Events
Events
Upcoming Events
Seminars
- 09 Apr 2025
- Seminar
Gareth Austin (University of Cambridge), "Determinants of African Business Performance in Colonial and Post-Colonial West Africa"
Professor Austin will present from 12 pm to 1:30 pm as part of BHI's Virtual Seminar
Series, "Business, Institutions, and Regions," hosted by Yuan Jia-Zheng and Marcel
Anduiza. Please RSVP by sending an email to bhi@hbs.edu to attend. Zoom links will
be sent out in the New Year.
- 18 Apr 2025
- Seminar
Julia Yongue (Josei University), "Siam Then, Thailand Now: Contextualizing the Emergence of Thai Capitalism through Three Phases of Globalization"
Professor Yongue will present from 10 am to 11:30 am as part of BHI's Virtual Seminar
Series, "Business, Institutions, and Regions," hosted by Yuan Jia-Zheng and Marcel
Anduiza. Please RSVP by sending an email to bhi@hbs.edu to attend. Zoom links will
be sent out in the New Year.
- 30 Apr 2025
- Seminar
Andrea Lluch (CONICET; National University of La Pampa), "Global Development and International Organizations during the Cold War Era: ILO's Management Development Programs in Latin America (1950s-1970s)"
Professor Lluch will present from 12 pm to 1:30 pm as part of BHI's Virtual Seminar
Series, "Business, Institutions, and Regions," hosted by Yuan Jia-Zheng and Marcel
Anduiza. Please RSVP by sending an email to bhi@hbs.edu to attend. Zoom links will
be sent out in the New Year.
- 14 May 2025
- Seminar
Grace Ballor (Bocconi University), "Commerce against the Social Single Market"
Professor Ballor will present from 12 pm to 1:30 pm as part of BHI's Virtual Seminar
Series, "Business, Institutions, and Regions," hosted by Yuan Jia-Zheng and Marcel
Anduiza. Please RSVP by sending an email to bhi@hbs.edu to attend. Zoom links will
be sent out in the New Year.
- 28 May 2025
- Seminar
Marcel Anduiza (Harvard Business School), “The Manila Galleon: Luxury Trade and the Silk-for-Silver Connection across the Pacific World, XVI-XVIII.”
Dr. Anduiza will present from 12 pm to 1:30 pm as part of BHI's Virtual Seminar Series,
"Business, Institutions, and Regions," hosted by Yuan Jia-Zheng and Marcel Anduiza.
Please RSVP by sending an email to bhi@hbs.edu to attend. Zoom links will be sent
out in the New Year.
- 11 Jun 2025
- Seminar
Paloma Fernández Pérez (University of Barcelona), "Institutions, Entrepreneurs, and Multinationals in the Emergence of Urban Clusters of Healthcare in the Spanish Speaking World during the Turn of the 19th Century and the First Third of the 20th Century"
Professor Fernández Pérez will present from 12 pm to 1:30 pm as part of BHI's Virtual
Seminar Series, "Business, Institutions, and Regions," hosted by Yuan Jia-Zheng and
Marcel Anduiza. Please RSVP by sending an email to bhi@hbs.edu to attend. Zoom links
will be sent out in the New Year.
Past Events
Conferences, Seminars, & Workshops
- 02 Dec 2024
- Business History Seminar
Seth Rockman, (Brown University) “Plantation Goods: A Material History of American Slavery"
Co-Sponsored by Baker Library Special Collections. 3:30 p.m. - 5:00 p.m. This year's
business seminar will be hosted in person at HBS. Please RSVP by email to bhi@hbs.edu
to attend.
- 25 Nov 2024
- Business History Seminar
Charles Fawell (Yale University), “Empire on the Line: Shipping Corporations, Sovereignty, and the Sea Corridors of European Colonialism, 1850-1920"
3:30 p.m. - 5:00 p.m. This year's business seminar will be hosted in person at HBS.
Please RSVP by email to bhi@hbs.edu to attend.
