2022 Richard Robinson Business History Workshops

2022 RRBHW

4th Biennial Richard Robinson Business History Workshop

4th BIENNIAL

RICHARD ROBINSON BUSINESS HISTORY WORKSHOP

Capital, Commodities, and Empire:
Doing Business at Long Distance

PORTLAND STATE UNIVERSITY

April 21 - April 24, 2022 | Portland OR

Richard Joseph Robinson
(credit: PSU Archives Digital Gallery)

The Richard Robinson Business History Workshop at Portland State University has been made possible by a bequest from Richard Robinson.

Richard Joseph Robinson, who passed away in May 2014, was Professor Emeritus of Management and former Chair of Management in the School of Business Administration at Portland State University. He received the BS from Indiana University-Bloomington in 1949 and the MBA from the same institution the following year. In 1965 he earned the Doctorate of Business Administration from the University of Washington. Hired by Portland State University in 1962, he retired at the end of 1989. His publications include:

Co-authored with Wendell L. French, "Collective Bargaining by Nurses and Other Professionals: Anomaly or Trend?" Labor Law Journal, vol. 11, no. 10 (Oct. 1960), pp. 903-910, 944.
"How Should Business Behave?" in McGuire, Joseph William, ed., Interdisciplinary Studies in Business Behavior (Cincinnati: South-Western Pub Co, 1962), pp. 207-224.
"Personnel Practices in Denmark and Holland: An Environmental Analysis," DBA diss., University of Washington, 1966.
United States Business History, 1602-1988: A Chronology (Westport, Conn: Greenwood P, 1990).
Business History of the World: A Chronology (Westport, Conn: Greenwood P, 1993).

THU 4.21.2022 | Keynote Address | 6:30pm

Preceded by Reception, 6:00pm

Smith Memorial Student Union
SMSU RM 296/298
1825 SW Broadway

From Advertising to Public Relations: Sugar and the Case for Capitalism at the End of Empire

This talk examines how and why the British sugar refining industry turned to public relations during the economic and political crises that followed the Second World War. While previous scholars have focused on how advertising served as form of imperial propaganda that shaped consumers' understandings of imperial commodities, global markets, and racialized labor systems, this paper emphasizes how public relations became a tool of empire during the era of decolonization. Using advertising, but also less visible techniques, corporate public relations often suppressed the very ideals of empire companies had promoted for decades. Instead of empire, global industries like sugar promoted neoliberal ideals of development and partnership to maintain the power and profits that empire had afforded in the past.

Erika Rappaport is a Professor of History at University of California Santa Barbara. She works on the history of gender and consumer cultures in Modern Britain and its Empire. Her work examines how the history of consumption and commodities were integral to the construction of identities, politics, and economies in the 19th and 20th centuries. She is the author of Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London's West End (Princeton 2000); A Thirst for Empire: How Tea Shaped the Modern World (Princeton 2017) and co-edited Consuming Behaviours: Identity, Politics and Pleasure in Twentieth Century Britain. Her current book project, tentatively titled Anonymous Empire: Public Relations at the End of Empire, explores how the relatively new field of public relations managed the process and memory of decolonization between the late 1940s and 1970s. During these years international public relations campaigns shaped capital investments, promoted capitalist values, and secured colonial relationships decades after political imperial ties were severed. The project reveals the global power of PR and demonstrates how global forces shaped the history of public relations. It offers a genealogy of the political power of business in the postwar world.

(All times listed are Pacific Daylight Time)

PROGRAM

Smith Memorial Student Union
SMSU RM 296/298
1825 SW Broadway

Thursday, 21 April 2022

Reception, 6:00pm
Keynote address, 6:30 PM

Erika Rappaport (University of California-Santa Barbara), “From Advertising to Public Relations: Sugar and the Case for Capitalism at the End of Empire”

