Visualizing Business History

This panel examines how visual representations of economic life and business practices helped make economic knowledge and business management visible and legible to audiences across industries and countries. The panel explores how visual representations in the form of statistical graphs, diagrams, maps, and insurance books were mobilized to underwrite narratives of the imagined futures of individuals, businesses, and national economies, and to accord legitimacy to innovative business practices such as market research and authority to those who implemented them in business management. Moreover, it analyzes how the different visualization strategies actors employed to target their intended audiences shaped understandings of the temporalities of business. The panel seeks to contribute to the burgeoning literature on visualization in business history by exploring how we came to rely on visual representations of data and economic knowledge as ostensibly accurate depictions of economic life. The papers in this panel therefore trace how (1) US business in the first half of the twentieth century mobilized statistical graphics produced by graphic designers to grant authority and legitimacy to newly developed business practices such as “scientific” advertising and market research, (2) how strategies of data visualization adopted by borrowing countries during the first decades of the twentieth century helped make their claims about current and prospective economic growth and national development visible and legible to global audiences of creditors and investors, and (3) how standardized life insurance books helped promote specific visualizations of imagined futures that connected the insured’s past relationship with their collecting agent to a vision of an ordered and insured future designed to mitigate uncertainty at the turn of the twentieth century.