Newsletters

2023 Newsletter

Statement from the Secretary General

I hope you have all had a productive year since we last met at the XIXTH WEHC in Paris in July 2022. It was wonderful to gather again after the pandemic years of Zoom. I want to thank the whole Paris team for persevering through enormous uncertainty to host what turned out to be a tremendously successful Congress. A more detailed report on the Congress appears below.

It has been my first year as Secretary General after taking over from Jari Eloranta last July, and I also want to thank him for steering the ship so ably through the challenges of the pandemic. Since I came into the role, the main focus of the Executive Committee has been to select a venue for the next World Economic History Congress in 2025. Normally this would have been done before the 2022 Congress, but the pandemic continues to have lingering effects, particularly on the ability of institutions to plan for big events like this one. We were fortunate to have two excellent bids for the Congress, and over the spring members of the EC visited each venue. Both bid leads also made presentations to the full EC at our meeting at the end of May.

Following a careful review and vote by the EC, I am pleased to announce that the 2025 World Economic History Congress will be hosted in Sweden by Lund University. As many of you know, Lund’s Economic History department has expanded recently to become a real global hub for economic history research. It has over 100 staff and students representing 30 countries. We look forward to working with their team to organise the 2025 meeting. Look out for a call for sessions to be issued in the next few months. Note that due to the compressed timetable for the 2025 Congress there will be only ONE call for sessions, not two as in the past.

One new initiative for 2025 will be the dedication of 10 slots for sessions organised by member associations. The call for these will be issued at the same time as the more general call for sessions. Member association sessions are an opportunity for associations to highlight the best recent research in their field (whether that be regional or thematic) and showcase their activities to a global audience.

A second focus of the EC is the redesign of the IEHA’s website. The current design has been in place for more than a decade and is rather static. We would like the site to reflect the IEHA’s role as a global hub for economic historians. We are currently developing ideas to be considered at the next EC meeting in 2024. If there is anything in particular which members would like to see on the site, please drop me an e-mail.

Finally, we are in the process of working with potential hosts for the 2028 WEHC. Bids are welcomed from all regions of the world. A complete list of previous IEHA sites can be found here. The newsletter includes a call for preliminary bids, which is also on the IEHA’s website. The call is intended for anyone who wants to assess the feasibility of a potential bid before putting together a full one. Preliminary bids will be considered by officers of the IEHA, who will give feedback on any potential questions raised. Again, please contact me if you might be interested in hosting the 2028 Congress.

Report on Paris Congress
After a year’s delay due to COVID, the XIXth World Economic History Congress took place from 25-29 July 2022 in Paris. Some 1,500 scholars from around the world participated in a hybrid meeting – 1,129 in person and 371 online. Those who attended in person got to make use of the new facilities of the Campus Condorcet in Aubervilliers in the Paris suburbs. For those who were unable to attend, the full programme remains online and recordings of keynote lectures by Bruce Campbell, Catherine Coquery-Vidrovich and Francesca Trivellato are on the Association’s Youtube channel.

Notable features of the Congress were a new set of Digital Humanities prizes, sponsored by the Association Francaise d’Histoire Economique (AFHE). The winners of these and the usual dissertation and poster prizes appear below. Congratulations to you all!

IEHA Poster prize
Gianni Marcante (University of Warwick)
When nation building goes south: draft evasion, government repression, and the origins of the Sicilian mafia

IEHA Pre-1800 Dissertation Prize
Jeremy Land (University of Helsinki)
Boston, New York and Philadelphia in global maritime trade, 1770-1775

IEHA Long 19th century Dissertation Prize
Cheng Yang (University of Cambridge and Renmin University of China)
The occupational structure of late Imperial China, 1736-1898

IEHA 20th-21st century Dissertation Prize
Katharine Frederick (Utrecht University)
Deindustrialization in East Africa: textile production in an era of globalization and colonization, 1830-1940

AFHE Digital Innovation prize (joint winners)
The AveTransRisk database: mapping trade, risk and disasters in the first globalization
The mass digitization of historical tables using open-source AI and machine vision tools

