Business history is the study of the origins and development of commercial institutions, including their administrative structures, interactions with governments, and global markets. It originated in the US and UK but has become popular worldwide, with scholars using interdisciplinary methods to study topics such as labor relations and the formation of commercial guilds. Harvard Business School played a key role in its development, and the field has become less academically isolated over time.
Corporate history is the academic study of the origins and development of commercial institutions. It is a subfield of economic history, drawing scholarship from other fields such as economics and political science. The discipline originated in business school and has historically focused on topics such as the origins of business management or entrepreneurship. Its scholars also write about labor history and government regulatory relationships with companies and workers. Originally, there was a strong British and American focus, but historians today approach business history across different cultural and economic contexts.
Business historians research the development of business entities and their administrative structures, as well as the history of corporations along with their complex interactions with governments and global markets. Sometimes associated with management schools, business history examines questions about the origins of management and financial structures 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, especially the interaction of organized unions with management.
The nature of entrepreneurship and its role in the growth of modern industry is a special topic of interest in American business history. Scholarly biographies of steel or railroad magnates, such as so-called robber barons, could also be considered business history, along with research on the relationship between these entrepreneurs and the US government. Business historians were generally less interested in the cultural and social elements of corporate life, although the rise of comparative approaches has changed this to some extent. In the sociological analysis of business, scholars sometimes investigate how a corporate culture develops within a firm.
Harvard Business School became an early leader in creating business history from the 1920s onward by dedicating a journal to the subject and amassing major library titles. Examples of prominent Harvard fellowships in the field include work on the history of individual companies, sometimes narrated by veterans of these companies, but also studies on the financing of publicly traded companies. In the 1960s and 1970s, Alfred Chandler wrote on the history of management and its role in shaping modern society, works which encouraged a trend of interest in administrative history.
Business history has become less academically isolated than postwar American universities. Scholars use interdisciplinary methods in topics such as the formation of commercial guilds in the pre-modern world and the struggles between states and large corporations. However, older economic approaches such as Raymond de Roover’s classic studies of banking in Renaissance Florence to major theoretical works such as Joseph Schumpeter’s analysis of modern business cycles remain influential. Business historians in the United States have sometimes worked with legal history when studying government regulation of corporations and the legal aspects of industry.
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