The Fondazione Istituto Internazionale di Storia Economica “F. Datini” and the European School for Training in Economic and Social Historical Research (ESTER) announce their eighth jointly-organized Datini-ESTER Advanced Seminar for economic and social historians on 14th-20th May 2023, in Prato (Italy). The topic of the seminar is “Economic Exchanges”.

The topic of the Datini-Ester seminar is closely related to the theme of the congress yearly organized by the "F. Datini" International Institute of Economic History and devoted in 2023 to Alternative Currencies. Commodities and Services as Exchange Currencies in the Monetarized Economies of the 13th to 18th Centuries. The 2023 Datini-Ester seminar will deal with Economic Exchanges. We particularly welcome papers on the exchange of goods and services, on the role of markets, monies, trade, transaction costs and institutional contexts, which might foster market integration or, alternatively, constrain economic performance. Our purpose is to clarify the role of economic exchange and markets in past economies. Papers can cover any relevant aspect and any period from Antiquity until today.

Extended deadline abstracts 15 November 2022.

The organizers of the European Business History Association's 2023 congress challenge you to reflect on how the future relevance of business history can and should be developed. We encourage papers, panels sessions and roundtable discussions dealing with the challenges facing the field of business history in terms of its academic, societal, and educational relevance.

The proposed workshop will target the period of repeated fuel shortages in Europe from roughly 1860 to 1960 – the century during which coal supplied more than 50 % of all energy in Europe. Coal consumption and prices show big fluctuations in European coal markets during this period, creating a classical “shortage” situation. Yet researchers have so far not addressed the nature of European coal shortages sufficiently. In both scholarly and recent public debates coal shortages remain largely overshadowed by the oil shocks of the 1970s. This gap calls for interdisciplinary cooperation in order to assess the story of repeated energy crises in Europe. The announced workshop is planned for 1 February 2023 and it is going to be held online. We invite scholars to reflect together upon coal shortages, their manifold faces and outcomes, during the centenarian apogee of King Coal’s rule in Europe. The event aims to bring together researchers with different disciplinary backgrounds, such as history, energy studies, international relations, the technological and environmental humanities, geography, economics, media studies and anthropology. After the workshop, we plan to turn its papers into a special issue for a major peer-reviewed academic journal, or, alternatively, into an edited volume.

Global history is emerging as a significant perspective in contemporary history writing. This approach examines the transnational networks through which human societies emerge as interactive global communities. Its increasing relevance can be attributed to its explicit focus on transnational relations; transcending euro-centric dominance; and exploring interconnections between and among (but not limited to) regions, communities, and commodities across historical periods. In the process global history seeks to question binaries like the north-south, micro-macro, local-global, empire-colony, and other asymmetric dependencies. However, in practice, it often reproduces them. At present, the acute economic, political, and rapidly accelerating climate crisis has further accentuated global asymmetries and exacerbated fault lines in the practices of global history. Perspectives from Global South provides a crucial vantage point to map and respond to this widening gap. This workshop, by focusing on perspectives from Global South, attempts to initiate discussions on these concerns.

The Rural History 2023 conference continues the tradition of the previous Rural History conferences held in Bern, Girona, Leuven, Paris, Uppsala aiming to promote a scientific discussion on new research on rural history in a broad sense by bringing together researchers dealing with different regions, different periods and from different theoretical and methodological traditions.

In accordance with this, the conference is open for research on all aspects on the history of the countryside in Europe and its interaction with other parts of the world throughout time. We welcome participation from different academic subjects dealing with history, archaeology, geography, economic history, economics, sociology, ethnology, anthropology, development studies, gender studies, environmental history, historical demography, science and technology history, colonial history, global history, etc.) presenting and discussing new research and thereby contributing to expanding our knowledge on the rural history of Europe and beyond. Our conference is also a great opportunity to bring into discussion contemporary concerns regarding rurality, and to highlight ways we could contribute to the safeguarding of living heritage

This international conference seeks to discuss possible paths for the future of global history. How can the field live up to its emancipatory potential, how can its approaches and methods be pluralized, how do we address the more pressing topics of global inequality and poverty, how do we strive for a consequent decolonization, and how can a decentralized and entangled practice of global history be achieved (Mignolo, 2007; Bhambra, 2014; Grosfoguel, 2007; Epple, 2018; Adichie, 2019)? With these questions at hand, we would like to center stage the perspectives and experiences of scholars from societies that are still at the margins of global history. We therefore invite scholars, artists, and writers whose histories and epistemologies have been sidelined or excluded from debates about our global past to chart the pivots of a new global history in the plural. The aim of this conference is to discuss and promote ways toward a more open and multicentered study of global history. However, the conference is not limited to the field’s research and writing practices, but also problematizes who its (current and future) practitioners and audiences are, addressing the stark imbalance of gender, race, and class within the discipline. While the workshop does not attempt to provide final answers for a remake of the field, it offers the opportunity to suggest, reflect, and sketch new avenues for a fairer global history that includes a broader and more diverse authorship and an expansion of its methodological, narrative, and conceptual repertoire.

