This roundtable discussion brought together a diverse group of experts to examine relations between firms, governments, and global governance frameworks in historical perspective. Panelists addressed questions about the ways companies have interacted with multi-layered governance and commented on the past, present, and future of scholarship in this research area. As part of a larger conference series and publication project, this roundtable aimed to contextualize contemporary debates about governing global capitalism.

Organized by Grace Ballor and Sabine Pitteloud, the roundtable featured participants Neil Rollings (Glasgow), Patricia Clavin (Oxford), and Quinn Slobodian (Wellesley). Nicolás Perrone (Valparaíso) provided written comments.

May 13, 12:00 to 4:00 (East Coast US Time)

Sophus Reinert (HBS), Introduction

Marlous van Waijenburg (HBS), Chair
Sebouh Aslanian (UCLA), "'Taking Risks Beyond the Bounds of Common Sense'? An Indo-Armenian 'Bill of Exchange' from Isfahan, c. 1730, and Trust Relations between Julfan Armenians and Marwari Indians"
Joel Bakan (British Columbia, Law), "The Corporate Form of Capitalism"
Francesca Trivellato (IAS), Comment
 
Mattias Fibiger (HBS), Chair
Mary Hicks (Chicago), "Captivity's Commerce: The Theory and Methodology of Slaving and Capitalism"
Bernard Harcourt (Columbia, Law), "The Kraken, perhaps, but what about the Behemoth?"
Carl Wennerlind (Barnard), Comment

Pat Giersch, Wellesley
​ 3:30 - 5:00 PM, via Zoom

Kimberly Phillips-Fein, NYU
​ 3:30 - 5:00 PM, via Zoom

Tehila Sasson, Emory
​ 3:30 - 5:00 PM, via Zoom

Hannah Farber, Columbia
​ 3:30 - 5:00 PM, via Zoom

Charles Harvey, Newcastle, and Mairi Maclean, Bath
3:30 - 5:00 PM, via Zoom.​

Naomi Lamoreaux, Yale
3:30 - 5:00 PM, via Zoom

10:00 am– 11:00 am: Nicholas Radburn, Lancaster University 

11:00 am– 12:00 pm: Leigh Gardner, LSE 

12:15 pm– 1:15 pm: Klas Rönnbäck, University of Gothenburg 

1:15 pm– 2:15 pm: Filipa Ribeiro da Silva, International Institute of Social History 

2:15 pm– 2:30 pm: Marlous van Waijenburg, Closing remarks ​

10:00 am – 11:00 am: Justene Hill Edwards, University of Virginia 

11:00 am – 12:00 pm: Anne Ruderman, LSE, and Marlous van Waijenburg, HBS 

12:15 pm – 1:15 pm: Bronwen Everill, University of Cambridge 

1:00 pm – 2:15 pm: Carolyn Roberts, Yale University ​

Caitlin Rosenthal, Berkeley
​ 3:30 - 5:00 PM, via Zoom.

Rawi Abdelal, Grace Ballor, and Geoffrey Jones (HBS), sponsoring faculty

10:00AM-10:15AM (EDT), Welcome and Introductory Remarks
Grace Ballor (HBS)

10:15AM-10:45AM (EDT), Panel 1: Knowledge and Resources
Chair and discussant, Rawi Abdelal (HBS)
Alexander Kentikelenis (Bocconi) and Leonard Seabrooke (Copenhagen Business School)
Neil Fligstein (Berkeley) and Janna Huang (Berkeley)

10:45AM-11:30AM (EDT), Panel 2: Power and Politics
Chair and discussant, Kristin Fabbe (HBS)
Meg Rithmire (HBS)
Yasheng Huang (MIT)
Ben Ross Schneider (MIT)

12:00PM-12:45PM (EDT), Panel 3: Agents and Agency
Chair and discussant, Gareth Austin (Cambridge)
Carolyn Biltoft (IHEID)
Véronique Dimier (Université Libre Bruxelles) and Sarah Stockwell (King’s College London)
Ann-Kristin Bergquist (Umea) and Thomas David (University of Lausanne)

12:45PM-1:30PM (EDT), Concluding Remarks and Discussion
​ Rawi Abdelal (HBS)

​Marlous van Waijenburg and Sophus Reinert (HBS), sponsoring faculty

Presentations by Justene Hill Edwards (University of Virginia), Bronwen Everill (Cambridge University), Leigh Gardner (LSE), Nicholas Radburn (Lancaster), Carolyn Roberts (Yale), ​Klas Rönnbäck (Gothenburg), Anne Ruderman (LSE), Filipa Ribeiro da Silva (IISG), and Marlous van Waijenburg (HBS).

Marie Favereau, Paris Nanterre University​ 
​3:30 - 5:00 p.m. 

A. J. Murphy, Brandeis ​

Vanessa Ogle, Berkeley ​

Casey Lurtz, Johns Hopkins University ​​
​3:30 - 5:00 p.m. ​

​Mary E. Hicks, Amherst College​
​3:30 - 5:00 p.m. 

This two-day workshop brought together scholars in the fields of history, economics, and management to explore the unconventional as it relates to researching and writing about entrepreneurship and business. The goal was to critically assess frameworks and approaches that animate scholarship in business history, the history of capitalism, and the comparative study of markets and institutions both past and present. There was a special session on HBS’s large Creating Emerging Markets oral history project. We covered three complementary areas of discussion: unconventional techniques, unconventional sources, and unconventional capitalisms.

This workshop, brought together internationally-renowned scholars in the fields of medieval, Renaissance, and economic history doing vibrant work on the Italian and Mediterranean economies. Before the Great Divergence which is the focus of much current scholarship on capitalism, there were earlier and smaller divergences: first Italy (perhaps as early as the eleventh century), then Holland, and then England experienced modern economic growth. In this conference, we examined the patterns of divergence in the Italian example and began to think more broadly about why premodern economic history and business history can and should matter to us today.

