The Exchange

 Earlier this month, the American Antiquarian Society (AAS) held a conference with the title, "Before Madison Avenue: Advertising in Early America." Now the Library Company of Philadelphia , in conjunction with the LCP's Visual Culture Program and the AAS's Center for Historic Visual Culture (CHAViC), has announced a similar meeting, also called "Before Madison Avenue: Advertising in Early America," to be held March 15-16, 2012. The conference program is now available. As the organizers explain: From newspaper agate print to trade cards to broadsides to posters, ads were everywhere in early America, helping to support the rise of entire sectors of the publishing industry and introducing Americans to the ever-expanding world of goods and services that the growing nation offered. But what were the aesthetics, conventions, norms, and business practices of advertising in early America? How did individuals and businesses make sense of the constantly chan...

The Library Company of Philadelphia will host a conference on June 7-8, 2012, to investigate the topic “Capitalism by Gaslight: The Shadow Economies of Nineteenth-Century America.” As the call for papers explains:     There were many ways in which Americans earned a living through economic transactions beyond the spheres of “legitimate” commerce. Entrepreneurs of this sort included everyone from prostitutes and card sharps to confidence men, mock auctioneers, pickpockets, fences of stolen goods, and many others. Although these shadow economies may have unfolded “off the books,” they were anything but marginal. Instead, they were crucially important parts of the mainstream economy, bound up in the development of commercial and industrial capitalism in nineteenth-century America. The shadow economy’s successful entrepreneurs—women, people of color, and children among them—had to be even more creative, flexible, and adaptive than “respectable” counterparts. The practices,...

Readers in or near New York City will be interested in the Columbia University Business History Forum 's November 29 meeting, which will be a symposium on Capitalism Takes Command: The Social Transformation of Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago, 2011 [but out in January 2012]), edited by Michael Zakim and Gary J. Kornblith.    The symposium will meet from 6:30 to 8:00 pm, in Room 523, Butler Library, Columbia University, and will be followed by a reception. The meeting, which is open to the public, is sponsored by the Columbia Rare Book and Manuscript Library; the Herbert H. Lehman Center for American  History; and the History Department at the New School for Social Research and Eugene Lang College.    Capitalism Takes Command presents original histories of the commercialization of farming, the creation of a national mortgage market, the collateralization of slaves, the invention of office systems, and more—an inventory of means by which capitalism became...

The Economic History Society has posted the preliminary program for its 2012 meeting, which will be held at St. Catherine's College at the University of Oxford on March 30-April 1, 2012. In addition to two sessions (IV.F and V.B) specifically labelled "business history," the program contains many topics of interest to both business and economic historians. The 2012 Tawney Lecture will be delivered by Professor Sir Roderick Floud of Gresham College.     Registration information and other details will be posted on the EHS conference site as they become available.

The Center for the History of Business, Technology, and Society at the Hagley Museum and Library in Wilmington, Delaware, and the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania present will host a conference on “Historicizing Routines” on November 1-2, 2012. The organizers “invite empirical and historically focused papers that explore the development, devolution, destruction, and re-creation of routines in twentieth-century organizations and bounded communities.” Herewith the complete call for papers:     Routines are central to much human behavior, both within organizations and more broadly, because they facilitate the navigation of complex social, economic, and ecological environments. Too often, however, they are simplistically equated with stasis and adaptation, and unfairly counter-posed to innovation or transformation. In reality, routines can be dynamic, as the organizations and individuals that follow them encounter and respond to new situations or condi...

The European Business History Association will hold its next meeting jointly with the Business History Society of Japan on August 30-September 1, 2012, at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris. The theme of the meeting is "Business Enterprises and the Tensions between Local and Global." Over several centuries companies have pursued their business strategies on several dimensions, from the local to the global. This can be seen in the recruitment of personnel, their procurement, their financing, their R & D, their production or services, and their relations with consumers, social forces, intellectuals, public authorities, education and research systems. However, the process of adapting to these multiple dimensions is not straightforward, even for large and experienced multinationals, and often results in tensions between global and local. . . . comparisons between regions and countries, branches of industry, single enterprises, and, of co...