- 18 Mar 2024
- Conference
Oral History and Business in the Global South
- 15 Dec 2023
- Conference
Using Oral History in Research
The event was organized by Geoffrey Jones and Tarun Khanna.
- 20 Nov 2023
- Business History Seminar: Business, Society, and the Environment
Valeria Giacomin (Bocconi University), "Environmentalism and Sustainability in the Southeast Asian Plantation Industry (1930s-2000s)"
Seminar meets on Zoom.
- 13 Nov 2023
- Business History Seminar: Business, Society, and the Environment
Pierre-Yves Donzé (Osaka University and Harvard Business School), “Capitalism and Global Health: A Modern History (1850-2020)"
- 06 Nov 2023
- Business History Seminar: Business, Society, and the Environment
Kwelina Thompson (Harvard Business School), “Under Water: Tourism Development and Environmental Loss in the Caribbean, 1960-1990"
Seminar meets on Zoom.
- 30 Oct 2023
- Business History Seminar: Business, Society, and the Environment
Naomi Oreskes (Harvard University), "The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market"
Seminar meets on Zoom.
- 23 Oct 2023
- Business History Seminar: Business, Society, and the Environment
Ann-Kristin Bergquist (Uppsala University), "Business and Global Climate Politics"
Seminar meets on Zoom.
- 16 Oct 2023
- Business History Seminar: Business, Society, and the Environment
Christy Thornton (Johns Hopkins University), "Revolution in Development: Mexico and the Governance of the Global Economy"
Seminar meets on Zoom.
- 02 Oct 2023
- Business History Seminar: Business, Society, and the Environment
Bart Elmore (The Ohio State University), "Country Capitalism"
Seminar meets on Zoom.
- 25 Sep 2023
- Business History Seminar: Business, Society, and the Environment
Victor Seow (Harvard University), "Carbon Technocracy: Energy Regimes in Modern East Asia"
Seminar meets on Zoom.
- 02 May 2023
- Seminar
Hybrid Seminar: Meg Rithmire (HBS), "Precarious Ties: Business and the State in Authoritarian Asia"
Meg Rithmire, F. Warren McFarlan Associate Professor of Business Administration at HBS, discussed her forthcoming book, Precarious Ties: Business and the State in Authoritarian Asia.
Precarious Ties analyzes "the relationships between business and political elites in three authoritarian regimes in developing Asia: Indonesia under Suharto's New Order, Malaysia under the Barisan Nasional, and China under the Chinese Communist Party." It shows how "all three regimes enjoyed periods of high growth and supposed alliances between autocrats and capitalists. Over time, however, the relationships between capitalists and political elites changed, and economic outcomes diverged. While state-business ties in Indonesia and China created dangerous dynamics like capital flight, fraud, and financial crisis, Malaysia's state-business ties contributed to economic stagnation."
Learn more about the book on the Oxford University Press website.
- 03 Apr 2023
- Seminar
Hybrid Seminar: William Kirby (HBS), "Empires of Ideas: Creating the Modern University from Germany to America to China"
William Kirby, T.M. Chang Professor of China Studies and Spangler Family Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, spoke about his new book, Empires of Ideas: Creating the Modern University from Germany to America to China (Harvard University Press, 2022).
Empires of Ideas chronicles "two revolutions in higher education: the birth of the research university
and its integration with the liberal education model." It examines “the successes
of leading universities—The University of Berlin and the Free University of Berlin
in Germany; Harvard, Duke, and the University of California, Berkeley, in the United
States—to determine how they rose to prominence and what threats they currently face."
The book "draws illuminating comparisons to the trajectories of three Chinese contenders:
Tsinghua University, Nanjing University, and the University of Hong Kong, which aim
to be world-class institutions that can compete with the best the United States and
Europe have to offer.”
Learn more about the book on the Harvard University Press website.