AFHE Science Outreach prize
Labor, livelihood, and immigration in a Brazilian plantation: the archives of Ibicaba farm
Honorable mention: Multiscale trade in eighteenth-century La Rochelle region

Financial Report
The EC reviewed and approved the financial report prepared by the treasurer Jeroen Touwen for this fiscal year. The IEHA’s finances remain healthy, for which we thank the support of our member associations. We realise that these have been difficult times for many of you, and remain grateful for your support. If any member association is struggling to pay its annual membership, please get in touch with the Treasurer.
Despite the uncertainties of the pandemic, we have maintained a healthy surplus which will allow the Association to continue its support for travel bursaries for the 2025 Congress and beyond.

XX World Economic History Congress in Lund, 28 July-1 August 2025
Now that we have selected a venue for the 2025 WEHC, please look out for further communication about the organization of the Congress. The call for sessions will be sent around in the next few months, with a deadline for submission in early 2024. As noted above, there will only be one round of session proposals for this Congress. There will be a parallel call for member associations to submit their own sessions for a dedicated set of member association sessions. We look forward to receiving your submissions!

XXI World Economic History Congress in 2028 – call for bids!
We welcome bids for the 2028 WEHC. Those interested are welcome to submit preliminary bids for feedback from the Secretary General and officers of the IEHA. As detailed here, preliminary bids should include information on the potential membership of the local organizing committee, host institution and supporting organization. It should also include details on the conference venue, including the number and size of available rooms (both classrooms for parallel sessions and larger venues for keynotes), some indication of local accommodation options, and information on local and international transport networks. Full bids for 2028 will be due at the end of 2024.

Stay well, and see you in Lund!
Leigh Gardner (l.a.gardner@lse.ac.uk)
Secretary General
International Economic History Association (IEHA)
http://www.ieha-wehc.org

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2020 Newsletter

Statement from the Secretary-General

I hope you have had a productive and safe 2020 as we did at the International Economic History Association (IEHA). My apologies for sending this newsletter so late in the year, but I have had some professional and personal matters take up a lot of my time.
This newsletter contains a report of the Executive Committee’s (EC) actions this year, since we want to keep our members informed of our activities. And I would cordially ask for responses from the national (and other) organizations that you have received this information, i.e. to acknowledge it with a reply to yours truly. We appreciate the support of our member organizations, and our activities reflect the wishes of our members, as well as our longstanding principles.
I also wanted to provide a quick personal update relating to international events, especially since we are a truly global organization. In fact, global reach and international collaboration are the very reasons for the IEHA’s existence, and we will try to honor those principles in our activities. We will do our utmost to make sure this continues. Many of us have become used to, even though it has been difficult, to distance teaching and not being able to see our peers. Scholarly networks and collaboration makes our profession better every day. Unfortunately, the current epidemic has made our interactions much harder, along with a lot of potential grief and misery. I hope you are all still safe and healthy, first of all. Some of you in the USA, UK, and Europe have been able to receive at least one dose of the vaccine, but I also recognize that that is not the case everywhere. Second, as you have seen, many conferences and university activities have been cancelled or put online. Things are only slowly improving, and this impacts all of us at least until the end of the year. Third, on a related note, many pre-conferences and events that could have hosted such sessions have been moved online. There will be many of those in the coming months in 2021 and early 2022.
With the XIXth World Economic History Congress (WEHC) (Paris, July 25–30, 2022) a little over a year half away, I am pleased to inform you that the preparations are proceeding well. The organizers did a great job in moving the conference to 2022 early enough for us to adjust to that, as well as securing similar facilities and funding as we had in place for 2021. The first round of proposals were accepted in November 2019, and the second round in January 2021. Also, you will find details on the posters and dissertations below. The deadlines for those proposals have been extended as follows: December 1, 2020 for dissertations, and January 31, 2021 for posters. Please pass along this information to your colleagues, students, and among your personal scholarly networks. Moreover, we are now actively soliciting bids for the 2025 World Congress, and I am aware of several efforts in this regard. However, please get in touch with me about 2025 (or future dates) if you have ideas for bids.
For me, IEHA stands for collegiality, international collaboration, global unity, and interdisciplinary openness. I think we are doing well in this vein, and we will certainly keep these principles alive going forward, especially during such challenging times. Please keep your colleagues and friends in your thoughts, and let’s hope this epidemic passes soon.

