The Exchange

The Digital Library of the London School of Economics (LSE) is a growing collection of items from the School's holdings. According to the website, the Digital Library is the Library's repository of digital items and collections. These items and collections are made available online for anyone who might wish to make use of them for education, research or general interest. . . . The Digital Library contains digitised material from the Library's collections and also born-digital material that has been collected and preserved in digital formats. The site is searchable, or users may  browse through various collections. These currently include tracts, minute books, and pamphlets from the Fabian Society and the Young Fabians; the papers of Lionel Robbins (including his Bretton Woods diary); materials from the LSE Women's Library (including a chronological presentation of more than 300 items from the 16th century to the present); poster collections (including, for examp...

 The 2015 meeting of the Omohundro Institute for Early American History and Culture (OIEAHC), which will be held jointly with the Society of Early Americanists (SEA), will take place in Chicago on June 18-21, 2015. The program has now been posted. Probably of most direct interest are Session 16, on the French Company of the Indies in the Atlantic world; Session 29, on "Commerce, Health, and Medical Knowledge in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World"; Session 35, "Smuggling almost with impunity"; and Session 37, "Doing Business in the Early Atlantic." Several other sessions include papers on areas such as property rights, slavery, gender, and material culture also of interest to business and economic historians.     For full information about the conference, please see the meeting website .

The 14th Congress of the International Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ISECS) will be held at Erasmus University in Rotterdam on July 27-31, 2015. The ISECS is an interdisciplinary organization, home to members working in a variety of disciplines, time periods, and geographical spaces, and offering materials in both English and French. Because the theme of the 14th Congress (comprehensively described here ) is "Opening Markets: Trade and Commerce in the Eighteenth Century," many of the sessions will be of interest. The full draft program has now been posted.      Early registration ends on May 15, 2015 ; on-line registration closes on July 15 . For complete information about the meeting, please visit the Congress website .

A list, by no means complete, of books of interest to business and economic historians published or forthcoming between March and June 2015 : Francesca Bray, Peter Coclanis, Edda Fields-Black , and Dagmar Schaefer , eds., Rice: Global Networks and New Histories (Cambridge University Press, March 2015) Richard Davenport-Hines , Universal Man: The Lives of John Maynard Keynes (Basic Books, May 2015) Timothy Gloege , Guaranteed Pure: The Moody Bible Institute, Business, and the Making of Modern Evangelicalism (North Carolina University Press, April 2015) Kevin M. Kruse , One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America (Basic Books, April 2015) David Kynaston and Richard Roberts , The Lion Wakes: A Modern History of HSBC (Profile Books, March 2015) Adrian Leonard and David Pretel , eds., The Caribbean and the Atlantic World Economy: Circuits of Trade, Money and Knowledge, 1650-1914 (Palgrave Macmillan April 2015) Paul Lerner , The Consuming Te...

On June 4, 2014, the Centre for Economic and Business History (CEBH) at the University of Nottingham is holding a one-day workshop on "The Varieties of Capitalism in the Americas." According to the announcement, This workshop aims to investigate the various histories and varieties of capitalism in the Americas. It is a common trope that in the US, at least, the War of Independence heralded in a modern, more capitalist (and better?) society. However, there are many definitions of capitalism and many types; taking case studies from 16th-century South America to the 21st-century US, this workshop aims to challenge any simple teleology of the rise or development of capitalism, or indeed any central type. Speakers and topics are Dr Elvira Vilches, North Carolina State University Reckoning for Silver: The Global, the Local, and the Making of Money in Colonial Latin America Dr Emma Hart, University of St Andrews Trading Cattle and the Histories of Early American Capitalis...

"The Vault" at Slate recently displayed a telephone map of the United States in 1910 , showing where lines existed at that time. The original source is the David Rumsey Map Collection . 98 Acres in Albany is a community history project dedicated to documenting the people displaced and the structures demolished to make way for the Nelson A. Rockefeller Empire State Plaza. The goal is to digitally reconstruct and repopulate the 40 city blocks as they were in 1962. The website is the creation of Ann Pfau (independent historian), David Hochfelder (University of Albany), and Stacy Sewell (St. Thomas Aquinas College). Jonathan Coopersmith has become a blogger for HNN, with a series called "Infinity, Limited." A number of recent texts of interest have been in the news: At New Books in History , Gavin Wright is interviewed about Sharing the Prize: The Economics of the Civil Rights Revolution in the American South (Harvard University Press). Steve Fraser...

A new group has recently been established in the UK called the Business History Network . According to the organization's website, The Business History Networks brings together early-career researchers from all disciplines with an interest in business history. We want to create a network that helps increase the quality and impact of business history in the UK and build long-term collaborative relationships between the participants of our workshops. . . . We strongly invite researchers from other disciplines such as sociology, law, management, economics, and the humanities, whose research is on business history. The group's initial activities are two workshops ; the first was held in March; the second will take place on June 18, 2015. The program for both can be found here. Questions about the network can be addressed to Jasper Bittner , who is a doctoral student in Economic and Social History at the University of Oxford working on bankruptcy law in eighteenth- and ninetee...