Accounting and finance

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Counterfeits, Frauds, and the Value of Early Modern Money

The papers on this panel examine the relationship between money, value, and imperial and early national politics between the seventeenth and mid-nineteenth centuries. They contribute to recent scholarship that has emphasized money’s political, legal, and socio-cultural histories by paying particular attention to the ways that monetary frauds tested the bonds between minting and state power.

Undertaking Ingenuity in Work and Labor Management

The session will offer historical perception on ingenuity as one of the discreet foundations of innovation. It is this ability to cleverly combine expertise and skill: mobilize knowledge to improve know-how (savoir-faire) and vice versa. Ingenuity is part of the common practices of “ordinary people” observed by Michel de Certeau and his team in the 1970s. It is “another form of creativity hidden in a subtle entanglement of silent and effective tricks, by which everyone invents their “own way” of making things through the forest of imposed products”.

Pensions, Organized Labor, and Financialization in Postwar US

While companies established the first retirement funds in the late nineteenth century, they proliferated after World War II and by the 1990s, owned close to one third of all domestic equities, according to historian Sanford Jacoby. Our proposed panel looks at pension funds and finance in the mid-twentieth century in the United States in three ways: the developing standards of pension investment, the regulatory apparatus imposed on pension fund managers, and the professionalization of this type of financial expertise.