Karl Miller Center
KMC Room 285
615 SW Harrison St

Friday, 22 April 2022

Panel 1, 8:30–10:15: Negotiating Imperial Networks

Discussant: Chia Yin Hsu

Michel Abesser (University of Freiburg), “Paving the Way for Russian Imperial Commerce on the Black Sea: Armenian Trade Networks and the Interethnic Economy in Nakhichevan and Rostov on the Don in the Early Nineteenth Century”
Ilya Vinkovetsky (Simon Fraser University), "Tea and Industrialization in Nineteenth-Century Russia" [Remote]
Daniel Strum (University of São Paulo), “Long-Distance and Cross-Polity Judicial Enforcement of Contracts in Early Modern Times”

Panel 2, 10:45–12:15: Credit, Credibility, and Financial Exchanges in Imperial Context

Discussant: Thomas M. Luckett

Paula Vedoveli (Fundação Getúlio Vargas), "Credibility Brokerage and the Market for Brazilian and Argentine Debt in London, 1852–1906"
Christoph Nitschke (University of Oxford), "The Volatile Career of American ‘General Credit’"

Panel 3, 2:00–3:30: Imperial Visions and Images

Discussant: Erika Vause

Julia Leikin (Higher School of Economics, Moscow), “From the Black Sea to India: The Russian Empire’s Economic Imaginary at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century”
David Rainbow (University of Houston), “New York to Paris by Rail: Pacific Empires and the Bering Strait, 1898–1907”

Panel 4, 4:00–5:45: Bridging Imperial Distance – Transport, Networks, & Imperial Intermediaries

Discussant: Chia Yin Hsu

James R. Fichter (University of Hong Kong), “French Coal Traffic and Empire from Djibouti to Tonkin, 1885–1900” [Remote]
Lin Sun (Beijing Normal University), “The Economy of Empire Building: Ginseng, Fur, and Multiple Trade Networks of the Early Qing Empire, 1583–1644” [Remote]
Robert P. Geraci (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), “‘These people are Afraid to Cross the Moscow River in a Rowboat’: Challenges to Merchant Seafaring and the Trope of Russian Commercial Inferiority”

Saturday, 23 April 2022

Student Panel, 9:00–10:00

Discussant: Thomas M. Luckett

Erum Hadi (St. John’s University), “Commodities of Coexistence: A Cultural History of Cosmopolitan Places, People, and Things of Western India in the Indian Ocean World During the Seventeenth Century”
Eric Martinez (St. John’s University), “The Political and Economic Benefits of the Kimberly Closed Compound System”

Panel 5, 10:30–12:15: Imperial Environments & Commodifying Animal Life

Discussant: Erika Vause

Laird Jones (Lock Haven University), “Reorganizing Slaughter: The Early Colonial Hide and Skin Trade in Mwanza District, German East Africa, 1903–1914” [Remote]
Alexei V. Kraikovski (University of Genoa), “‘Like Other Civilized Nations Do’: The International Blubber Market and the Development of the Joint-Stock Company in Eighteenth-Century Russia”
Martin Kalb (Bridgewater College), “Boom and Bust: Commodity Extraction Along Namibia’s Coastline” [Remote]

Panel 6, 1:45–3:30: Crisis and Control

Discussant: Chia Yin Hsu

Mark Metzler (University of Washington), “Globalized Grain Markets and Climate-Induced Famines in the Late Nineteenth Century”
Olga Koulisis (Murray State University), “Educating a Nation of Leagues: Banking on Public Opinion, 1918–1923” [Remote]
Jonathan Robins (Michigan Technological University), “Plantations and the End of Empire: The Oil Palm Industry, 1950–1980”

Panel 7, 4:00–5:45: The Slave Trade and the Business of Slavery

Discussant: Thomas M. Luckett

Cheryl S. McWatters (University of Ottawa), “Further Glimpses into French Slave-Trade Cargoes of the Eighteenth Century: Commodities, Collaborative Co-Operation, and Communities” (co-authored with Yannick Lemarchand, Université de Nantes)
Jessica Hanser (Yale-NUS College, University of British Columbia), “Slavery and Capitalism in Britain’s Global Empire” [Remote]
Jesús Bohorquez Barrera (University of Lisbon), “Linking the Atlantic and Indian Oceans: Asian Textiles, Spanish Silver, Global Capital, and the Financing of the Portuguese-Brazilian Slave Trade, 1760–1808”