The publication of this issue of Business History Review marks the centennial of the journal. Founded at Harvard Business School in 1926 as the Bulletin of the Business Historical Society, the journal helped to establish business history as a distinct field of inquiry. Initially conceived as a vehicle for the collection of archival materials and the research and writing of firm histories, the Bulletin contributed to defining the scope and methods of the discipline. With its transformation into the Business History Review in 1954, the journal assumed a more explicitly analytical orientation, and over the subsequent decades it played a central role in shaping successive historiographical developments, including the rise of entrepreneurial history, studies of organizational and managerial capitalism, social and cultural business history, and more recently, to global and interdisciplinary approaches to the field.
The centennial volume will consider the past, present, and future of business history. A more comprehensive history of the Business History Review is forthcoming, and additional contributions this year will examine individuals and scholarly currents that have defined its trajectory. Central to this endeavor is a reconsideration of those figures whose work, published in the journal and beyond it, helped to establish the conceptual and methodological foundations of business history.
In this issue, two articles exemplify this historiographical project by reassessing pioneering contributors whose scholarship shaped the early field in distinct but complementary ways. Monika Poettinger offers an intellectual portrait of Fritz Redlich (1892–1978), the German-born historian whose work was foundational to the development of entrepreneurial history in the mid-twentieth century. A prolific contributor to the journal, authoring eleven articles as well as numerous reviews, Redlich’s scholarship had roots in the methodological approaches of the German Historical School and also engaged with American social science. Poettinger situates Redlich at the intersection of these traditions, emphasizing his role within the Research Center in Entrepreneurial History at Harvard in the 1940s and 1950s. There, alongside figures such as Joseph Schumpeter, Arthur H. Cole, and Alfred D. Chandler Jr., Redlich participated in an effort to conceptualize the entrepreneur as a central analytical category.
Robert Fredona and Sophus Reinert, in turn, reconstruct the life and work of Florence Edler de Roover (1900–1987), whose scholarship on medieval commerce represented an earlier and often underappreciated aspect of the formation of the field. Between 1932 and 1953, Edler contributed seven articles to the journal, in addition to producing her influential Glossary of Mediaeval Terms of Business (1934), a work that helped to systematize the study of premodern commercial practices. As Fredona and Reinert demonstrate, Edler’s scholarship had a profound impact on contemporaries, not least in extending the temporal and geographical scope of business history. At the same time, her career illuminates the social and gender constraints that shaped academic labor in the twentieth century. As they observe, “The trajectory of Florence’s career was shaped by the structures of academic life, the social and scholarly arrangements surrounding marriage, and informal hierarchies of intellectual labor that determined which work would be recognized as scholarship and which would remain invisible.” By situating Edler within both the intellectual and institutional history of the discipline, the article contributes to a reassessment of whose work has been incorporated into, or excluded from, canonical narratives.
Taken together, these contributions highlight the extent to which the Business History Review has functioned as a publication that shaped the discipline, one in which competing methodologies, intellectual traditions, and scholarly identities were negotiated.
The issue also includes articles that engage with themes long central to the journal’s concerns. Jamieson Myles’s study of farmers’ cooperative marketing associations in the early twentieth-century United States examines the relationship between Populist political economy and federal intervention in agricultural markets, contributing to ongoing debates about the role of the state in shaping market institutions. Tirthankar Roy’s article on Harrisons & Crosfield, a British firm headquartered in India, contributes to the historiography of multinational enterprise and colonial business by emphasizing the importance of site-specific strategies; the firm’s decision to base its operations in a small town in southern India, Roy argues, was integral to its long-term global success.
Also included is a research note by BHR co-editor Geoffrey Jones on Harvard Business School’s Creating Emerging Markets Project (2007–2025), which assembled an extensive archive of oral histories with leading business figures across the globe. The project represented a significant contribution to the sources available for the study of contemporary business history and raised important methodological questions about the use of oral testimony in the field.
Finally, the issue features two review essays. Albert Churella examines Bob Wyss’s Black Gold: The Rise, Reign, and Fall of American Coal and Mark Aldrich’s The Rise and Fall of King Coal: American Energy Transitions in an Age of Markets, 1800–1940, while David Eltis reviews Patricia Seed’s Sails and Shadows: How the Portuguese Opened the Atlantic and Launched the Slave Trade, situating it within the historiography of early modern Atlantic expansion and the transatlantic slave trade.
