The Exchange

The Association of Business Historians (ABH) will hold its next annual meeting at Sheffield Hallam University on July 4-6, 2019; the theme of the conference will be "Business Transformation in an Uncertain World." According to the call for papers, Businesses have always operated in a shifting and uncertain environment. Such uncertainty has stemmed from a variety of factors including the surprising behaviour of rivals, the advent of new and sometimes disruptive technologies (such as steam power or electricity), changes in consumer tastes, the tightening or relaxation of regulation, macroeconomic disturbances (such as depressions), natural and industrial disasters, national-ization, political crises and war. The conference seeks to explore how businesses (and business organizations) in the past charted their way through an uncertain world, whether reactively or creatively through reorganization and the development of new strategies to secure an advantage. Failure may be as...

Reviews of interest, mostly ungated, published over the summer: Edward Balleisen,  Fraud: An American History from Barnum to Madoff ,  reviewed by  Cristie Ford for Jotwell. Hartmut Berghoff, Jan L. Logemann, and Felix Römer, eds.,  The Consumer on the Home Front: Second World War Civilian Consumption in Comparative Perspective ,  reviewed by  Manuel Schramm for H-German. Fahad Ahmad Bishara,  A Sea of Debt: Law and Economic Life in the Western Indian Ocean, 1780-1950 ,  reviewed by  Johan Mathew for H-IslamInAfrica. Trevor Burnard and John Garrigus,  The Plantation Machine: Atlantic Capitalism in French Saint-Domingue and British Jamaica , and Paul Cheney,  Cul-de-Sac: Patrimony, Capitalism and Slavery in French Saint-Domingue , jointly  reviewed by  Andy Cabot for Books and Ideas. William J. Collins and Robert A. Margo, eds.,  Enterprising America: Businesses, Banks, and Credit Markets in Historical Persp...

A final 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 Portuguese Association of Economic and Social History  (APHES) will hold its next annual meeting in Lisbon, Portugal, on November 16-17. The theme will be "Gender in Economic and Social History." The keynote address will be delivered by Jane Humphries, emeritus professor of economic history at the University of Oxford and Fellow of All Souls College.     Online registration for the meeting is now open: early bird registration concludes September 30 ; online registration closes on October 15 . All registrants must be members of the APHES. When available, the full program will be accessible  here .

The 2018 fall conference , sponsored by the Center for the History of Business, Technology, and Society at the Hagley Museum and Library, will take place on November 8-9.  The topic, "Seeing Like a Capitalist: Histories of Commercial Surveillance in America," will examine the "non-state surveillance activities that might be found in a variety of business settings and industries, involve a range of formal or informal practices, and might be directed at customers, media audiences, borrowers, consumer markets, employees, or labor." The program has now been posted on the Hagley website.     Sarah E. Igo (Vanderbilt University) will open the conference with a keynote address on Thursday, evening, November 8, in which she will discuss her new book, The Known Citizen: A History of Privacy in Modern America (Harvard University Press, May 2018). Conference panels will take place throughout the day on Friday, November 9.           There is no fee, b...

News of interest from around the web: From H-Soz-u-Kult, a summary [in English] of the presentations at a workshop, "Business and the Law: Perspectives on Legal Change," held at the University of Bayreuth in June. The Center for the History of Business, Technology, and Society at the Hagley Museum and Library has announced that the 2018–2019 Jefferson Scholars/Hagley Library Fellow in Business and Politics will be A. J. Murphy, a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at Columbia University. An interesting blog maintained by Irwin Collier: "Economics in the Rear-View Mirror: Archival Artifacts from the History of Economics." Stephen Mihm of the University of Georgia has been awarded a grant of $60,000 under the NEH's Public Scholar Program for a book project entitled "Industrial and Technical Standards in Modern Life: A History," on the history, from the late eighteenth century to the present, of the industrial and technical standa...

