Submit a Manuscript to the Journal
Business History
For a Special Issue on
Business and Cities in the Global Economy
Abstract deadline
Manuscript deadline
Special Issue Editor(s)
Valeria Giacomin,
Bocconi University, Italy
[email protected]
Youssef Cassis,
European University Institute, Italy
[email protected]
Jan Logemann,
University of Göttingen, Germany
[email protected]
Chinmay Tumbe,
Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad, India
[email protected]
Business and Cities in the Global Economy
Overview
Cities have long stood at the crossroads of business and globalization. From medieval market towns and colonial entrepôts to industrial metropolises and financial hubs, cities have mediated the flows of goods, capital, people, and ideas that underpin capitalism in the global economy (Beckert, 2025). Urban historians have shown that cities emerged historically as centres of exchange and specialization, often linked to hinterlands through flows of agricultural surplus (Childe, 1950; Clark, 2013; Leon, 2024; Lewis, 2016; Mumford, 1961). Empires and colonial systems further embedded cities into international circuits as ports, administrative hubs, and commercial nodes (Bairoch, 1988; King, 2012).
Seminal work in global urban studies presented cities as nodes in world-spanning networks, structuring hierarchies of capital and connectivity (Castells, 2011; Sassen, 2007; Taylor & Derudder, 2016). Global history showed how urban elites concentrated wealth, power, and influence, thereby shaping the material foundations and institutional infrastructures of global capitalism (Beckert, 2001). Urban economics further investigated how agglomeration in cities created both opportunities and constraints, with scale economies, dense networks, and rising costs shaping business practices and organizational forms (Glaeser, 2012; Glaeser & Cutler, 2022; Hanlon & Heblich, 2022).
Business history has traditionally focused on firms, entrepreneurs, and institutions that expanded across borders, while the urban contexts that enabled and structured these processes have often remained in the background. Rather than serving as passive contexts, cities constituted the institutional and infrastructural foundations of global business. Viewed through the lens of business history, they were arenas in which firms and institutional actors structured, negotiated, and transformed the processes of global capitalism (Aslanian, 2011; Henn & Laureys, 2010; Llorca-Jana, 2014). At the same time, informal and hybrid actors, including bazaar traders, migrant entrepreneurs, and diasporic networks, leveraged urban density and connectivity to embed themselves in global circuits (Frost, 2005; Metcalf, 2013; Trivellato, 2009; Tumbe, 2022).
Histories of financial centres (Cassis, 2010; Cassis & Wójcik, 2018) demonstrate how global cities such as London, Paris, and New York as well as small states or city states such as Singapore, Dubai and Luxembourg (Calabrese & Giacomin, 2025) developed specialized institutions, practices, and reputations that anchored international finance. Studies of maritime transport and shipping (Broeze, 2013; Miller, 2012) reveal how port cities concentrated shipping companies, dockside services, and logistics infrastructure, making them indispensable to global circulation (Brunero, 2021; Home, 2013; King, 1985). Research on manufacturing, construction, and real estate further highlights how urban economies were shaped by industrial production and building enterprises, illustrating the long-term interplay between property markets, urban growth, and business development (Degraeve, 2024).
Urban hinterland studies, such as William Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis (1991), show how the fortunes of firms and industries cannot be understood apart from their urban nodes, as for Chicago serving as both a product of and a driver for the integration of the American West into national and global markets. Comparative work on international entrepôts such as Singapore (Huff, 1994; Webster & White, 2020), Batavia (Abeyasekere, 1987; Blussé, 2008) or Bombay (Kidambi, 2016) highlights how colonial and imperial cities functioned as organizing points for regional economies within wider global value chains (Kanai, 2013). Expanding on these insights, this special issue invites contributions that engage with cities as business environments in a systematic way. Encouraging a genuinely global comparative perspective, we are especially interested in research on regions such as Japan, Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America which remain underrepresented in existing scholarship.
Objectives and Scope
By integrating case studies on a broad scope of from across world regions and diverse historical periods, the issue seeks to contribute cumulatively to a comparative and theoretically informed understanding of how cities shaped business globalization. In positioning cities as central agents of global capitalism, the issue builds on existing literatures in business, financial, and urban history, seeking to connect and extend these fields through new empirical evidence and cross-regional dialogue. We intend to position cities as active, historical agents of globalization in business history.
Contributions may address (but are not limited to) the following themes:
- Cities as Nodes of Global Finance, Trade and Manufacturing: How did businesses use cities as hubs of commerce, credit, and investment in globalizing economies? What role did stock exchanges, banks, trading houses, and merchant guilds play in embedding global capital within specific urban contexts? How did these institutions transform cities into command points of globalization?
- Cities, Real Estate, and Global Investment: How did property markets and urban real estate development become globalized? From colonial land concessions and foreign-owned plantations to the rise of multinational property firms, how did investment in land and real estate shape the growth, form, and business dynamics of cities? How did flows of capital into real estate, from banks, funds, and transnational investors, transform urban space and embed cities in global financial circuits?
- Urban Infrastructures of Globalization: Ports, warehouses, transport corridors, and communication systems were often financed, managed, or operated by businesses. How did firms shape, invest in, and benefit from urban infrastructures that connected production and consumption across continents? Conversely, how did these infrastructures reshape urban space and labor markets?
