An International Collaboration of Business Historians: Female Entrepreneurs in the Long Nineteenth-Century, A Global Approach

Sharing the challenges and opportunities of our global collaboration on nineteenth-century female entrepreneurship, this roundtable will describe and analyze our experiences as part of a 20-member team of scholars examining women in business across the globe in the long nineteenth century. In 2019 we came together in person and via skype to produce a workshop on global female entrepreneurship, an edited volume (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) and a digital research hub and international network focusing on scholarship on women in management and enterprise (ReWOMEN). Our discussants will consider how a global collaboration enhanced previous regionally focused analyses and challenged us as scholars at different places in our academic careers. Ranging from emerging scholars to senior academics with research on the United Kingdom, the United States, Brazil, Australia and New Zealand, we will consider the value of this overarching project for our own work. First, both co-organizers of the conference (and co-editors of the book) will speak to the inspiration and planning behind this groundbreaking endeavor. Then participants will briefly discuss the opportunities and challenges of contributing research to a wider project beyond their field specialization and how a collaborative endeavor sharpened and contextualized research agendas. We expect this opening portion to take half of the session, after which we will welcome questions and comments. We will share our collaborative methods as well as the historiographical questions our project’s widened perspective introduces about the significance of business to nineteenth-century women and their contribution to nineteenth-century business across the globe. While not ignoring the obstacles faced throughout each phase of the joint-project, our discussion will highlight how the creation of a sustained model of scholarly collaboration can benefit individual academics, regional fields, interdisciplinary pursuits and global analyses of business history.