The 10th edition of the EBHA (European Business History Association) Summer School will take place in Barcelona, from Wednesday, July 8th to Friday, July 10th, 2020. The School, titled Challenges for Business History in a Changing World, aims to encourage a fresh and rigorous exchange of thoughts, ideas, and new research being done by doctoral students in early stages of their doctoral work, in fields closely related to Business History. It is organised jointly by the European Business History Association (EBHA) and the University of Barcelona (UB) in cooperation with the Spanish Association of Economic History (AEHE). 

The LIII Settimana invites research papers on how organizational, technological, and scientific innovations spurred productivity gains and economic growth from the thirteenth through eighteenth centuries. Can the paradigms and theories that have emerged to explain how the knowledge economy stimulated the Industrial Revolution be usefully applied to the pre-modern period? To what extent can we identify ‘useful knowledge’ (Simon Kuznets) as a source of economic growth? What kinds of cultural, economic, and institutional structures provided the most hospitable environment for the application of scientific knowledge to innovations that promoted competition, efficiency, quality, specialization, tools, access to information, and other measures of productivity? The LIII Settimana will reflect on these relationships as well as their influence on the recovery capacity of European medieval and early modern societies after demographic, economic, and military crises.