According to the guest editors, Susanna Fellman (Gothenburg University & University of Helsinki) and Martin Shanahan (University of South Australia, Adelaide), the core focus will be to address questions concerning the connections between the legal/regulatory environment and company and/or cartel behaviour. The approach of the individual contributions can differ in methodology, and can have either a micro and/or a macro perspective, but each contribution should be profoundly historical in approach and should address the interaction and/or interdependence between the regulatory environment and cartel/firm behaviour. The deadline for submissions is November 30, 2018 . Potential contributors are encouraged to contact either of the guest...

A number of business historians have appeared in the media recently: With the launch of his new book, Temp: How American Work, American Business, and the American Dream Became Temporary (Viking, August 2018 ), Louis Hyman has made numerous press appearances. He wrote an OpEd for the New York Times titled "It's Not Technology That's Disrupting Our Jobs. " He was interviewed by  US News and World Report  on "The Temp Economy and the Future of Work" ; and he can be heard on WBUR's "On Point" discussing "The Origin Story of the Gig Economy."  The book itself was the subject of a "Books of the Times" review by Jennifer Szalai. Caitlin Rosenthal discussed her new book, Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management (Harvard University Press, August 2018), on NPR's "Marketplace" ; she wrote about her research in "How Slavery Inspired Modern Business Management" in the Boston Revie w; and John Griff...

We regret to report that well-known business historian Harold C. Livesay, most recently Clifford A. Taylor Professor in Liberal Arts at Texas A&M University, passed away on August 9, 2018. After a varied and unconventional early career that ranged from tomato picker to railroad yardmaster and beyond, Hal Livesay decided on an academic life. He received a B.A. from the University of Delaware in 1966 and a Ph.D. in History from the Johns Hopkins University in 1970.       His major publications include Merchants and Manufacturers: Studies in the Changing Patterns of Distribution [with Glenn Porter] (1971); Andrew Carnegie and the Rise of Big Business (1975); and American Made: Men Who Built the American Economy (1979). Livesay was an active member of the Business History Conference for many years, and he also served as president of the Economic and Business History Society (1990-1991). For a fuller description of his life (and a hint of his personality), readers a...

The annual conference of the Economic and Social History Society of Irela nd (ESHSI) will take place in Belfast on November 30-December 1, 2018, at Queen's University Belfast. According to the call for papers , the meeting will not have a specific theme; rather, the organizers welcome proposals on any topic in economic and social history.       Abstracts of papers and proposals for panels should be sent to Dr. Graham Brownlow ( graham.brownlow@qub.ac.uk ) by October 5, 2018 . Abstracts should be between 250 and 300 words, and panel proposals should include a title, contact details for all speakers, and abstracts for all papers to be included in the session. For more details, please see the ESHSI website and the full call for papers .

The Trustees of the Business History Conference are happy to announce that Dr. Paula de la Cruz Fernández has been selected from a field of candidates to become the new editor of "The Exchange."      Dr. de la Cruz-Fernández received her BA in History and MA in Anthropology from the Universidad de Granada (Spain) and received her doctorate in History at Florida International University in Miami, Florida (United States). She is a historian and researcher of gender, culture, and multinationals, and she has published in Enterprise and Society and Business History Review . Her Enterprise and Society article on the Singer Sewing Machine Company was awarded the 2015 Mira Wilkins Prize for the best article published annually in the journal pertaining to international and comparative business history. She currently works as a digital archivist at the George A. Smathers Libraries at the University of Florida in Gainesville, Florida. Dr. de la Cruz-Fernández is also a digital...

The Legal History Blog has announced that the site's guest blogger in August will be Laura Phillips Sawyer , assistant professor at the Harvard Business School, where she was previously a Newcomen Fellow. Sawyer is also a member of the BHC's Board of Trustees.       Her research focuses on U.S. political economy in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, particularly on competition law and policy and its administration. She is the author of the recently released American Fair Trade: Proprietary Capitalism, Corporatism, and the "New Competition," 1880-1940 (Cambridge University Press). Her first post of the month concerns "Blending Business History and Legal History."