Here’s to a year of recovery for all of us!
Jari Eloranta, Secretary-General of the IEHA

IEHA MATTERS

Session proposals

We are very pleased that the second call for session proposals in 2020 brought in a very large number of proposals. A record of 207 proposals were submitted covering a diverse range of themes, approaches and geographic coverage. In addition to a strong showing of submissions from Western Europe and North America, similar to Boston and Kyoto, we are very heartened by many good quality proposals (and expected participation) from Asia, notably from Japan and China, as well as Latin America. 95 session proposals were accepted, along with nearly a hundred from the first round. Thus, our 2022 World Congress promises to be a great meeting with numerous interesting sessions!

IEHA Executive Council Deliberations in January

Here you can find a summary of the actions the Executive Council took in their meetings on January 6-7, 2021 online.

First, IEHA President Anne McCants opened the meeting, and then the EC approved the minutes of their previous meeting in Paris in 2019. This was followed by reports from the Secretary-General Eloranta, Treasurer Marjolein t’Hart, and an extensive report by the Paris organizing team. The move to 2022 and the preparations for the conference were proceeding well. Then the EC discussed potential future locations, including also European options, given the uncertainty arising from the Covid-19 outbreak and other financial considerations.

After that, the EC began deliberating on the 2nd round proposals, which continued during the second day. In addition, the EC discussed again future locations as well as whether a three- or four-year rotation makes more sense. There was no unanimity among the EC members, thus we would like to hear from the national organizations on the matter, i.e. would you prefer a three- or four-year cycle for the world congresses?

Campus Condercet, Paris, France (which has now been completed)

CALL FOR PAPERS, POSTERS, AND DISSERTATIONS

Call for Papers: 2nd Round (NOW COMPLETE)

You can check out the accepted proposals on the World Congress website: https://wehc2021.sciencesconf.org/. Please note that many accepted sessions are still looking for participants, so keep track of EH.News lists, Facebook groups (for the World Congress, as well as Economic and Business History News), and other social media. Moreover, if you see a session that your research would fit well into, you should contact the session organizers directly to see if there is room for one more paper.

Call for Poster Submissions (EXTENDED)

PhD students and junior postdoc researchers in economic history are invited to present their ongoing research to an international audience with a poster at the World Economic History Congress in Paris July 25–30, 2022. We welcome historical applications in any field of economics or cognate social sciences, business history, demographic history, environmental history, global and world history, social history, urban history, methodological approaches to historical research, history of economics and economic thought, and other related fields. Digital posters will also be considered, pending space constraints. Posters will be selected on a competitive basis, and the best posters will receive an award (in three categories: ancient/medieval/early modern; the long 19th century; and 20th century). The deadline for submission is January 31, 2022. Selections will be announced by March 1, 2022. Further information will be available on the WEHC web site: https://wehc2021.sciencesconf.org/

Call for Dissertations (EXTENDED)

Students who have completed their dissertations between June 2017 and August 2021 are encourage to submit their theses for the dissertation panel/competition. Dissertation will be shortlisted and considered for awards in three separate categories: Ancient/medieval/early modern period; the long 19th century; and 20th century. The three finalists in each category will be invited to present their work in the dissertation panel. Theses written in languages other than English will also be considered, although the abstract needs to be in English. The deadline for electronic submissions of the theses, along with information on past and current affiliation of the student, advisor, 500-word abstract, and any other pertinent information is December 1, 2021. All materials should be sent by email to: iehaofficial@gmail.com. All submissions will be acknowledged by a reply email. Selection of finalists will be announced by March 1, 2022.

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