Through three distinct case studies, the panelists explore diverse practices of quantification in France, Malaysia, and China, where numbers play a significant role in (re)-shaping the relationship between public and private actors in the Malayan colonial context, in the French water industry (1922-2017), and in everyday commercial calculations in 20th-Century China.
This panel investigates political, intellectual, and legal controversies that erupted in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century United States over businesses and business practices deemed hostile to the public interest.
David A. Hounshell published his book From the American System to Mass Production, 1800-1932: The Development of Manufacturing Technology in the United States forty years ago, in 1984. The purpose of this panel is two fold: to celebrate this anniversary of an important text that has been greatly influential in business history, the history of technology, and other fields, and to consider how scholars from these scholarly communities would approach these topics today, given our current understanding and the new research that been done over the intervening decades.
Each of the papers in this panel consider how families thought of themselves as economic units in particular historical circumstances. Lindsay Keiter demonstrates that elite families before the Civil War circulated various forms of wealth among extended kin but also cut off aid to chronically indebted members in the interest of preserving household capital—much like a business cutting losses.
Dear Conference Organizers,
This panel delves into the transformative impact of the electronics industry during the "electronic century" (as conceived by Alfred Chandler Jr.) across diverse contexts in the Americas during the 1970s and 1980s. Rather than isolating specific geographical locations, our approach explores the broader implications of the industry's growth and influence on emergent business strategies in the region. With this panel, we aim to extend the study of the electronics industry beyond conventional narratives.
This panel addresses how policymakers have grappled with the challenge of political market disruption—specifically, the disruption of commodity markets—during the 1970s and 1980s. Each of the three panelists—all of whom are emerging scholars new to the BHC—spotlight a different commodity type (oil, money, and food crops), but they each present a story of policy actors trying to change or adapt to changes in commodity market dynamics. They are, essentially, accounts of efforts by various actors to “fix” markets that appeared to them imperiled or warped by political developments.
It is no exaggeration to say that electricity is the single most important public utility to this century’s energy transition. Despite electric power’s present and future importance, however, much of its relevant history, especially in the US, remains poorly understood, hampered by a focus on singular figures and early technical inventions. This panel, by contrast, considers electric power’s institutional history, encompassing the wide range of organizational bodies that govern what is sometimes called the world’s largest coast-to-coast machine.
As the Business History Conference meets in Providence in spring of 2024, a stone’s throw from Slater Mill and the industrial heritage of the Blackstone Valley, it feels an appropriate moment to reflect on the business history of textiles in the United States. This panel will explore three stories of textile commerce that have origins in New England, but stretch across regional lines, national markets, and indeed global trade.
The early modern period plays a minor role in business history discussions today, despite a robust, long-standing literature that points to early modern business practices in early modern north-western Europe as essential to understanding the rise of capitalism. While the Dutch Republic and England are famous for introducing new business practices like state-chartered joint-stock companies, these countries were also at the vanguard of negotiating the public role of business and the role of companies vis-a-vis the public interest.