Business history studies the origins and development of business institutions, drawing on economics, political science, and labor history. It originated in the US and UK, but is now studied worldwide, with a focus on topics such as management, entrepreneurship, and government regulation. Harvard Business School was an early leader in the field, and interdisciplinary methods are now used to study topics such as trade guilds and state-corporate struggles.
Business history is the scholarly study of the origins and development of business institutions. It is a subfield of economic history, drawing on scholarship from other areas such as economics and political science. The discipline originated in a business school and has historically focused on topics such as the origins of corporate management or entrepreneurship. Its scholars also write about labor history and the government’s regulatory relationships with firms and workers. Originally, there was a strong British and American focus, but today historians approach business history through many different cultural and economic settings.
Business historians research the development of business entities and their administrative structures, as well as the history of companies along with their complex interactions with governments and global markets. Sometimes associated with business schools, the business background examines questions about the origins of management and financial frameworks taught in MBA programs and implemented in companies. The subject originated in its current form in the United States, but has become popular in universities around the world. Some business historians study labor relations, particularly the interaction of organized unions with management.
The nature of entrepreneurship and its role in the rise of modern industry is a special topic of interest in American business history. Academic biographies of steel or railroad magnates such as the so-called Robber Barons could also be considered business history, along with research on the relationships between these businessmen and the US government. Business historians have generally been less interested in the cultural and social elements of corporate life, although the emergence of comparative approaches has changed this to some extent. In sociological analysis of business, scholars sometimes investigate how a corporate culture develops within a company.
Harvard Business School became an early leader in creating business history beginning in the 1920s, dedicating a journal to the subject and amassing large library collections. Examples of important scholarship on the subject at Harvard include works on the history of individual companies, sometimes told by veterans of those companies, but also studies on the financing of publicly traded companies. In the 1960s and 1970s, Alfred Chandler wrote about the history of management and its role in shaping the modern corporation, works that encouraged a trend of interest in management history.
Business history became less academically isolated than it was in postwar American universities. Scholars use interdisciplinary methods on topics such as the formation of trade guilds in the premodern world and struggles between states and large corporations. Older economic approaches, such as Raymond de Roover’s classic studies of banking in Renaissance Florence, to great works of theory, such as Joseph Schumpeter’s analysis of modern business cycles, remain influential. Business historians in the US have sometimes worked with legal history when studying government regulation of business and the legal aspects of the industry.
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