BHC

📚 New Works in Legal History | Virtual Book Talk

🗓 April 16, 2025 | 🕕 6:00–7:00 PM Central

Join us for a joint virtual event hosted by the American Society for Legal History and the Business History Conference, featuring two groundbreaking books that examine the regulatory and institutional structures shaping modern American life.

📖 Featured Authors & Books:

🥫 Xaq Frohlich — From Label to Table: Regulating Food in America in the Information Age

(University of California Press, 2023)

A compelling look at how food labeling evolved into a battleground for information, politics, and public trust.

💳 Sean Vanatta — Plastic Capitalism: Banks, Credit Cards, and the End of Financial Control

(Yale University Press, 2024)

An incisive history of the credit card industry and its influence on American financial governance and inequality.

#BizHis #LegalHistory #FinancialHistory #businesshistory #booktalk #NewBooks2024 #FoodRegulation #CreditCards #AmericanHistory #PublicPolicy #XaqFrohlich #SeanVanatta #UCPress #YaleUniversityPress #HistoricalScholarship #VirtualEvent #BHC #ASLH

BHC presidential address 2025, Business history

🎧📖 Interview with author Benjamin Waterhouse

One Day I'll Work for Myself

The Dream and Delusion That Conquered America

https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393868210

Hosts Katherine Turk, Richard John, and Dan Wadhwani.

From side-hustlers to start-ups, freelancers to small business owners, Americans have a special affinity for people who make it on their own. But the dream has a dark side.

“One day I’ll work for myself.” Perhaps you’ve heard some version of that phrase from friends, colleagues, family members—perhaps you’ve said it yourself. If so, you’re not alone. The spirit of entrepreneurship runs deep in American culture and history, in the films we watch and the books we read, in our political rhetoric, and in the music piping through our speakers.

What makes the dream of self-employment so alluring, so pervasive in today’s world? Benjamin C. Waterhouse offers a provocative argument: the modern cult of the hustle is a direct consequence of economic failures—bad jobs, stagnant wages, and inequality—since the 1970s. With original research, Waterhouse traces a new narrative history of business in America, populated with vivid characters—from the activists, academics, and work-from-home gurus who hailed business ownership as our economic salvation to the upstarts who took the plunge. We meet, among others, a consultant who quits his job and launches a wildly popular beer company, a department store saleswoman who founds a plus-size bra business on the Internet, and an Indian immigrant in Texas who flees the corporate world to open a motel. Some flourish; some squeak by. Some fail.

As Waterhouse shows, the go-it-alone movement that began in the 1970s laid the political and cultural groundwork for today’s gig economy and its ethos: everyone should be their own boss. While some people find success in that world, countless others are left bouncing from gig to gig—exploited, underpaid, or conned by get-rich-quick scams. And our politics doesn’t know how to respond.

Accessible, fast-paced, and eye-opening, One Day I’ll Work for Myself offers a fresh, insightful cultural history of the U.S. economy from the perspective of the people within it, asking urgent questions about why we’re clinging to old strategies for progress—and at what cost.

#bookinterview #podcast #bizhis #freelance #entrepreneurship #entrepreneur

Interview with business historian Jennifer Black

Branding Trust Advertising and Trademarks in Nineteenth-Century America https://www.pennpress.org/9781512825008/branding-trust/

In the early nineteenth century, the American commercial marketplace was a chaotic, unregulated environment in which knock-offs and outright frauds thrived. Appearances could be deceiving, and entrepreneurs often relied on their personal reputations to close deals and make sales. Rapid industrialization and expanding trade routes opened new markets with enormous potential, but how could distant merchants convince potential customers, whom they had never met, that they could be trusted? Through wide-ranging visual and textual evidence, including a robust selection of early advertisements, Branding Trust tells the story of how advertising evolved to meet these challenges, tracing the themes of character and class as they intertwined with and influenced graphic design, trademark law, and ideas about ethical business practice in the United States.

As early as the 1830s, printers, advertising agents, and manufacturers collaborated to devise new ways to advertise goods. They used eye-catching designs and fonts to grab viewers’ attention and wove together meaningful images and prose to gain the public’s trust. At the same time, manufacturers took legal steps to safeguard their intellectual property, formulating new ways to protect their brands by taking legal action against counterfeits and frauds. By the end of the nineteenth century, these advertising and legal strategies came together to form the primary components of modern branding: demonstrating character, protecting goodwill, entertaining viewers to build rapport, and deploying the latest graphic innovations in print. Trademarks became the symbols that embodied these ideas—in print, in the law, and to the public.