- 24 Mar 2023
- Seminar
Seminar on Zoom: Geoffrey Jones (HBS), “Deeply Responsible Business: A Global History of Values-Driven Leadership”
The book offers "a series of in-depth profiles of business leaders and their companies...from India to Japan and from the turmoil of the nineteenth century to the latest developments in impact investing and the B-corps." It "distinguishes deep responsibility, which can deliver radical social and ecological responses, from corporate social responsibility, which is often little more than window dressing." (Read the full publisher’s description.)
Learn more about the book at deeplyresponsible.com.
Deeply Responsible Business is now available! You can order the book at Harvard University Press, Amazon, Bookshop, Barnes and Noble, and the Harvard Book Store.
- 06 Feb 2023
- Conference
Using Oral History in Business and Management Studies
6 February 2023 (8:30AM-12PM EST) on ZOOM: Using Oral History in Business and Management Studies
The Creating Emerging Markets (CEM) project based at Harvard Business School's Business History Initiative has been conducting lengthy interviews with top business leaders in emerging markets since 2008. These are hosted on a public website featuring full interview transcripts and associated video clips that are free to download and use for teaching, research, or general interest. At this online conference, speakers shared their experiences using CEM transcripts and video materials for teaching in different institutional contexts in Europe, India, Latin America, and the United States. Each session included time for discussion and debate, as the conference sought to lay the foundation for a community of scholars that can exchange ideas on the value of oral history collections for various classroom settings. There was also a short mid-session break during which CEM video clips were played.
The speakers (in order) were Chinmay Tumbe (Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, India), Jeffrey Fear (University of Glasgow, Britain), Sudev Sheth (Lauder Institute, University of Pennsylvania), Andrea Lluch (Universidad de los Andes, Colombia), Marcelo Bucheli (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), and Tarun Khanna (Harvard Business School).
The online conference was co-organized by Tarun Khanna and Geoffrey Jones (BHI Faculty
Chair at Harvard Business School).
- 14 Nov 2022
- Business History Seminar
Kendra Boyd (Rutgers), “The Great Depression, Black Nationalist Organizing, and Radical Economics in Detroit”
- 07 Nov 2022
- Business History Seminar
Diana Kim (Georgetown), "A Most Durable Inequality: Caste and Untouchable Labor across Post-World War Two Industrializing Asia"
- 31 Oct 2022
- Business History Seminar
Thomas Fetzer (Central European University), "Nationality and multinational corporations: Insights from a historical perspective on German and British labour organizations in US-owned automobile firms"
- 24 Oct 2022
- Business History Seminar
Melanie Sheehan (Harvard Business School), “Integration and Disintegration: Walter Reuther and the 'Atlantic Community' in the 1960s"
- 17 Oct 2022
- Business History Seminar
Quinn Slobodian (HBS and Wellesley), "The Ethno-Economy: Peter Brimelow's Short Leap from Financial Journalism to the Alt-Right"
- 03 Oct 2022
- Business History Seminar
William Lazonick (UMass Lowell), "Investing in Innovation: Confronting Predatory Value Extraction in the US Corporation"
- 31 May 2022
- Workshop
Roundtable: Governing Global Capitalism
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.
