A selection of new and forthcoming books in business and economic history:

Caroline Frank, Objectifying China, Imagining America: Chinese Commodities in Early America (University of Chicago Press, December 2011)

Paul Garner, British Lions and Mexican Eagles: Business, Politics, and Empire in the Career of Weetman Pearson in Mexico, 1889-1919 (Stanford University Press, September 2011)

Robert Gudmestad, Steamboats and the Rise of the Cotton Kingdom (Louisiana State University Press, October 2011)

Barbara Hahn, Making Tobacco Bright: Creating an American Commodity, 1617-1937 (Johns Hopkins University Press, September 2011)

William M. McClenahan, Jr., and William H. Becker, Eisenhower and the Cold War Economy (Johns Hopkins University Press, November 2011)

Matthew Parker, The Sugar Barons: Family, Corruption, Empire, and War in the West Indies (Walker Books, August 2011)

Brian Schoen, The Fragile Fabric of Union: Cotton, Federal Politics, and the Global Origins of the Civil War (Johns Hopkins University Press, September 2011)

James Simpson, Creating Wine: The Emergence of a World Industry, 1840-1914 (Princeton University Press, October 2011)

William G. Thomas, The Iron Way: Railroads, the Civil War, and the Making of Modern America (Yale University Press, September 2011)

Carl Wennerlind, Casualties of Credit: The English Financial Revolution, 1620-1720 (Harvard University Press, November 2011)

Olivier Zunz, Philanthropy in America: A History (Princeton University Press, November 2011)

"Ireland, America, and the Worlds of Mathew Carey" will take place in Philadelphia, Pa., on October 27-29, 2011, hosted by the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, the Library Company of Philadelphia, the Program in Early American Economy and Society, and the University of Pennsylvania Libraries. As the organizers explain, "This is the first part of a trans-Atlantic conference on Mathew Carey (1760-1839) that will take place on two occasions. . . . The second part of this trans-Atlantic conference will be held at Trinity College Dublin, on November 17-19, 2011. It will be hosted by the Centre for Irish-Scottish and Comparative Studies and Trinity College Dublin."
   Carey is of interest to business and economic historians because, again in the words of the organizers,

By the mid-1790s, Mathew Carey had transformed himself from printer to publisher, from artisan to manufacturer, becoming the most important American book publisher of the early national period. Carey's identity as an Irish-American and a Catholic, and his contributions to economics and politics are inseparable from the trans-Atlantic print culture of the early national era.

The program for the October meeting has now been posted, including links to the full text of papers.
   The conference is free, but registration is required. Details are available on the conference website.
   The preliminary program for the second part of the conference in Dublin is available on Sarah Crider Arndt's Print on the Periphery blog.

Morris L. Bian of Auburn University has recently published a review of the literature on modern Chinese business history, 1978-2008, entitled "Interpreting Enterprise, State, and Society." The article appears in the September 2011 issue of Frontiers of History in China (full viewing requires a subscription or access through a subscribing institution). According to the abstract:

This article offers a critical review of literature in the area of modern Chinese business history from 1978 to 2008.  It focuses on four interconnected topics: (1) the evolution of industrial capitalism, (2) the adoption of corporate hierarchies and/or social networks, (3) the change of financial institutions and monetary system, and (4) the development of state-owned industries and the formation of the (central) state enterprise system.  The review reveals not only significant growth of the field of modern Chinese business history over the last three decades but also the existence of major gaps. The article concludes by considering the implications of its findings for understanding the political economy of business enterprises and enterprise systems in different national and historical contexts.

   Bian is the author of The Making of the State Enterprise System in Modern China (Harvard University Press, 2005), and he is the recipient of the BHC's Newcomen Article Award (now the Oxford Journals Article Prize) for his essay, "The Sino-Japanese War and the Formation of the State Enterprise System in China: A Case Study of the Dadakou Iron and Steel Works, 1938-1945," published in the 2002 issue of Enterprise & Society. 

Applicants are sought for up to two $10,000 fellowships for doctoral thesis research in U.S. business or economic history. These fellowships are available largely through the generosity of the late John E. Rovensky. The Rovensky Fellowship program is administered by the University of Illinois Foundation.
   Applicants must be working toward a Ph.D. degree with U.S. business or economic history as the area of major interest. Fellowship recipients must be enrolled in a doctoral program at an accredited college or university in the United States. Preference will be given to applicants who are preparing for a career in teaching and research and who will have completed all graduate course work prior to the fall of 2012. Awards are non-renewable and may not be taken simultaneously with an Economic History Association graduate dissertation fellowship.
    Application forms may be found on the Web at http://www.thebhc.org/awards/rovenapp.html; the full announcement is at http://www.thebhc.org/awards/rovenann.html.
    Inquiries may be directed to:
William J. Hausman, Department of Economics, Box 8795, College of William & Mary, Williamsburg, VA 23187-8795.
   Completed applications for the fellowship must be received no later than Monday, February 13, 2012.

As the new academic year begins, we again offer a round-up of workshops, forums, and discussion groups in business and economic history. Please check each website for more detailed information; some groups may not have posted Fall 2011 information. In addition to their value for those able to participate directly, these groups often maintain mailing lists and sometimes make speakers' papers freely available.

