Toward a Global Collaboration for Women's Business History

Sharing the challenges and opportunities of our ongoing global collaboration on nineteenth-century female entrepreneurship, this panel presents an alternative approach to individual efforts by business historians. The panel analyzes our experiences as part of a 20-member team of scholars examining women in business across the globe in the long nineteenth century. Recent scholarship highlights the significant role of nineteenth-century businesswomen at the local and national level. While it is clear that in the past women relied on their social networks to build and sustain their enterprises, most current historians researching these female entrepreneurs work alone. In contrast, we came together on paper, and in person, to produce a workshop on global female entrepreneurship, a forthcoming edited volume, and a digital research hub and international network focusing on scholarship on women of management and enterprise (ReWOMEN). Our panelists consider how our global collaboration enhances our regionally focused analyses and challenges us as scholars at different places in our academic careers. Jennifer Aston, the co-editor of the book and co-organizer of the workshop, will discuss how a collaborative endeavor sharpened and contextualized her own research agenda; our senior scholar (Susan Ingalls Lewis) will share the ways in which this collaboration widened her perspective and raised vital questions about the significance of business to nineteenth-century women and their contribution to nineteenth-century business; and two early-career scholars (Kari Zimmerman and Alisha Cromwell) will discuss the opportunities and challenges of contributing research at an initial phase in their career and beyond their field specialization. We will debate issues relevant to business history collaborations such as lens of analyses, field specific trends, disciplinary methods, and divergent research styles. While not ignoring the obstacles faced throughout each phase of the joint-project, our panel highlights how the creation of a sustained model of scholarly collaboration can benefit individual academics, regional fields, interdisciplinary pursuits and global analyses of business history.