The Past Speaks

My Impressions of the Association of Business Historians Conference

I have just returned from the Association of Business Historians conference. This was my first time at this conference and I must say that I was really impressed both the organization of the event and the quality of the papers.

Here are some quick and dirty observations about some of the papers I found  particularly interesting.

The keynote speech was given by Professor Colin Divall (University of York and National Railway Museum)
“To encourage such as would travel a little, to travel more:  Business History, Global Networks and the Future of Mobility” an interesting effort to integrate the histories of transportation and globalization with environmental history.  Divall placed the ongoing efforts to decarbonize transportation (i.e., to reduce the carbon footprints of intensive users of transport such as yours truly) in a historical context.

I liked the panel on Finance, Governance and Takeovers, where Michael Rowlinson, Queen Mary, University of London, The takeover of Cadbury by Kraft: heritage and historiography”. His paper gave us a sense of why companies invest resources in publishing official histories and otherwise telling people about their pasts. Why do companies create “usable pasts” for themselves? Rowlinson showed that Cadbury created an image of history that stressed the firms god-fearing, Quaker origins after an early 20th century ethical scandal about. He showed how the social memory of Cadbury as an ethical company persisted until the firm’s recent and controversial acquisition by Kraft.

I also heard a great paper by Andrew Tylecote (University of Sheffield) “Power, governance and the financial system: why the globalisation of finance worked before 1914 and doesn’t now.”  Before 1914, vast amounts of capital flowed from Europe, where savings were abundant and opportunities to invest were limited, to the settler economies, which needed the capital to build up the economies (e.g., by building railways in Canada and Argentina). This is more or less what economics would predict. Today, vast amounts of capital flow from relatively and underdeveloped economies into the industrialized countries where much of it is used to finance consumer expenditure, which is counterintuitive on many levels.  His paper tries to explain this paradox.

Stephanie Decker (University of Liverpool) “Traditional and non-traditional foreign investors in the economic decolonization of Ghana and Nigeria.” This great paper looked at the turn-key factories built in the 1960s, when Western contractors built steelmills and other factories in Africa countries than then turned them over to the local governments. This wave of projects did very little to benefit the newly independent countries and got them into debt to the west.

Peter Sørensen and Kurt Pedersen (University of Aarhus) „German foreign direct investments into Denmark during the Occupation.‟ This very interesting paper looked at German FDI in occupied Denmark. In most places in occupied Europe, the Germans simply seized assets at gunpoint and did not pretend to respect existing property rights. In contrast, they were very respectively of the existing institutions in occupied Denmark, which continued to have a functioning democracy and market economy for much of the war. During the war, German firms purchased a wide variety of assets in Denmark.

I heard three great papers on “The Importance of Local to Global Networks”
„The mighty instrument of concord: comparative advantage, Corn Laws, and the construction of naturalised free trade‟ Thomas D. Finger (University of Virginia)

„Local credit networks in the first age of global trade.‟
Mina Ishizu (London School of Economics) This paper looked at the British merchants who flooded into Brazil after 1807.
„Islands in a sea of trade: Liverpool‟s business networks in a globalising market, 1750-1810.‟
Sheryllynne Haggerty (University of Nottingham) This great paper looked at business networks and the economic aspects of the rise of anti-slavery sentiment.

I heard some good papers on advertising.

The paper „Cigarette papers: The John Player & Sons advertising archive.‟ Andrew Newnham (University of Nottingham) should interest all smokers, not to mention cultural historians interesting in tobacco.
„From the local to the global at Rowntree & Co. York, c 1900-1969.” Emma Robertson (Sheffield Hallam University) should interest cultural historians of Empire.

The last panel I heard was International Shipping and Absentee Landlords: Assurance, Mortality and Slavery

John Killick (University of Leeds) „North Atlantic steerage fares, mortality, and travel conditions, 1820-1870: evidence from the Cope Line Passenger Service”

This fantastic paper was based on the records of a packet line that carried many emigrants from the British Isles to the United States. The paper challenged the claims of the existing historiography, including the view that shipboard mortality rates were extremely high. The deplorable conditions on board the Coffin Ships that brought Irish famine refugees to North America in the 1840s are the stuff of social memory. This paper suggests that shipboard mortality on most ships was actually quite low and only somewhat higher than would be expected with a similar population on land. The paper also showed the costs in work-time to purchase trans-Atlantic passage fell dramatically in the period studied. In the 1820s, it would have taken almost a year of unskilled work to pay for a trip across the Atlantic. By the 1850s, this had fallen to roughly 80 days of earnings. (I didn’t write down the exact numbers, I’m afraid).

Simon Smith (University of Hull), “The curse of the Caribbean: absentee planting on St Vincent and the Grenadines, 1817-34”

Another great paper. Many slave plantations in the West Indies had absentee proprietors. Historians have traditional regarded the widespread use of agents to manage plantations on behalf of absentees as something that made plantations less efficient and retarded the development of the islands. This paper showed the plantations with absentee owners actually had somewhat higher output per slave than plantations with resident owners.

I also attended the presentations by the finalists for the Coleman prize, which is given to the best PhD thesis on a business history topic completed in Britain. It is sort of the equivalent of the Krooss Prize in the United States. The three presentations I heard were all great, but the research project that most interested me was that of Albane Forestier. Her PhD thesis compared a pre-Revolutionary French merchant house that traded with the French West Indies with a similar British firm. Her paper compared practices related to debt and contract enforcement. It should interest Canadian historians, especially those interested in that old chestnut of Canadian history: why were French-speaking merchants in Montreal largely displaced by an English-speaking bourgeoisie after the British Conquest of New France.  Forestier now lives in Montreal, where she is a Post-doctoral Fellow in the French Atlantic History Group at McGill University.  The winner of the prize was Aashish Velkar, who did his thesis on the standardization of units of measurement in Britain, which is also a great topic.