The Past Speaks

I recently got back from attending the 2024 Association of Business Historians (ABH) conference. I’m sharing my observations about this year’s ABH here.  Established in about 1991 or 1992, the ABH conference serves as a platform for business historians to present their work, share ideas, and discuss recent developments in the field. The conference covers a wide range of topics within business history, including corporate governance, entrepreneurship, international business, and the impact of historical events on business practices. In its early days, most of the attendees of the ABH worked in the Economic and Social History Departments. Today, most of the UK-based academics at the ABH are business historians who work within business school.  Each year, the conference attracts participants from around the world, fostering a global dialogue on business history. The ABH is closely associated with the journal Business History. I’ve been going to the ABH for a long time (I think 2008 in York was the first time I went) so I think I can speak with some authority about its evolution.

The ABH appears to be in very good health indeed. I was struck by how many academics from different disciplines and countries were there. The US was very strongly represented at the ABH this year, thanks to the partnership with the Economic and Business History Society, with whom the ABH jointly organized the conferences. In my books, a conference that can attract lots of people who are from far away both geographically and from different disciplines is a strong conference. You want to buy stock in that conference and the associated scholarly community.

The ABH-EBHS doctoral workshops that ran before the main conference attracted, I’m told, about 20 PhD students from various countries and disciplines. I was particularly impressed by the US sociology PhDs who were there. The workshop was funded by the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET), which apparently sees lots of value in cultivating the next generation of business historians. Readers may recall that INET was founded in October 2009 in response to the global financial crisis of 2007-2012. Its funders, who included George Soros and James Balsillie were really dissatisfied with mainstream neoclassical accounts of how the economy operates and wanted to encourage new approaches, including historical ones.  The fact INET is funding this initiative is another indicator of the robust strength of business history.

I noticed a fair number of Canadians on the conference programme—many of them work at UQAM. At the conference, there was a very good discussion about why so few corporate archives in Canada are open to researchers. That discussion was sparked by a remark I happened to make in the session on corporate archives.

Congratulations to Dr Chris Corker on organizing this conference so well.