- Migration, Informality, and Urban Globalization: How did informal markets, migrant entrepreneurs, and diasporic communities leverage urban density, mobility, and transnational connections to build alternative circuits of trade, credit, and labor that sustained “globalization from below”? How did these actors navigate, shape, and transform colonial and postcolonial urban systems over time? In what ways did these resilient networks engage with or circumvent formal business institutions, adapting to and contesting existing hierarchies while transforming cities into laboratories of hybrid and transnational economic life?
- Resilient Cities: Crisis, Adaptation, and Environmental Change: How did wars, revolutions, financial crises, pandemics, or deindustrialization reshape urban hierarchies, and why did some cities adapt and recover while others declined? How did firms, investors, and local institutions respond to these ruptures, reconfiguring urban economies and spatial organization? What does a long-term perspective reveal about the intertwined dynamics of crisis, resilience, and ecological transformation in shaping global urban capitalism? How have urban business activities contributed to, and been transformed by, environmental change, from extraction and industrial pollution to pressures for sustainability and climate adaptation?
References
Abeyasekere, S. (1987). Jakarta: A History. Oxford University Press.
King, A. D. (2012). Colonial urban development: Culture, social power and environment. Routledge.
Metcalf, T. R. (2013). Colonial cities. In P. Clark (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of cities in world history (pp. 753-769). Oxford Univeristy Press.
Mumford, L. (1961). The city in history: Its origins, its transformations, and its prospects (Vol. 67). Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Submission Instructions
Timeline
- April 2026: Deadline for extended proposals (800–1000 words)
- July 2026: Paper development workshop at 2026 World Congress of Business History in Toronto
- July/August 2026: Online paper development workshop
- November 2026: Full paper submissions through Business History Submission Portal
- March 2027: Paper development workshop with revise-and-resubmit papers at the Business History Conference annual meeting
- September 2027: Final revised papers due
- 2028: Expected publication of the special issue (final date subject to the Business History editorial team’s scheduling)
Submission Requirements
- Authors are invited to submit an extended abstract or proposal for initial consideration. Proposals should be approximately 800–1000 words and should clearly outline the article’s research question, historical scope (timeframe and location), sources and methodology, and expected contributions to the literature. Please include a tentative title, author name(s) and affiliation(s), and contact information. Please send proposals to [email protected] by April 15, 2026. In your email subject line, include “CFP – Business and Cities Special Issue”. We especially encourage proposals that demonstrate engagement with the historiography and theoretical frameworks relevant to the Business and Cities theme (as outlined above), and that highlight how primary evidence (archival records, oral histories, etc.) will be used to support the analysis.
- Formatting and Length: Final papers should adhere to Business History guidelines (typically in the range of 8,000–10,000 words, including notes and references). Authors will be provided detailed instructions for manuscript preparation upon acceptance of proposals. We welcome informal inquiries if you have questions about the fit of a topic or the preparation of your proposal. All articles will be submitted through the Submission Portal for the journal in order to be peer-reviewed before acceptance for publication. For further information about the journal and submission policies, you may also consult the Business History journal website.
Guest Editors
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- Valeria Giacomin is a business historian specializing in emerging markets, multinational enterprises, and global value chains. She has published in Business History, Business History Review and Enterprise and Society among others, with a focus on agglomeration dynamics, global cities and clustering in different contexts. She serves as a trustee of the Business History Conference, and has experience in editorial projects and international collaboration.
- Youssef Cassis is Professor at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, European University Institute, Florence, and Director of the European Research Council funded project MERCATOR – ‘The Memory of Financial Crises: Financial Actors and Global Risk’. His work focuses mainly on banking and financial history, as well as business history more generally. His most recent books include Capitals of Capital. The Rise and Fall of Financial Centres, 1780-2009 (Cambridge University Press, 2nd ed. 2010) and Crises and Opportunities. The Shaping of Modern Finance (Oxford University Press, 2011). He has edited several books in business, economic and financial history, including, with Richard Grossman and Catherine Schenk, The Oxford Handbook of Banking and Financial History (Oxford University Press, 2016).
- Jan Logemann is Interim Professor of Social and Economic History at the University of Göttingen. His research focuses on the transnational history of consumption and business in the twentieth century, including the history of retailing and urban development as well as commercial design and architecture in transatlantic perspective. His work has appeared in Business History Review and Business History among other places, and he published two monographs, Trams or Tailfins? Public and Private Prosperity in Postwar West Germany and the United States (2012) and Engineered to Sell: European Émigrés and the Making of Consumer Capitalism (2019) with the University of Chicago Press.
- Chinmay Tumbe is a faculty member in the Economics Area at the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad. He is the author of India Moving: A History of Migration (2018) and The Age of Pandemics, 1817–1920: How They Shaped India and the World (2020). He has published widely in leading business history outlets, with recent work in the Business History Review on cities and globalization, including the article “Globalization, Cities, and Firms in Twentieth-Century India” (2022). His research spans migration, urbanization, and business history, with a particular focus on India in global perspective.