The 54th Congress of the Business History Society of Japan (BHSJ) will meet in Kyoto, Japan, on September 29-30, 2018. The preliminary program is now available on the meeting website . As in the recent past, there will be several sessions in English, as well as an English-language plenary session. The latter, titled "Situating Business History: Going Beyond National, Disciplinary and Methodological Boundaries," will be chaired by Takafumi Kurosawa and Junko Watanabe, with discussion by Takafumi Kurosawa, Pierre-Yves Donzé, Teresa da Silva Lopes, Matthias Kipping, and Andrea Lluch.     In addition, the BHSJ Congress will include the 32d meeting of the Fuji Conference , which will take place on September 30 and have as a theme "Toward Global Business History: A Focus on the Electrical and Electronic Equipment Industry." Fuji Conference sessions are conducted in English.     Note that "early bird" registration closes on August 15 ; thereafter, on-line r...

The 2019 annual meeting of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic (SHEAR) will be held in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on July 18-21. The call for papers has just been posted: The program committee invites proposals for sessions and papers exploring all aspects of and approaches to the history and culture of the early American republic, c. 1776-1861. We particularly encourage submissions that reflect the diversity of the past, but also address the most pressing issues of the present;  fill gaps in the historical narrative and/or historiography;  focus on pedagogy, public history, digital humanities, and other alternative methodologies;  foster audience participation, feature pre-circulated papers, or assess the state of a given field. Individual proposals will be considered, but the program committee gives priority to proposals for complete panels that include a chair and commentator.  The submission deadline is December 1, 2018 . For mo...

Two of the 2018-2019 programs at the Folger Shakespeare Institute in Washington, D.C. will be of particular interest to readers (note that each seminar has its own application deadline): Jennifer L. Morgan of New York University will head a colloquium entitled "Finance, Race, and Gender in the Early Modern Atlantic World."   From the website description: In recent years, a host of new scholarship exploring the relationship between slavery and capitalism has emerged. How might this new canon be reconfigured by a thorough consideration of race and gender in tandem with histories of fungibility and value? . . .  Interrogating early modern notions of finance by asking how they intersected with, shaped, and were shaped by categories of race and gender will garner new understandings of these interrelated processes. This year-long colloquium will explore those intersections between histories of race, gender, and finance that culminate in early modern Atlantic slavery. The dea...

As the summer flies by, a reminder that the deadline for all paper and panel proposals for the 2019 annual meeting of the Business History Conference is October 1, 2018 . The theme of the meeting, which will be held in Cartagena de Indias, Colombia, on March 14–16, 2019, is “Globalization and De-Globalization: Shifts of Power and Wealth.” According to the organizers, the conference "aims to concentrate on business history research agendas that enable a nuanced understanding of the phenomena of globalization and de-globalization. The conference theme encourages contributions from a variety of approaches to business history research, covering a broad range of geographies and periods."     For much more, including suggested topics, submission procedures, and information about the Kerr and Krooss prizes and the Doctoral Colloquium, please see the full call for papers .

The Economic History Society of Australia and New Zealand (EHSANZ) and the All-UC Group in Economic History invite papers and proposals for sessions for the joint Asia Pacific Economic and Business History (APEBH) and All-UC Group conference to be held at the California Institute of Technology on February 8-9, 2019. The organizers welcome proposals for contributions on the conference theme, “Decline and Rise: Asia since the Industrial Revolution,” from any aspect in economic history. While submissions for papers or panels on the conference topic will be given preference, submissions on all topics in economic history are welcome.     The conference keynote, the Noel Butlin Lecture, will be given by Philip Hoffman from the California Institute of Technology. Researchers across a broad range of related disciplines, including business and social history, are warmly welcomed; early career researchers and especially graduate students are particularly encouraged to attend. Limit...

News of interest from around the web: The program for the Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR) annual meeting, held in June, remains available online; several panels address topics relating business, economics, and foreign relations. George Robb can be viewed discussing his book Ladies of the Ticker at the Museum of American Finance on YouTube. Two bits of news from MIT: an interview with Anne McCants , vice-president of the International Economic History Association and chair of the World Congress, which opens in Boston this week. an interview with MIT faculty member Caley Horan about her book manuscript, "Actuarial Age," which explores the cultural life of insurance and the role of risk-based thinking in shaping American institutions and daily life during the second half of the 20th century. The program for the recent meeting of the Society for the Study of French History, held at the University of Warwick, UK, is available online. W...