Branding Trust thus identifies and explains the visual rhetoric of trust and legitimacy that has come to reign over American capitalism. Though the 1920s has often been held up as the birth of modern advertising, Jennifer M. Black argues that advertising professionals had in fact learned how to navigate public relations over the previous century by adapting the language, imagery, and ideas of the American middle class.

Narratives of Business History: Fact, Fiction, and the Archive

Organizers: Marina Moskowitz and Andrew Popp

The recent publication of Hernan Diaz’ Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Trust—a four-voice narrative about the life of a New York City financier—brings a long tradition of novels about business back into the spotlight. While Trust can sit easily on a bookshelf of business fiction alongside Theodore Dreiser’s The Financier, Frank Norris’ The Pit, Sinclair Lewis’ Babbitt, and Philip Roth’s American Pastoral, among others, it also raises questions that are at the heart of writing of history. What sources do we as historians “trust”? What are the roles of memoir, biography, and other personal narratives in our assessment of past business practices? How do business professionals, firms, and ultimately, historians, shape the archives that are at the core of our research? And how do we separate fact from fiction? (Or conversely, is there a place for fiction in our teaching, our research, and our writing?)

In this discussion-based workshop, we aim to explore these questions in an open-ended conversation. Participants certainly do not have to have read Trust (or other business fictions) to attend, but just be willing to exchange ideas about how we craft business history; what the benefits and pitfalls might be of drawing on other genres, whether as source material, teaching tools, or models of writing; and how we can be creative in constructing both our archives and the narratives we draw from them?

2024 BHC Presidential Address by Professor Sharon A. Murphy, introduced by Professor Andrew Popp on March 16 2024 in Providence, RI. Doing Business in the Public Interest

Enterprise & Society TOC 25 1

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/enterprise-and-society/latest-issue

Popp, Andrew. “Introduction.” Enterprise & Society 25, no. 1 (2024): 1–1. https://doi.org/10.1017/eso.2023.60.

Murphy, Sharon Ann. “How to Define (or Not to Define) the New History of Capitalism.” Enterprise & Society 25, no. 1 (2024): 49–53. https://doi.org/10.1017/eso.2023.37.

Regele, Lindsay Schakenbach. “A Response to the Comments on Martial Capitalism.” Enterprise & Society 25, no. 1 (2024): 54–59. https://doi.org/10.1017/eso.2023.35.

Moore, Katie A. “Capitalism Indivisible.” Enterprise & Society 25, no. 1 (2024): 39–48. https://doi.org/10.1017/eso.2023.36.

Farr, Brittany. “Concealing Martial Violence.” Enterprise & Society 25, no. 1 (2024): 27–38. https://doi.org/10.1017/eso.2023.34.

Schakenbach Regele, Lindsay. “A Brief History of the History of Capitalism, and a New American Variety.” Enterprise & Society 25, no. 1 (2024): 2–26. https://doi.org/10.1017/eso.2023.32.

Mollan, Simon. “‘Witch-Hunt in Washington’: Ronald Prain, Robert F. Kennedy, the McClellan Committee, and the Investigation of International Business in the Cold War.” Enterprise & Society 25, no. 1 (2024): 248–80. https://doi.org/10.1017/eso.2022.37.

Walker, Stephen P. “The Peruvian Amazon Company: An Accounting Perspective.” Enterprise & Society 25, no. 1 (2024): 281–306. https://doi.org/10.1017/eso.2022.43.

Moazzin, Ghassan. “Electric Pioneers: Nationalist Lobbying, Technology Transfer, and the Origins of the Chinese Electric Lamp Industry, 1921–1937.” Enterprise & Society 25, no. 1 (2024): 213–47. https://doi.org/10.1017/eso.2022.34.

Wang, Jackie. “Banking on Women: The Shanghai Women’s Commercial and Savings Bank, 1924–1955.” Enterprise & Society 25, no. 1 (2024): 160–83. https://doi.org/10.1017/eso.2022.32.

Wade, Lewis. “Underwriting Empire: Marine Insurance and Female Agency in the French Atlantic World.” Enterprise & Society 25, no. 1 (2024): 184–212. https://doi.org/10.1017/eso.2022.33.

Gibson, Peter, and Simon Ville. “Marketing the Multinational in Shenbao, Shanghai, 1872–1889.” Enterprise & Society 25, no. 1 (2024): 134–59. https://doi.org/10.1017/eso.2022.31.

Yong, Yen Nie. “Crafting a Postcolonial (Inter)National Identity: Malaysian Pewter Company Royal Selangor’s Branding Strategies (1970–1992).” Enterprise & Society 25, no. 1 (2024): 103–33. https://doi.org/10.1017/eso.2022.30.