A (by no means complete) listing of new and forthcoming books of interest for this summer, covering late May-September 2018: Bernardo Batiz-Lazo,  Cash and Dash: How ATMs and Computers Changed Banking  (Oxford University Press, September 2018) Michael Bliss,  Northern Enterprise: Five Centuries of Canadian Business  (new ed., ed. John Turley-Ewart) (Rock's Mills Press, August 2018) [no publisher page]. William D. Bryan,  The Price of Permanence: Nature and Business in the New South  (University of Georgia Press, August 2018) John W. Chaffee,  The Muslim Merchants of Premodern China: The History of a Maritime Asian Trade Diaspora, 750–1400  (Cambridge University Press, August 2018) Nicholas Crafts,  Forging Ahead, Falling Behind and Fighting Back: British Economic Growth from the Industrial Revolution to the Financial Crisis  (Cambridge University Press, September 2018) Ben Dew,  Commerce, Finance, and Statecraft: Histor...

As the new academic year begins, we again offer a round-up of ongoing workshops, forums, and discussion groups in business and economic history. Please check each website for more detailed information. Some groups, particularly those in non-US universities, may not yet have posted Fall 2018 information; in those cases, a link to the home site or last available listing is included.      In addition to their value for those able to participate directly, these groups often maintain mailing lists and sometimes make speakers' papers freely available. Business History Seminar , Harvard Business School Business History @ Erasmus Seminars Center for the History of Business, Technology, and Society  (Hagley) Research Seminars Columbia University Seminar in Economic History Economic History Seminar , LSE Economic History Seminar , Stern School of Business, NYU Economic History Seminar , University of California, Berkeley Economic History Workshop , Stanford Un...

The Economic History Association (EHA) has just completed its annual meeting, this year held in Montreal, Canada. The organization has announced its award recipients: The Allan Nevins Prize for the best dissertation in U.S. or Canadian economic history: Gillian Brunet, “Understanding The Effects of Fiscal Policy: Measurement, Mechanisms, and Lessons from History” (University of California Berkeley) Alexander Gerschenkron Prize for the Best Dissertation in non-US or Canadian economic history:  Erik Prawitz, “On the Move: Essays on the Economic and Political Development of Sweden” (Stockholm University) Jonathan Hughes Prize for Excellence in Teaching Economic History:  Howard Bodenhorn (Clemson University) Arthur H. Cole Prize for the best article published in the Journal of Economic History Mohamed Saleh, “On the Road to Heaven: Taxation, Conversions, and the Coptic-Muslim Socioeconomic Gap in Medieval Egypt” (June 2018) Ranki Prize for the best book published in ...

Those unable  to attend the 2018 European Business History Association (EBHA) congress , currently taking place at the Università Politecnica delle Marche in Ancona, Italy, might wish to check out the final version of the meeting program . Nearly 75 of the papers have been uploaded and are freely available. Facebook users can see images on the EBHA Facebook site ; on Twitter it's #ebha2018 .

A number of business historians have written or been quoted in blog posts recently. A sampling: For the Economic History Society blog, "The Long Run," Aaron Graham writes "Wages of Sin: Slavery and the Banks, 1830-50," drawing on data from the "Legacies of British Slave Ownership Project." For SHOT's "Technology's Stories" blog, Daniel Levinson Wilk writes about " A Brief Episode in the History of Dusting." For the Society of U.S. Intellectual History blog, Andy Seal begins a series "Asking New Questions of the New History of Capitalism." Subsequent posts so far are "When Did the History of Capitalism Become New? Periodizing the Field" and "Two Paths for the History of Capitalism: Commodification and Proletarianization." On "Black Perspectives," the blog of the African American Intellectual History Society, Paige Glotzer writes about "The Connections between Urban Developm...

The 2018 World Economic History Congress (WEHC) in Boston is over, but materials of interest remain on the website. The media page for the Congress has links to the slides presented by each of the plenary speakers, as well as links to interviews with Thomas Piketty and Anne McCants. The site also lists the winners of both the dissertation and the poster competitions.     For those on Facebook or Twitter, posts of interest can be found at the WEHC2018 Facebook site , at the Twitter account @ WEHC2018 ., and with #wehc2018 .