The call for papers for the 55th “Datini Study Week” is now open. The topic of the Week is “Social Mobility in pre-industrial societies: tendencies, causes and effects (13th-18th centuries)”. The conference will take place in 2024 (12-16 May) in the beautiful city of Prato (Italy) but, as is the tradition for the Datini Study Week, the program is defined much in advance. Paper proposals have to be submitted by November 1, 2022.

On 20-21 October 2022 the Unit for Economic History of the Department of Economy and Society of the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, will host a Frontier Research in Economics and Social History (FRESH) 2-day meeting on the theme Colonialism and natural resources.

The goal of FRESH meetings is to gather researchers to present ongoing research, with a focus on early- stage research, in an environment especially focused on constructive feedback and support.

Free wage labour is commonly presented as the focus, if not the very core, of the history of labour in Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries. Emphasis is typically placed both on the rise of free wage labour in the 19th century and on the first labour and social legislation of the late 19th century, which laid the foundations in various European nation states for the regulation of formal labour that is still in force today. We also hear much about how these legal and social models of gainful employment were consolidated throughout Europe over the course of the 20th century until they were thrown into prolonged crisis: in Western Europe in the 1970s; in Eastern Europe somewhat later. The overriding impression is thus of an era of labour formalisation and protection lasting roughly from 1870 to at least 1970. The conference aims to challenge this narrative by focusing on multiple forms and fields of informal work.

International organizations are not simply the realm of bureaucrats, diplomats and statesmen. For much of the 20th century, business actors have taken important international roles, both officially and unofficially. Recent work has shown for example that bankers and financiers took key roles in the League of Nations’ Economic and Finance Committee; the International Chamber of Commerce was established in the name of business internationalism, and as a shadow bureaucracy for intergovernmental organisations; in the second half of the 20th century, the United Nations actively sought the involvement of businessmen in the promotion and funding of its programs. The examples are many. Historians are exploring the ways in which neoliberal international actors sought to use the UN, the World Bank, and the IMF to impose visions of a new ordoglobal order in the 1970s. Through the 20th century, business actors of many kinds have seen in international organisations the means to different ends, from peace through the distribution of wealth, to the regulation and control of the world economy, whether through primary commodity controls and wealth redistribution schemes to international business cartels.

Studies of deindustrialization in different parts of the world have pointed out that deindustrialization was often connected in intricate ways with forms of reindustrialization. Most obviously and commonly, deindustrialization at one particular place implicated industrialization somewhere else, often far removed from the place that industry had been located before deindustrialization hit. Sometimes, however, industries did not move all that far. And sometimes, the transformations associated with deindustrialization did not lead to complete devastation of the industrial cores and the abandonment of urban environments – a process most often associated with the rust belt of the United States and centers of heavy industry in formerly socialist countries. Even there one can argue that deindustrialization went hand in hand with economic transformations that led, in certain parts, to examples of reindustrialization. At the same time, optimistic predictions about a surge in manufacturing in the Global South because of the relocation of capital from the North thanks to an abundant supply of cheap labor and natural resources, and thanks to trade liberalization failed to materialize. The (South) East Asian ‘tiger’ model appears to be not so easily replicable.

The University of Tübingen’s Collaborative Research Center 923 – “Threatened Orders: Societies under Stress”(Germany) – provides funding for an intensive three-day event aimed at PhD students in business history or economic history working on any topic that overlaps with the theme of the school (for more details, see “Further Notes for Applicants” below). Students will, the pandemic permitting, be hosted in the historic town of Tübingen and will present, debate and discuss their works-in-progress with leading international scholars within a world-class university.

The school aims to provide doctoral students with an overview of relevant research and innovative tools and methodologies in the fields of business and economic history. It is the third event in this series organised jointly by the Seminar für Neuere Geschichte (University of Tübingen) and the Centre for Business History in Scotland (University of Glasgow).