Enterprise and Society Advance Access originally published online on August 5, 2008
Enterprise and Society 2008 9(3):487-490; doi:10.1093/es/khn080
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© The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Business History Conference. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org.
Bringing Political Economy Back in
RICHARD R. JOHN is a professor of history and adjunct professor of communication at University of Illinois, Chicago
Contact information: University of Illinois at Chicago, History Department M/C 198, 913 University Hall, 601 South Morgan Street, Chicago, IL 60607-7109; E-mail: rjohn@uic.edu
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Like so many of the fields that have flourished in history departments in recent years, business history has an uneasy relationship with political history. When business history first emerged in the United States as a separate field in the 1920s, its founders stressed the importance of lavishing on business records the same reverence that political historians accorded the personal papers of lawmakers. Only in this way, business historians assumed, would it be possible to convince other historians of the centrality of business leaders—and, more broadly, of economic institutions—to the making of the nation.
Much has changed since the 1920s. Yet the adversarial relationship of business historians toward political history persists. This mindset is evident