Aitken, Rob. “‘Numberless Little Risks’: ‘Tropical Exposure’ in Globalizing Actuarial Discourse, 1852–1947.” Enterprise & Society 25, no. 1 (2024): 60–102. https://doi.org/10.1017/eso.2022.21.

Volume 24 - Issue 4 - December 2023

Enterprise & Society

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/enterprise-and-society/

Krooss Prize Dissertation Summaries

Sick Time: Medicine, Management, and Slavery in Louisiana and Cuba, 1763–1868, Liana DeMarco

History from the Dustbins, Adam K. Frost

Building Blocs: Raw Materials and the Global Economy in the Age of Disequilibrium, Rob Konkel

Indigenization and the Long-Term Formation of Human Capital in Africa: The Airline Industry in East Africa Since 1946, Nahashon Nzioka Nthenya, Pierre-Yves Donzé

From Marxist Venture to Venture Capitalists: The Swedish Wage-Earner Funds and the Market Turn, 1983–1994, Rikard Westerberg

Dealing in Debt: The Role of Credit in Early Sino–U.S. Trade, Alicia Maggard

Doing Business in the Schools of the Welfare State: Competing “Entrepreneurial Selves” and the Roots of Entrepreneurship Education in 1980s Sweden, Elin Åström Rudberg

Globalization from Below: Labor Inequality in the German Shipbuilding Industry, 1960–2000, Katharina Bothe, Carolin Decker-Lange

Bricolage and Innovation in the Emergence and Development of the Spanish Tourism Industry, Jorge Hernández-Barahona, Elena San Román, Águeda Gil-López

The Stock Market and the Space Age, Sarvnaz Lotfi

#academic #bizhis

Whatch the ESC Mentoring Week Workshop - Grant writing

On Tuesday, 5th of March, 2024, at 11 am EST.

Speakers: Christina Lubinski (Copenhagen Business School) and Ed Balleisen (Duke University).

This workshop organized by the BHC Emerging Scholars Committee as part of the Mentoring Week will equip emerging scholars with the essential knowledge and skills required to craft successful grant proposals. Christina Lubinski (Copenhagen Business School) and Ed Balleisen (Duke University) will discuss the fundamentals of grant writing, including identifying funding opportunities, understanding proposal requirements, and crafting compelling narratives. Emerging scholars attending the session will gain insights into effective communication techniques for presenting their proposals persuasively to funders. They will have the opportunity to engage with the panelists through Q&A.

ENTERPRISE & SOCIETY

THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF BUSINESS HISTORY

Published by Cambridge University Press for the Business History Conference, Volume 24, Number 3, September 2023

https://doi.org/10.1017/eso.2023.28

ARTICLES

Under the Influence of Commercial Values: Neoliberalized

Business-Consumer Relations in the Swedish Certification

Market, 1988–2018

Klara Arnberg, Martin Gustavsson, and

Kristina Tamm Hallström

Spillovers from Oil Firms to U.S. Computing and Semiconductor

Manufacturing: Smudging State–Industry Distinctions and

Retelling Conventional Narratives

Cyrus C. M. Mody

The Trees of the Forest: Uncovering Small-Scale Producers in

an Industrial District, 1781–1851

Joe Lane

Futures of Europe: The City of London’s Commodity Exchanges,

the European Economic Community, and the Global Regulation

of Futures Trading (1960s–1980s)

Marco Bertilorenzi

Banking and Eurodollars in Italy in the 1950s

Ioan Achim Balaban

Part-Time Employment in the Breadwinner Era: Dutch

Employers’ Initiatives to Control Female Labor Force

Participation, 1945–1970

T. J. (Timon) de Groot

Satisfaction Guaranteed: Your Choice and the Transnational

Distribution of Hardcore Pornography Between the Netherlands

and Britain

Oliver Carter

Private Lending in an Alpine Region during the Eighteenth

Century: A Family of Merchant-Bankers and Their Credit Network

Cinzia Lorandini and Francesca Odella

Dividends, Efficiency, or Safety? Governance Choices at Corn

Products Refining

Sally H. Clarke

A Historical Social Network Analysis of John Pinney’s

Nevis–Bristol Network: Change over Time, the “Network

Memory,” and Reading Against the Grain of Historical Sources

Peter Buckles

The Other Kitchen Debate: Gender, Microwave Safety, and

Household Labor in Late Cold War America

Wendy Gamber

Published online by Cambridge University Press