Business History Unit Seminars, LSE
Business History @ Erasmus Seminars
Center for the History of Business, Technology, and Society (Hagley) Research Seminars
Centre for Macroeconomics and the Historical Record (MEHR), University of Copenhagen
Columbia University Seminar in Economic History
Core Seminar in Economic and Social History, University of Cambridge
Economic and Social History of the Premodern World, IHR, University of London
Financial History Seminar Series, Stern School, NYU
George Mason Economic History Workshop
Harvard Economic History Workshop
History and Economics Seminar, Harvard University
Institute for Economic and Business History Research, Stockholm
Northwestern Workshop in Economic History
Paris School of Economics, Economic History Seminar
PEAES Fellows Colloquium and Seminars, Library Company of Philadelphia
Penn Economic History Forum
Program on the Study of Capitalism, Harvard University
University of Arizona Economic History Workshop (listed among all Econ Dept. seminars)
Vanderbilt University Economic History Workshop
Von Gremp Workshop in Economic and Entrepreneurial History, UCLA
Washington (D.C.) Area Economic History SeminarWinton Institute for Monetary History Seminar, University of Oxford
Workshop on the Cultural History of Capitalism, University of Georgia
Yale Economic History Workshop

The 2011 edition of BEH On-Line, a series devoted to edited essays from the Business History Conference annual meetings, is complete. Readers may freely access all of the 18 essays in this issue, as well as any of the 199 previous essays.  A cumulative author index is available. Each year's issue also includes the program and paper abstracts from that year's meeting.  BEH On-Line is the successor publication of the BHC's Business and Economic History, print collections of papers from the annual meetings.  The complete run of Business and Economic History, 1962-1999, can be accessed from the BHC website, and includes a cumulative index as well.

The American Historical Association has released the preliminary version of the program for the 2012 annual meeting, which will be held in Chicago, Illinois, on January 5-8. As announced earlier, the Business History Conference is now an AHA-affiliated organization and as such can propose sessions for the meeting (though with no guarantee of acceptance). The BHC is sponsoring three sessions in Chicago, which can be found from the BHC sessions page. They include: session 95, "The Business of Media History: Technology, Journalism, Advertising," chaired by Pamela Walker Laird and featuring papers by Richard John, Anna McCarthy, Lynn Spigel, and James L. Baughman; session BHC2, "Writing History at The Wall Street Journal," chaired by Daniel Levinson-Wilk; and session 189, "Everyday Calculations: Varieties of Commercial Numeracy in Early America," chaired by Patricia Cline Cohen and including papers by Caitlin Rosenthal, Thomas Wickham, Molly McCarthy, and Jennifer Egloff.
   Other sessions of interest are the Economic History Association session and two German Historical Institute sessions, as well as several other papers. The EHA session, chaired by Daniel Raff, is "A Discussion of Before and Beyond Divergence: The Politics of Economic Change in China and Europe by Jean-Laurent Rosenthal and R. Bin Wong." The GHI sessions are "Communities of Consumers? Social-Democratic Spaces in the Age of Postwar Mass Consumption," chaired by Lizabeth Cohen; the second is session 220, "In Search of a New Balance: Meat in Twentieth-Century America," which includes papers by Uwe Spiekermann on Oscar Mayer and by Roger Horowitz on Agriprocessor and the decline of kosher meat. An example of the single papers of interest is Rebecca Kobrin's paper in session 18: "Creative Destruction: Jewish Immigrant Bankers, the Business of Mass Migration, and the Reshaping of American Capitalism, 1870–1914."
   Abstracts are available for most sessions and papers. Additional papers of interest can be found by searching for relevant key words; the search engine captures not only words in session and paper titles but also those in the abstracts.

A conference on "The Trade in Luxury and the Luxury of Trade," focusing on the production, display, and circulation of precious objects from the Middle Ages to the present day, will be held November 22-23, 2012, at the Musée Gadagne in Lyon. The conference is being organized by the Laboratoire de Recherche Historique Rhône-Alpes (LARHRA). The organizers explain:

the objective is to reveal the richness and diversity of a phenomenon referred to as ‘luxury,’ and the progressive emergence of specialized markets. Two specific approaches will thus be developed in the conference: on the one hand, a focus on people and goods, and on the other hand, a focus on points of sale and the material and symbolic power deriving from this particular sector of the economy.

Paper proposals should be sent to Alain Bonnet at the University of Nantes and to Natacha Coquery, at the University of Lyon 2. The deadline for submissions is January 1, 2012. For a full explanation of the meeting's objectives and themes, please see the call for papers (in French and English).

In 1992 the libraries of the University of Western Ontario tried to identify the company histories scattered throughout their holdings and to pull them together in one source, Business & History at Western: A Guide to Selected Resources in the UWO Library System. This work has now been placed on-line, at an expanded and on-going site, Books about Companies. As the compilers explain,

Since 1992 more company-related books have been discovered in the stacks and many more have been published. . . . The list is continually under construction and new company histories are added as they arrive. As well, we have included the company histories that are often found (but rarely indexed) in reference works or in books about industries. For example, this guide will direct you to the company histories found in The Advertising Age Encyclopedia of Advertising and to the short sketches found in The World Guide to Automobile Manufacturers.

   Although the great majority of the entries are straightforwardly bibliographic, linking to the UWO catalog entry for each publication, occasional annotations to the list include reviews of the books and short bibliographies, as well as links to articles that have been scanned by the staff in the Business Library. Many pamphlets, such as the hundreds of relevant Newcomen Society publications, are included. For a fuller description of the plans and purposes of the site, please visit Books about Companies.

Kevin Tennant, on his Business History blog, has posted a report on the recent British Academy of Management (BAM) meeting and the success of his and John Wilson's attempt "to revive the Business and Management History track" at this annual conference. Participants in the track included Andrew Godley, Terry Gourvish, and Stephanie Decker. The full listing can be found on the BAM program, at page 61. One promising aspect, Tennent reports, is the interest among management scholars in undertaking archival research, as demonstrated at a workshop session in which he talked about "Business Archives: why they are relevant to management academics and how to use them."
   Tennent concludes that "the papers . . . , together with the workshop sessions, contributed to a healthy meeting of minds and a forging of many new networking opportunities for all involved."

Tip of the hat to Andrew Smith's blog.