Economic and Social History

The last quarter of a century has been one of great changes for the field of early modern economic history. My argument is that, in this period, early modern economic history has shown a remarkably innovative spirit. However, this is most apparent not at the core of the discipline, but in how economic history has interacted with other branches of early modern history, be they social, cultural, environmental, or material. This argument is supported by the analysis of quantitative evidence. I then move on to consider two important developments in early modern economic history since the late 1990s: global economic history and the history of consumption and trade. This article concludes with a reflection on recent developments in the so-called New History of Capitalism (NHC) and on studies of pre-modern inequality, sustainability, and the environment.

“The Vast and Unsolved Enigma of Power”: Business History and Business Power

Business is commonly regarded as one of the powerful actors in the world today. However, this position is neither as straightforward as often believed nor particularly new. Nevertheless, business historians have not focused on the topic of business power to date, often leaving it as something lurking in the background of their analyses. There are signs that this may be beginning to change with the growth of studies on the history of capitalism, but this revised presidential address encourages business historians to engage more fully and explicitly with the concept of power and to recognize the different ways in which the concept can be used to enlighten the study of business history.

Putting Capitalism in Its Place: Economies of Worth and the Practice of Australian History

Writing histories of capitalism involves making decisions about how to contextualise the wider non-capitalist formations that underpin and sustain capitalist processes. This article introduces Boltanski and Thévenot’s economies of worth (EW) framework as a tool and stimulus for historians to historicise capitalism as a social order while simultaneously avoiding the determinism of concepts such as commodification and capitalist accumulation. The article identifies four dominant approaches to contextualisation of capitalism in Australia in the past: economic history, radical nationalism, the New Left and settler capitalism. It then introduces EW, a repertoire of competing conceptions of the common good that, we argue, offers a framework for systematically drawing contested, hybrid and co-existent forms of capitalist and non-capitalist value, or “worth,” into view across multiple temporal and spatial scales. The potential usefulness of this framework is illustrated through a discussion of recent scholarship in the history of capitalism in Australia.

Book review: Andrew B. Liu, Tea War: A History of Capitalism in China and India

Andrew B. Liu, Tea War: A History of Capitalism in China and India (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020), pp. 360, $50.00, 25 b/w illus, Hardcover. ISBN: 9780300243734.