The past two decades have been an exciting time to be a business historian. Especially since 2008, interest among historians, students, and the public in the history of business, finance, and political economy has been consistent, and the implications of business history to our contemporary lives have felt particularly urgent to understand. An expanding group of scholars have engaged in work relevant to business history, extending the range of actors and the sorts of questions at the heart of the field. In the pages of Enterprise & Society, exciting and deeply relevant discussions and debates have made clear the breadth and depth of the work that the field produces.
These happy developments have also dramatically increased the number of books that fall within Enterprise & Society’s purview. The range and dynamism of the field have become impossible to capture, either comprehensively or even representatively, in a traditional book review section. At the same time, there is a need in this time of robust scholarship for a broader look at how questions are being addressed across several works, to assess the emerging questions and reassessments of the field, and to consider how scholars who come to business history via disparate roots converge on and diverge from the issues at the heart of the field.
To this end, beginning with this issue, the book review section of Enterprise & Society will have a new format. Rather than publishing individual book reviews, each issue will feature a longer review essay that either examines several recent books comparatively or offers multiple perspectives on a single new book. We expect that these essays will spark important conversations and reflections on the shape of the field and the diversity of scholarship that business history can proudly claim.
In this issue, we feature the first of these essays, Ian Kumekawa’s “Lessons from Environmental and Economic Crises.” It is a terrific debut for the new book review section, and we trust that you will enjoy it. Continue to watch this space for a forthcoming book roundtable and more extended essays in the future.
