Business History

Professor Fibiger is currently at work on a history of the global dollar system. The book argues that the dollar system evolved as an open-access order which augmented the agency of its participants and which the United States managed with enlightened self-interest. It concludes that the enduring role of the dollar as the world’s key currency reflects the steady accumulation of utility and reliability across periods of stability and crisis.

Professor Jones is currently completing at book which is entitled Underdog Capitalism: A History of Local Business and Resilience in the Global South. The book will provide a comprehensive study of the dynamics of growth of locally-owned business across selected countries of the Global South - Japan, South Korea, China, India, Turkey, Egypt, Nigeria, South Africa, Mexico, Brazil, Colombia and Argentina – from the nineteenth century to the present day.

Professor Robertson’s first book, Capital Untamed: The Politics of Finance in Nineteenth-Century France, was published in June 2026 and charts a foundational experiment in modern financial statecraft under Napoleon III. Her current project is about European foreign investment and financial diplomacy on the eve of World War I.

Professor van Waijenburg’s current projects include a book on the fiscal role of forced labor in colonial state building and an NSF-funded project on investor behavior, risk management, and business organization in the transatlantic slave trade.

We are pleased to announce that Richard N. Langlois has won Business History Review's 2022-2024 Alfred and Fay Chandler Book Award for his book, The Corporation and the Twentieth Century: The History of American Business Enterprise. This award is given once every three years to the best book in the field of business history, published in the United States, as determined by a vote of the Editorial Advisory Board of Business History Review.

Takashi Hirano, Ken Sakai, and Pierre-Yves Donzé have won Business History Review’s Henrietta Larson Award for their article “Housewives and the Growth of the Japanese Electrical Appliance Industry, 1950–1990.” This award is given each year to the authors of the best article published in BHR, as determined by a vote of the Editorial Advisory Board.