For more information, see the following event page.- 13 May 2022
- Virtual Workshop
"Forms of Capitalism"
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
- 06 May 2022
- Virtual Workshop
"Forms of Capitalism"
May 6, 12:00 to 4:00 (East Coast US Time)
Geoff Jones (HBS), Introduction
Charlotte Robertson (HBS), Chair
Rebecca Henderson (HBS), "Reimagining Capitalism"
Peter Hall (Harvard), "Growth Regimes"
Quinn Slobodian (Wellesley), Comment
Jeremy Friedman (HBS), Chair
Mary O'Sullivan (University of Geneva), "The Ruin of Britain's Manufactures: Capitalism
and Colonialism through the Lens of Pitt's 1785 Irish Proposals"
D'Maris Coffman (UCL), "The First Crisis Economists: Lescure, Aftalion and the Theorization
of Periodic and General Crises in Industrial Capitalism"
Danielle Guizzo (University of Bristol), Comment
- 22 Nov 2021
- Business History Seminar: Global Business and Society
“Empire, Ethnicity, and Corporation: China’s Troubled History of Nation-building and the Development of Chinese Capitalism”
Pat Giersch, Wellesley
3:30 - 5:00 PM, via Zoom
- 15 Nov 2021
- Business History Seminar: Global Business and Society
“The Age of Reaction: Democracy and Inequality in the Thought of William Graham Sumner, Andrew Carnegie, Booker T. Washington and Frederick Taylor”
Kimberly Phillips-Fein, NYU
3:30 - 5:00 PM, via Zoom
- 08 Nov 2021
- Business History Seminar: Global Business and Society
“The Solidarity Economy: Markets and Morals at the End of Empire”
Tehila Sasson, Emory
3:30 - 5:00 PM, via Zoom
- 01 Nov 2021
- Business History Seminar: Global Business and Society
“Land at Five Percent, Money at Six: Interest Rates and Expectations in the Eighteenth Century”
Hannah Farber, Columbia
3:30 - 5:00 PM, via Zoom
- 25 Oct 2021
- Business History Seminar: Global Business and Society
“Perspectives on the Role of Philanthropy in Socioeconomic Development: US and Britain 1830-2020”
Charles Harvey, Newcastle, and Mairi Maclean, Bath
3:30 - 5:00 PM, via Zoom.
- 18 Oct 2021
- Business History Seminar: Global Business and Society
“Antimonopoly and State Regulation of Corporations in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era”
Naomi Lamoreaux, Yale
3:30 - 5:00 PM, via Zoom
- 15 Oct 2021
- Workshop
“Business, Capitalism, and Slavery”
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
- 08 Oct 2021
- Workshop
“Business, Capitalism, and Slavery”
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
- 04 Oct 2021
- Business History Seminar: Global Business and Society
“Human Resources or Liability Management? The Rise of Compliance in HR”
Caitlin Rosenthal, Berkeley
3:30 - 5:00 PM, via Zoom.
- 09 Jun 2021
- Conference
“International Governance, Business, and the State”
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)
- 28 May 2021
- BUSINESS HISTORY REVIEW: SPECIAL ISSUE WORKSHOP
“Business and Slavery”
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).
- 07 Dec 2020
- Business History Seminar
The Horde and the Mongol Exchange
Marie Favereau, Paris Nanterre University
3:30 - 5:00 p.m.
- 23 Nov 2020
- Business History Seminar
The World's Biggest Landlord: How the U.S. Military Built its Arsenal of Houses
A. J. Murphy, Brandeis
- 16 Nov 2020
- Business History Seminar
'Funk Money': The End of Empires, the Expansion of Tax Havens, and Decolonization as an Economic and Financial Event
Vanessa Ogle, Berkeley
- 02 Nov 2020
- Business History Seminar
Codifying Credit: Everyday Contracting and the Spread of the Civil Code in Nineteenth-Century Mexico
Casey Lurtz, Johns Hopkins University
3:30 - 5:00 p.m.
- 19 Oct 2020
- Business History Seminar
Elite Losers: Trump, Steel, and the Backlash against Neoliberal Constitutionalism from Above
- 05 Oct 2020
- Business History Seminar
Slaving and Abolitionism during the Age of Revolutions
Mary E. Hicks, Amherst College
3:30 - 5:00 p.m.
