Month: September 2023

5 Biennial Richard Robinson Workshop on

Business History

Portland State University

May 23–25, 2024, Portland OR

The modern economy is often conceived as a realm of anonymity, where strangers, motivated by rational and individual objectives, exchange goods and services with “no other nexus between man and man than naked self- interest, than callous ‘cash payment’” (as famously described in The Communist Manifesto). Yet actual business practices, in both the past and present, reveal the “embeddedness” of economic actions in social relations (as Granovetter and others have shown), most glaringly, in the a!ective and familial ties that are inextricable from economic strategies. This conference will explore the enduring imbrication of commercial practices with family, kinship, gender (which structures family and household bonds), and women (whose appearance as a social category troubled the notion of the autonomous, genderless, individual). It seeks to bring together scholars working on a broad array of topics related to the intimate and familial aspects of economic life from various regions across the globe and various historical periods (modern, pre-modern, & others). Questions this conference will investigate include, but are not limited to: How have family and kinship networks fostered trust, provided for credit and investment, shielded economic actors from uncertainty, and been leveraged as collateral? How have intimate relations, both legal and extra-legal, acted to forge commercial alliances, transfer and create capital, and facilitate the circulation of commercial information? How have kinship, marriage, and intimate relations permitted business exchanges in colonial and diasporic contexts?

How have kinship and marital ties allowed for long-term investment and long-distance (e.g. transoceanic and transcontinental) trades? How have gender roles and gender performances in the familial context enabled or undermined business activities? For instance, how have economic actors mobilized masculinity and femininity in their business practices? And how have women, as key actors in intimate economies, leveraged their position to participate in commercial a!airs?

In envisioning this workshop, we take a broad view of the notion of family and kinship, defining both as an association of people who do not see each other as strangers and who thereby possess a!ective ties and

bonds of obligation and reciprocity. These kinds of family formations extend from nuclear families to extended and joint families, and to kinship networks that may not involve blood ties. We are interested in works that interrogate how the search for profit or gain are tied to, embedded in, relations of obligation, that for financial benefits to relations of duty, and that for economic privilege to relations of responsibility. Given the historically crucial role of gender in intimate economies, we are particularly interested in papers that explore the gendered dynamics of business operations. We seek papers that engage how women have participated in formal and informal economies and the relation of their participation to their position in the household. As we intend this workshop to be a global history of business, we especially welcome proposals dealing with sites in the non-West, the counter-colonial space of the Global South, and the emerging continental entity of Eurasia.

Topics of particular interest may touch on (but are not limited to):

• Family and kinship as fostering trust and mitigating risk in economic networks
• Marriage as economic strategy (capital transfer, commercial alliances, etc.)
• Cross-generational and interfamilial capital transfer (inheritance, dowries, bride price) Economic aspects of intimate relations (information circulation, influence peddling) Performance of masculinity/femininity in business contexts
• Women as business partners, shareholders, investors, property owners
• Sex work and quasi- or non-monogamous marital ties (prostitution, courtesanship, concubinage)
• Gender and intimacy in colonial, postcolonial, and neocolonial commercial relations
• Unmarried women, married women, and widows as economic actors
• Kinship and diasporic businesses
• Family as collateral: pawnship, debt collateral, and use of family reputation
• Family as credit: family name and family reputation in finance, banking, and other credit-dispensing businesses

The Richard Robinson Business History Workshop has held small workshops on particular themes in business history since 2012. The keynote address of the fifth biennial Richard Robinson Workshop will be given by Professor Ritu Birla (University of Toronto) on the evening of Thursday, May 23. Papers selected for the workshop will be pre-circulated and discussed in plenary sessions on Friday, May 24 and Saturday, May 25.

Paper proposals, consisting of a one-page CV and a 500- word abstract, should be sent to the workshop organizers, Thomas Luckett (Portland State University), Chia Yin Hsu (Portland State University), and Erika Vause (St. John’s University), at psu.business.history.workshop@gmail.com (mailto:psu.business.history.workshop@gmail.com) by December 15, 2023. Accepted proposals will be notified by January 15, 2024.

Presentations will be in person at Portland State University. Presenters will receive lodging for three nights and meals, as well as air travel or other comparable travel to and from the Workshop. There will be no charge for conference registration.