Valeria Giacomin, Bocconi University

Youssef Cassis, European University Institute

Jan Logemann, University of Göttingen

Chinmay Tumbe, Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad

This special issue examines how cities functioned as central agents and arenas in shaping global business and capitalism. Rather than serving merely as passive backdrops, cities provided the institutional and infrastructural foundations through which firms, entrepreneurs, and diverse economic actors structured processes of globalization. The issue seeks to integrate scholarship from business history, urban history, and global studies to develop a comparative understanding of urban business environments across different world regions and historical periods.

Contributions may explore how businesses used cities as hubs for finance, trade, and manufacturing; how real estate and property markets became globalized; how urban infrastructures like ports and warehouses connected global production and consumption; how migrant communities and informal networks built alternative economic circuits; or how cities adapted to crises and environmental change. The special issue particularly welcomes research on underrepresented regions including Japan, Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

Appel publié par Business History. Voir l'appel sur le site de l'éditeur. Fiche de l'appel sur kerostig.

Potential topics

• Cities as nodes of global finance, trade and manufacturing
• Cities, real estate, and global investment
• Urban infrastructures of globalization
• Migration, informality, and urban globalization
• Resilient cities: crisis, adaptation, and environmental change

Timeline

• April 15, 2026: Deadline for extended proposals (800–1000 words)
• November 6, 2026: Full paper submissions deadline

Himadri Roy Chaudhuri, Xavier School of Business (XLRI)

Mark Tadajewski, University of York

Andrew Perchard, Otago Business School, University of Otago

Zoi Pittaki, University of Dundee School of Business

This special issue examines Indigenous entrepreneurial agency under colonial rule, treating colonial institutions as both economic constraints and sociopolitical structures that shaped market access, legal standing and accumulation strategies.

It invites business historical accounts of how entrepreneurs in colonised societies navigated, contested and reworked the rules of commerce, especially where access to courts, licensing, property rights, banking and credit markets was restricted or selectively enforced.

Contributions drawing on primary sources such as company records, court records, licensing files, banking archives, trading accounts, petitions, newspapers and vernacular-language materials are particularly encouraged.

Appel publié par Business History. Voir l'appel sur le site de l'éditeur. Fiche de l'appel sur kerostig.

Potential topics

• Entrepreneurship under legal and financial exclusion: responses to constraints in courts, licensing, taxation, banking, property rights, labour regimes and credit markets.
• Institutional negotiation and boundary work: how entrepreneurial actors exploited institutional gaps, navigated plural legal orders, reinterpreted colonial rules and mobilised intermediaries or brokers.
• Resilience as strategy: cooperative, mutual-aid and associational forms; diasporic, kinship and inter-regional networks; and late-colonial economic nationalism and early decolonisation as sites of institutional reconfiguration.
• Innovation as resistance: technology adoption and adaptation through which entrepreneurs offered alternatives that subverted or circumvented colonial hegemony.
• Comparative or connected histories that use the shared conceptual lens across cases.
• Submissions may use archival research, oral history, biography, microhistory, and comparative or connected history, and may engage postcolonial scholarship, subaltern studies, and critical perspectives on firms, markets and institutions.

Timeline

• October 1, 2026: Abstract deadline
• May 1, 2027: Manuscript deadline