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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 August 2019
The financial crisis of 2008 brought with it a renewed interest in the study of capitalism across disciplines. While historians have since led the way with writings on commodities, labor, finance, and institutions, these have been largely conveyed from the Euro-American perspective without necessarily probing other values, parameters, and conditions beyond western political economy that have shaped business over time. This article suggests that to assess the benefits and limits of the global capitalist experience, we must prioritize unconventional subjects, sources, and styles in how we frame research questions, analyze evidence, and cast narratives. Such an endeavor is especially timely given the growing influence of regional markets around the world and the increasing prominence of computational tools to generate and analyze novel datasets.
1 Soll, Jacob, “Jean-Baptiste Colbert and the Invention of European Commercial Culture, 1661–1750,” part of a new intellectual history of French commerce that builds on his book The Information Master: Jean-Baptiste Colbert's Secret State Intelligence System (Ann Arbor, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
2 Laura Phillips Sawyer, in “Unconventional Enforcement: Clarence Venner's Shareholder Suits against the Board and the Problem of Extortionate Litigation, 1900–1920,” presented new evidence from legal archives to analyze the role of minority shareholder rights and private litigation in curbing American corporate monopolies in the early twentieth century.
3 Hisano, Ai, “Capitalism and the Senses: Recreating Consumer Experience,” based on her forthcoming book, Visualizing Taste: How Business Changed the Look of What You Eat (Cambridge, MA, 2019)Google Scholar.
4 In “Anthroposophical Capitalism: Esoteric Beliefs and the Creation of Modern Business Enterprises,” Geoffrey Jones explored why unconventional philosophical and religious belief systems such as Rudolph Steiner's science of the spirit have become key to important narratives of success in organic food and tea, as told by entrepreneurs in Denmark and India themselves.
5 Chambi Chachage and Jacqueline Mgumia's “Africapitalism and Entrepreneurial Elites: Exceptional Cases of African Entrepreneurs” combined archival research in Tanzania with interview data from the Creating Emerging Markets oral history project to demonstrate how the private sector became a purported driver of development in African countries that seemed hostile to business in the late twentieth century. Chachage and Mgumia also correlated perspectives across interviews to suggest that capital scarcity continues to limit the scaling of homegrown ventures in education, health care, and other strategic sectors across Africa. This builds on Chachage, “Globalization and the Making of East Africa's Asian Entrepreneurship Networks,” in Entrepreneurship in Africa: A Historical Approach, ed. Ochonu, Moses E. (Bloomington, IN, 2018), 31–52Google Scholar.
6 Jeannette Estruth, “The Feminist Capital of the Silicon Valley, 1970–1975,” part of her book manuscript The New Utopia: A Political History of the Silicon Valley. See also Estruth, “Visions for the Suburban City in the Age of Decolonization: Chicana Activism in the Silicon Valley, 1965–75,” in Women's Activism and “Second Wave” Feminism: Transnational Histories, ed. Molony, Barbara and Nelson, Jennifer (London, 2017), 216–30Google Scholar.
7 In his presentation “Outlaw Economics: Reading Capitalism from Beyond the Pale,” Sebastian Prange outlined Arabic and Indic language sources for studying piracy as a distinctly Asian phenomenon; this new work builds on Prange, Monsoon Islam: Trade and Faith on the Medieval Malabar Coast (Cambridge, UK, 2018)Google Scholar. Adam Frost, in “Capitalism at the Margins: Illicit Entrepreneurship in Socialist China,” described how cultivating relationships with paper dealers across China led him to rare archival documents being sold on the black market; this work forms the base of his dissertation, titled “Speculators and Profiteers: The History of Entrepreneurship in Socialist China” (PhD diss., Department of History, Harvard University, in progress). Christopher Leighton's “Capitalists without Capital: China's Businessman under Mao” emphasized how overlooked paintings, photographs, and other visual evidence has helped him to analyze unlikely links between business leaders and politicians during Mao Zedong's leadership; this work is forthcoming as The Revolutionary Rich: Political Fortune and Red Capitalism in China, 1949–79 (Chicago, forthcoming)Google Scholar. In “Into the Bazaar: Indian Ocean Vernaculars in the Age of Global Capitalism,” Fahad Ahmad Bishara emphasized the need to incorporate bilingual manuscripts and petty financial papers from the Indian Ocean littoral to deprivilege land-based histories and shed light on the cosmopolitan exchanges characteristic of oceanic trade; this new work builds on Bishara, A Sea of Debt: Law and Economic Life in the Western Indian Ocean, 1780–1950 (Cambridge, UK, 2017)Google Scholar.
8 Sudev Sheth, “Trusteeship and Capital Development in Twentieth-Century India,” based on the author's interview of Sanjay Lalbhai, Ahmedabad, India, 6 Feb. 2019, Creating Emerging Markets Project, Baker Library Historical Collections, Harvard Business School, Boston; Andrea Lluch, “Entrepreneurship and Business Survival: The Unconventional Stories of Family Businesses in Latin America,” based on data from thirty-nine interviews conducted by the author in Argentina, Chile, Peru, and Colombia for the Creating Emerging Markets Project.
9 “Interviews,” Creating Emerging Markets website, https://www.hbs.edu/creating-emerging-markets/interviews.
10 Examples of capturing devices include computers, mobile phones, cameras, microphones, scanners, trackers, and even the Internet. In the field of data storage, technological leaps have made hard drives, servers, flash cards, USB sticks, and cloud space increasingly inexpensive. On average, the cost of storing data per gigabyte has halved every fourteen months since 1980. See “A History of Storage Cost (Update),” mkomo.com, 9 Mar. 2014, http://www.mkomo.com/cost-per-gigabyte-update.
11 In business, examples include supply-chain management, reducing operational costs, capturing new markets, and testing a product. In the sphere of predictive modeling, prominent examples include elections, sporting events, weather, crime, housing markets, and stock prices.
12 Neil Rollings, “A Novel Form of Biography? Analyzing Appointment Diaries through Quantitative Network Analysis,” part of an ongoing collaborative project sponsored by the United Kingdom's Economic and Social Research Council; Seven Ağır, “The Address Book as Sources of Data for Business History: The Problems and Prospects in Creating and Analyzing Novel Data Sets.” On how the data set is being built and used to probe new questions in Turkish business history, see Ağır, Seven and Artunç, Cıhan, “The Wealth Tax of 1942 and the Disappearance of Non-Muslim Enterprises in Turkey,” Journal of Economic History 79, no. 1 (2019): 201–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
13 Meng Zhang, “Shareholding Practices in Commercial Reforestation and the Social Network of Share Transactions in Early Modern China.” For an earlier iteration of this work, using Gephi to generate historical network analysis, see Zhang, “Financing Market-Oriented Reforestation: Securitization of Timberlands and Shareholding Practices in Southwest China, 1750–1900,” Late Imperial China 38, no. 2 (2017): 109–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Zhang is working on a book manuscript titled Sustaining the Market: Long-Distance Timber Trade in China, 1700–1930.