A very detailed map of medieval trade routes in Europe, Asia, and Africa in the 11th and 12th centuries, including major and minor locations, sea routes, canals, and roads, has been created by Martin Jan Mansson.
The National Museum of American History blog explores how board games have been teaching Americans to shop. And Sara Georgini wrote an essay for S-USIH on "The Way We Shop Now," offering a list of fictional works that explore how salespeople have been portrayed "for scholars interested in using literature to decode the history of capitalism.
Also of interest from S-USIH, Andy Seal has a series of posts on the 'new history of capitalism':
- "When Did the History of Capitalism Become New? Periodizing the Field";
- "Two Paths for the History of Capitalism: Commodification and Proletarianization";
- "Newsworthiness, Social Construction, and the History of Capitalism";
- "Commodity Histories, Complicity, and the New History of Capitalism"; and
- "The New History of Capitalism and What It Owes to Poststructuralism."
Business History has a recent special issue of note: Vol. 60, no. 7 (2018) offers "New Perspectives on 20th-Century European Retailing." The Introduction by Peter Scott and Patrick Fridenson is available ungated.
In other special issue news, Vol. 13, no. 4 (2018) of Management & Organizational History looks at "War and Peace in Organizational Memory," with Victoria Barnes and Lucy Newton serving as guest editors. Their Introduction and also their article in the issue, "War memorials in organizational memory: a case study of the Bank of England," are currently open access.
FRASER, repository of the Federal Reserve's historical digital data, has recently made available searchable text of The Merchants' Magazine and Commercial Review from 1839 through 1870. The magazine aimed to discuss "every subject that can be interesting or useful to the merchant."
Two web projects of interest on French business history:
TOFLIT18 is a project dedicated to French trade statistics from 1716 to 1821. It combines "a historical trade database that covers French external trade comprising more than 500,000 flows at the level of partners and individual products with a range of tools that allows the exploration of the material world of the Early Modern period." There is a preliminary use's guide available here.
DFIH (Data for Financial History) presents data on firms and securities prices listed on the Paris stock exchange from 1795 to 1976. This projects is a work in progress and will be updated as more information is added.
Richard Baldwin has written a five-part essay for Voxeu, "A Long View of Globalisation in Short," drawing on his 2016 book, The Great Convergence: Information Technology and the New Globalization (Harvard University Press).
Ellen Hartigan-O’Connor and Lisa Materson of the University of California, Davis, are featured in the University of California news blog discussing their recent collaboration on The Oxford Handbook of American Women's and Gender History.
And Heidi Tworek is featured in the University of British Columbia news magazine, discussing her work on the history of news and other topics (her book, News from Germany The Competition to Control World Communications, 1900–1945, is forthcoming from Harvard University Press).
Harold Demsetz, Arthur Andersen UCLA Alumni Emeritus Professor of Business Economics and one of the pioneers of the 'New Institutional Economics,' died on January 4, 2019, at the age of 88. Obituaries may be found here and here.