Please submit your review via e-mail to bhr@hbs.edu, either as an attachment or within the body of the message.

Book reviews should be 800 to no more than 1,000 words. Review essays should be approximately 1,500 to 2,000 words. The length of the review should be indicative of the book’s importance. Please do not undertake a longer review without checking with the editors. If you submit a review that exceeds the word limit you will be asked to cut and resubmit it. Please let us know if, after reading a book, you believe that it does not merit a review.

Reviews originally undertaken for the Business History Review must not be pre-published in another venue, whether print or on line. The Business History Review reserves the right not to publish a review.

Describe clearly and concisely the nature, scope, and thesis of the book, locate it in the relevant literature, and indicate its contribution to scholarship. Your review should not consist entirely of a summary of the book’s contents.

Discuss the extent to which the book achieves its stated objectives, draws on relevant source material, and is well organized and well written.

We are interested in the value of the book to business historians, but please bear in mind that the authors of many of the books we review are not themselves business historians and may have intended a wider, or simply a different, audience. It is appropriate to indicate the extent to which a book may be of interest to the readers of this journal, but it is less appropriate to condemn or praise a book primarily for the extent to which it suits a business historian’s needs.

Attach to your review a brief biographical statement, including your title and affiliation. Use the following format:

Henrietta Larson is professor of business administration at Harvard Business School. She is the author or co-author of several works, including History of Humble Oil & Refining Company (1959).

You need not list more of the title and bibliographic information than are required to identify the book. We will provide the correct heading here.

When quoting from the book under review, please cite the page number. It should appear in parentheses at the end of the sentence. "Cite quotes like this" (p. 95).

If you quote from or refer specifically to another book in your review, please provide the author’s name (first name as well as last), the full title of the book, and the book’s date of publication. If you cite a journal article, include the author’s name, journal title, and the month and year of publication. You may include the article title or not, as you wish: "In a recent study on slave mortality, Robert Brown concluded that… (Journal of American History [June 1984])." Do not use footnotes.

Include the first name (or initials, for those authors, like D. C. M. Platt, who are known that way) in the first reference to any person you mention. This does include any person you feel sure everyone will recognize.

Similarly, use the full name in the first use of any item that you wish subsequently to identify by an acronym.

We generally follow the 17th edition of the Chicago Manual of Style (2017). For further information on journal style see the general Author instructions.