This Special Issue of Business History Review revisits the theme of “Business History around the World” originally developed by Franco Amatori and Geoff Jones in an edited volume of essays published under that title in 2003. Their landmark collection explored comparative approaches to the field of business history and looked at patterns of business growth in several European countries, the United States, Japan, China, and, broadly, across Latin America. This issue of BHR continues that tradition and begins with a tribute to Amatori by his Bocconi colleague Andrea Colli and Andrea Lluch of the Universidad de los Andes. In the essay, Colli and Lluch describe Amatori's foundational and ongoing interest in comparative approaches to business history.
The introductory essay is followed by six research articles, on China, Mexico, Russia, Switzerland, Colombia, and India. Two of these essays -- Adam Frost's “Reframing Chinese Business History” and Valentina Fava and Volodymyr Kulikov's “Recent Trends in the Business History of Russia” -- look primarily at trends in the recent historiographies of these two countries. Two other essays explore, more specifically, entrepreneurship and innovation in economic growth. Aurora Gómez Galvarriato and Gabriela Recio Cavazos's “Mexico's Business and Entrepreneurship in the Era of Nationalism” examines entrepreneurship and state policy in periods of disruption and adaptation between the 1910s and 1980s. Carlos Dávila and Andrea Lluch's essay, “Entrepreneurship in Emerging Markets: Female Entrepreneurs in Colombia,” describes the growing diversity of entrepreneurship, especially the growth in the number of female entrepreneurs, over the past three decades. The final two essays, Sébastien Guex's “The Emergence of the Swiss Tax Haven” and Chinmay Tumbe's “Globalization, Cities, and Firms in Twentieth-Century India,” analyze aspects of globalization and its effects on the economies of Switzerland and India.
This issue of BHR also contains a reflection on the many contributions of Takashi Hikino, a distinguished historian and researcher, and a close collaborator of Alfred Chandler, Alice Amsden, and other scholars, who died earlier this year. Finally, the issue also features a review by historian Robert Fredona of Adam Tooze's Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World's Economy.
