About Us

Harvard Business School, more than any other leading business school, integrated the study of history into its curriculum from its earliest days.

The first dean, Edwin Gay, was an economic historian by training, and he believed that the art of management could be refined through the analysis of both history and contemporary case studies. Wallace Donham, who succeeded Gay and is credited with coining the phrase "business history," argued for the creation of a research professorship whose holder would study "specific situations as they came to business men and their communities in the past" and compare "these situations with current conditions." The Isidor Straus Chair in Business History has been held by a number of distinguished historians, including N. S. B. Gras, the first occupant, Alfred D. Chandler Jr., and Thomas K. McCraw. The Straus Chair is now held by Geoffrey Jones, whose books include British Multinational Banking 1830-1990 (1993), The Evolution of International Business (1996), Merchants to Multinationals (2000), Multinationals and Global Capitalism: From the Nineteenth to the Twenty-First Century (2005), and Renewing Unilever: Transformation and Tradition (2005).

History remains a vital part of HBS. Today, historians at the School offer two MBA courses in business history: The Coming of Managerial Capitalism and Entrepreneurship and Global Capitalism. Another course, Business Government and the International Economy, has a historical component. Historians at HBS also host a seminar in business history each fall and offer informal lunches throughout the year. The School publishes the journal Business History Review and awards fellowships to support research, including the Harvard-Newcomen Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Business History, the Thomas K. McCraw Fellowship in American Business History, and the Alfred D. Chandler Jr. International Visiting Scholars in Business History Program.

For a full account of the development of business history at the school, see Thomas K. McCraw and Jeffrey L. Cruikshank, The Intellectual Venture Capitalist: John H. McArthur and the Work of the Harvard Business School, 1980-1995 (1999).