Business histories have long concerned themselves with questions of region and location. But in recent decades, a new generation of historians of capitalism have put space at the very center of their analyses. This roundtable unites some of those scholars of business, capitalism, and cities to discuss how questions of space, place, scale, and political-economic zones are informing their new scholarship. Together and individually, the panelists will discuss how uneven geographies facilitate or direct capital accumulation, investment, and extraction over time.
In their individual comments, each participant will explain how their work brings a spatial perspective to business history. Their scholarship works at a range of scales from the local to the global: from the unequal provision of mortgage credit in one suburban county, to the inter-regional competition for elite American college graduates, to decisions about campus location among university officials, to a multinational banks’ pursuit of profits across the irregular spaces of global empire, to the free-market ideologues who hoped to create spaces for capital free from the constraints of democratic accountability.
After the presentations, the panel will have a wide-ranging conversation that asks what the attention to questions of space, place, and scale might offer business historians. We will discuss: How does attention to space and geography challenge the conventional firm- and industry-centered focus of business history? Conversely, what do the archival practices of business history illuminate for the history of capitalism? Regardless of methodology, what is the appropriate scale for examining uneven development?