Faculty & Research
Faculty & Research
Harvard Business School faculty members have made notable contributions to the history
of business. Faculty research is diverse, based in several of the School’s units,
and reflects disciplinary backgrounds in economics, history, sociology, strategy,
and political science.
13
Results
- February 2023
- Teaching Material
The Dutch East India Company (VOC)
By: Sophus A. Reinert and Robert Fredona
| Teaching Note for HBS Case No.723-002.
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- February 2023
- Teaching Material
Korea: The Miracle on the Han River
By: Sophus A. Reinert and Forest Reinhardt
| Teaching Note for HBS Case No. 723-019.
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- 2022
- Rivista storica italiana
Before Plagiarism: Lawyers and Copynorms in Europe, 1300-1600
By: Robert Fredona and Sophus A. Reinert
| This essay uses the concept of 'copynorms', social norms about copying expressive works that can be distinct from legal norms about the same, in order to understand the meaning of intellectual property among Roman law and canon law jurists from the fourteenth through...
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- 2022
- Book Chapter
The Origins of the Developmental State: The European Experience
| Book Abstract: There has been a major revival of interest in State Capitalism: what it is, where it is found, and why it is seemingly becoming more ubiquitous. As a concept, it has evolved from radical critiques of the Soviet Union, to being deployed by neo-liberals to...
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- 2021
- Working Paper
Caccia Selvaggia: Myth, Rites, and the Right in Carlo Ginzburg's Storia notturna
By: Robert Fredona and Sophus A. Reinert
| Carlo Ginzburg (b. 1939) is widely considered one of Europe’s leading historians. His masterpiece Storia notturna (Turin: Einaudi, 1989), widely praised for its extraordinary erudition and creativity, is now over three decades old but it continues to inspire...
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- 2021
- Working Paper
Capitalism, Slavery, and the Legacy of Cesare Beccaria
| The Milanese Marquis Cesare Beccaria (1738-1794) dedicated his life first to theorizing a more just and equal society grounded in individual rights, anchored in secular political economy rather than in religious dogma, then to realizing this bold vision through decades...
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- November 2021 (Revised January 2024)
- Case
The Global Great Depression, 1929-1939
By: Alberto Cavallo, Sophus A. Reinert and Federica Gabrieli
| The Great Depression was, by far, the worst economic contraction of the twentieth century, and some of the most important ideas about both fiscal and monetary policy in the second half of the century were developed in response to it. The economic collapse, which...
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- 2019
- Book
The Economic Turn: Recasting Political Economy in Enlightenment Europe
By: Steven L. Kaplan and Sophus A. Reinert
| The mid-eighteenth century witnessed what might be dubbed an “economic turn” that resolutely changed the trajectory of world history. From the birth of new agricultural practices and the foundation of private societies to the sustained and popular theorization of...
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- Summer 2019
- Business History Review
Breaking Even: Political Economy and Private Enterprise in the Norwegian Glass Industry, 1739-1803
By: Rolv Petter Amdam, Robert Fredona and Sophus A. Reinert
| Using internal debates and surviving account books, this article traces the 18th-century history of the Norwegian glass industry, created to exploit Norway's immense natural resource wealth, and of the chartered company that would later become Norway's iconic...
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- 2019
- Book Chapter
Merchants and the Origins of Capitalism
By: Sophus A. Reinert and Robert Fredona
| N.S.B. Gras, the father of business history in the United States, argued that the era of mercantile capitalism was defined by the figure of the “sedentary merchant,” who managed his business from home, using correspondence and intermediaries, in contrast to the earlier...
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- January 2019 (Revised December 2020)
- Case
Angola Starts Now
By: Jeremy Friedman and Sophus A. Reinert
| After five centuries of colonialism, four decades of civil war, an extended experiment with Marxism-Leninism, and nearly four decades of rule by a single man, José Eduardo Dos Santos, Angola finally has a chance to realize its enormous economic potential. A country...
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- 12 Dec 2018
- News
Free Trade Needs Nurturing—and Other Lessons from History
Re: Sophus Reinert & Dante Roscini
| Global free trade is not the natural order of things, so it needs to be carefully tended to and maintained. Sophus Reinert and Dante Roscini discuss trade over time and what history teaches.
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