Over the past several decades, a vibrant scholarly community has generated thousands of empirical and conceptual studies on the complex relationship between business and the natural environment. At the same time, many large corporations have created positions of Corporate Sustainability Officer with the goal of achieving steady improvements in their sustainability performance. Despite substantial academic research and management attention, complex ecological challenges continue to grow. This unfortunate disconnect between aspirations and reality has begun to provoke some self-reflection in the business and natural environment literature concerning its impact and relevance.

A significant body of research on corporate sustainability has examined win-win outcomes, where firms have reduced their environmental and other impacts while reaping economic benefits. Less attention has been devoted to tensions inherent in corporate sustainability, where moving in the direction of sustainability has required managers to change their business models, form risky partnerships, and otherwise incur net costs. Recent empirical business history research appears to show that profits and sustainability have been hard to reconcile throughout history. These tensions and conflicts merit careful examination from a variety of scholarly and practitioner perspectives.

This conference focused on the roadblocks to sustainability since the 1960s and developed a research agenda for scholars seeking to overcome those roadblocks. In addition to offering a retrospective analysis of where corporate sustainability has fallen short, the conference explored the incentives, organizational designs, and institutional systems that would allow sustainability to take hold.

This research conference brought together leading historians and legal scholars interested in the history and future of the U.S. regulatory tradition. During his renowned career at HBS, Professor Tom McCraw helped establish the field of regulatory studies, bridging the fields of history, law, economics, and political science. His work focused on both firms and their regulatory environment to explain economic development in the United States. His scholarship contributed to important works of legal and business history on the evolution of the corporate form, the influence of corporate actors on public regulation, and the importance of social science research on regulatory choices. Since then, the field of regulatory studies has taken off in both history departments and law schools; however, the two disciplines have taken divergent paths. Historians have emphasized the external social and cultural pressures that have shaped firms’ behavior, such as the efforts by interest groups to limit or redirect corporations’ economic power. Legal scholars, on the other hand, have emphasized the internal development of administrative bureaucracy to explain how state capacity changed over time and interacted with interest group movements. This conference sought to reinvigorate McCraw’s insight that interdisciplinary dialogue is necessary to understand the complexities of modern regulatory policy.

The conference built on the HBS tradition that McCraw helped establish by bringing together business historians and legal scholars interested in bridging disciplines and transcending historiographical tropes. The conference thus convened leading scholars in U.S. regulatory policy and academic studies.

The format of this research conference was on four panels over the course of a single day; each had three paper presentations followed by brief comments from a discussant. Additional time was allotted for audience questions. The last session was a roundtable on future directions for U.S. regulatory policy in public utilities and antitrust law. The roundtable discussants integrated themes from the day with their own insights and opened up a discussion with the audience.

Baker Library and HBS professors Dante Roscini and Sophus Reinert hosted a reception to celebrate a new translation of Benedetto Cotrugli’s The Book of the Art of Trade (1458). The new edition of the book, which recounts the life and work of a Mediterranean merchant, contains scholarly essays from Niall Ferguson, Giovanni Favero, Mario Infelise, Tiziano Zanato and Vera Ribaudo. The reception also provided an opportunity to recognize the Italian manuscript collections in Baker Library, including more than 150 ledgers and other manuscript volumes belonging to the Medici family dating from late 14th and early 18th century.

The reception was held in Baker Library Lobby from 5:30pm-8pm and was open to the public. Graduate students and faculty attended.

In a world that continues to be mostly ocean, countryside, forest, and desert and with nearly half the world’s population still living and laboring in such locations, we sought to decenter the city and metropole and problematize progress narratives that render capitalist and urban formations inevitable. Proceeding outward from any world region, we tackled a number of theoretical, historiographical, and methodological questions ranging from the origins of a capitalist world-system in the sixteenth century, to the relationship between slavery and capitalism, to the politics of development in the twenty-first century. These questions touched on the changing ways in which people relate to land, water, and other materials and the claims they make on them; the power relationships that govern those claims; how life is imagined and sustained, how livelihoods are made and unmade, and how belonging is constructed and contested.

With this conference, we brought together rising scholars from a range of disciplines and interdisciplines who study capitalism in non-urban locations. This conference was organized by the Program on the Study of Capitalism at Harvard University.

Geoffrey Jones discussed the Creating Emerging Markets project and how the oral histories being generated were being used in both teaching and research. Chinmay Tumbe (IIM-Ahmedabad) reviewed how oral history had developed in India and its role in business history. Among other recent initiatives he discussed "itihaasa", a project to document the growth of the Indian IT industry through oral history.

The second half of the conference heard presentations from the Chief Archivists of two of the most important corporate archives in India. Vrunda Pathare (Godrej Group) discussed her group’s oral history program, which has undertaken audio interviews with dozens of present and former staff. These interviews, which can be consulted at the Archives, are noteworthy for capturing the memories of present and former staff at all levels of the organization. Finally Usha Iyer (Cipla Ltd) explored the challenges of making business archives relevant within her own company, noting how she employed innovative and proactive social networking strategies to build a strategic presence.

This conference, held in Mumbai, brought together business practitioners, policy makers, and scholars in South Asia to discuss how the new materials being generated by the BHI’S Creating Emerging Markets project can shed light on key issues facing South Asian businesses now. These include spurring innovation, managing family business, relations with governments, and corporate responsibility. The broader agenda explored and debated what we can learn from history at a time of turbulent change. The sessions were moderated by HBS Professors Srikant Datar, Geoffrey Jones and Tarun Khanna.

Organized by David Collis, Asli Colpan, and Geoffrey Jones