- 13 Dec 2019
- Workshop
"Capitalism and Commercial Society"
- 25 Nov 2019
- Business History Seminar
Capitalism and German Imperialism before World War I: A Reassessment
New location: Chao Center, Room 120
- 18 Nov 2019
- Business History Seminar
Statoil and the Revival of State-owned Companies in Norway, 1970s - Present
- 04 Nov 2019
- Business History Seminar
The Company's Two Bodies: The Reinvention of the French East India Company in the late Eighteenth Century
- 21 Oct 2019
- Business History Seminar
Do Merchants Have No Country? Companies, States, and Transnational Networks in Europe’s Early Modern Expansion
- 07 Oct 2019
- Business History Seminar
When the War Ends: Opium and its Colonial Stakeholders in Asia,1870s-1930s
- 30 Sep 2019
- Business History Seminar
Corporate Reform: Companies, Colonies, and History in Making the Early Nineteenth-Century British Empire
- 09 May 2019
- Conference
Seeking the Unconventional in Forging Histories of Capitalism
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.
- 16 Apr 2019
- Noon Seminar Series
Strategy Professionals and Practice Change: 1960 to Today
- 01 Mar 2019
- Conference
Italy and the Origins of Capitalism
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.
- 19 Nov 2018
- Business History Seminar
Democracy Electric: Energy and Economic Citizenship in an Urbanizing America
- 16 Nov 2018
- Business History Seminar
Selling the Revolution: Communist China's Capitalist Ambassadors, 1949-1966
- 05 Nov 2018
- Business History Seminar
A Social History of Urban Expertise: Between Techno-bureaucratic Rule and the Right to the City in Twentieth-Century Mexico
- 29 Oct 2018
- Business History Seminar
Paris, City of Finance: Domesticating Investment in Nineteenth Century France
- 22 Oct 2018
- Business History Seminar
Socioeconomic Inequality across Religious Groups: Self-Selection or Religion-Induced Human Capital Accumulation? The Case of Egypt
- 15 Oct 2018
- Business History Seminar
The Role of Global Merchants: The Case of the Sassoons
- 14 Jun 2018
- Conference
Understanding and Overcoming the Roadblocks to Sustainability
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.
- 05 Jun 2018
- Conference
New Perspectives on U.S. Regulatory History: Past & Present of Public Utilities and Antitrust Law
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.
- 06 Nov 2017
- Business History Seminar
Politics, Institutions, and Diversified Business Groups: Comparisons across Developed Countries
- 30 Oct 2017
- Business History Seminar
Decoding the Balance Sheet: Material Objects, Symbolic Capital, and the Liquidation of the League of Nations
- 23 Oct 2017
- Reception
The Book of the Art of the Trade: A Celebration
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.
- 23 Oct 2017
- Business History Seminar
The Origins of Ethnic Orders and the Political Economy of Identity in Malaysia
- 19 Oct 2017
- Conference
Capitalism in the Countryside: Graduate Student Conference
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.
- 16 Oct 2017
- Business History Seminar
Legal Change and Business Enterprise in the Middle East, 1850 to Present
- 02 Oct 2017
- Business History Seminar
The Economics of World War II in Southeast Asia
- 25 Sep 2017
- Business History Seminar
Co-ethnic Capital in Coastal China and India: The Developmental Diasporas of Guangdong and Kerala
- 14 Jul 2017
- Conference
Oral History, Business History and Business Archives in India
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.
- 29 Jun 2017
- Conference
Capitalism and the Senses
- 05 Jun 2017
- Conference
Digital Technologies in the Social Sciences
- 27 Mar 2017
- Conference
Stakeholder Capitalism in Turbulent Times
- 12 Feb 2017
- Conference
Creating Emerging Markets: Lessons from History
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.
- 05 Dec 2016
- Business History Seminar
Fraud: An American History from Barnum to Madoff
- 28 Nov 2016
- Business History Seminar
World's Apart: The Cold War in the 20th Century
- 14 Nov 2016
- Business History Seminar
Corporate Ownership and Vertical Integration into Selling, 1857-1883
- 07 Nov 2016
- Business History Seminar
Shaping Computers and the Computing Industry in the United States, 1940-2010
- 27 Oct 2016
- Conference
Varieties of Big Business: Business Groups in the West
Organized by David Collis, Asli Colpan, and Geoffrey Jones
- 17 Oct 2016
- Business History Seminar