Call for Papers: Recovery
47th Annual EBHS Conference
Salt Lake City Marriott at University Park, Salt Lake City, Utah
May 18-22, 2022

The Economic and Business History Society annual conference will be held in Salt Lake City, Utah, on May 18-22, 2022, and invites submissions to the conference committee on the theme of Recoveries in Economic and Business History. The capitalist system has long been acknowledged to have periods of prosperity as well as hardship, and all economic systems are exposed to external shocks over which market actors have no control. Our responses to crises eventually lead to business and economic recoveries; the past shows us many instances of businesses and the people who ran them recovering from depressions, recessions, natural or man-made disasters, and other kinds of disruptions that required dramatic adjustments by businesspeople to keep their companies alive and moving forward. Yet regardless of the cause of the disruption, recovery always comes. The conference committee wishes to use the first in-person conference since the COVID-19 pandemic to explore the phenomenon of business and economic recovery after disruptive events. Such disruptions could be narrow, such as those arising from examples of Schumpeter’s concept of ‘creative destruction’ within the business world, or more widespread types of crisis. The Economic and Business History Society conference committee welcomes proposals on the processes or outcomes related to “recovery” in historical contexts and takes an inclusive approach to the topics and periods to be examined.

The current global pandemic provides an example of this kind of thing, and indeed some countries have enjoyed far less disruption – and thus a quicker ‘recovery’ – than others. Historically, we see similar crisis and recovery events reaching into the Middle Ages with the Great Fire of London or the European experience of the black plague. The Napoleonic Wars, modern state formation in Central and Eastern Europe, colonization and the post-imperial experience, the World Wars, and previous pandemics could all provide examples of how people have reconstructed their economic systems and individual businesses after a traumatic event. Indeed these events, and undoubtedly many others, occasionally created entirely new sectors or industries that themselves changed the macro-level economic or business environment. Therefore, we hope that conference participants will consider the broad theme of recovery when composing their proposals for the annual meeting.

The conference committee will also consider papers that do not address this theme for the conference but that engage topics concerned with economic and business history widely construed.

Continuing from the success of the virtual conference in 2021, and the particular success of the mentorship workshops, EBHS will again be organizing workshop mentorship opportunities. These will be available for both early-career scholars and also mid-career scholars. Furthermore, EBHS will also be re-launching an innovative mentor matching program, for select scholars who would like to receive guidance in a sustained way beyond the actual conference. This will also be available for those who attended and used this option at virtual conference in 2021. Please indicate in your proposal whether you would like to participate in the mentoring program either to provide or receive mentoring.

The conference hotel is the Salt Lake City Marriott at University Park. Accommodation will be available to delegates at the preferential conference rate of $115 per night plus taxes. The conference presentations will be held at the conference hotel. There will be a plenary lecture on Friday 20 May, where Professor Susie Porter from the Department of History at the University of Utah will give a talk on her latest book, From Angel to Office Worker: Middle-Class Identity and Female Consciousness in Mexico, 1890-1950. The talk will be accompanied by the conference banquet. Both the lecture and the banquet will be held at Child Hall in the David Eccles Business School, University of Utah.

The program chair is Dr. Mitch Larson, email . Proposals should include an abstract of no more than 500 words and contact details. The deadline for submissions is February 1, 2022. The Program Chair intends to send notifications of acceptance by February 20, 2022.

If you have further questions about the meeting or organization please contact EBHS 2022 President Dr. Mark J. Crowley (), or Program Chair Dr. Mitch Larson ().