Editor's notes and announcements

I am delighted to welcome Zhiwu Chen and Chicheng Ma as guest editors for this special issue of the Asia-Pacific Economic History Review. The papers are largely based on the program of the Eighth International Symposium on Quantitative History held in July 2021 at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. They span a range of topics in Chinese economic history including state censorship 1644–1790, marital fertility over three centuries, the transmission of wood-block carving and printing skills across 16 generations, the long-term impact of different administrative arrangements north and south of the Great Wall, and important albeit informal networks facilitating trust and co-operation among merchant groups in Republican China. The guest editors contextualise and identify the importance of these papers. I am grateful to Zhiwu Chen and Chicheng Ma for their informative introduction and their encouragement of these fine young scholars. In other news, the Asia-Pacific Economic History Review (formerly Australian Economic History Review) participates enthusiastically in the move toward open access publishing. Roughly half of our research articles are now published open access. This welcome development owes a great deal to agreements between the publisher Wiley and a fast-growing list of universities whose faculty and students may publish open access at no cost. See https://authorservices.wiley.com/author-resources/Journal-Authors/open-access/affiliation-policies-payments/institutional-funder-payments.html. The journal sends out important messages on Twitter @EcoHistoryAU and on Mastodon @[email protected]. Follow us for all the latest and important news! The 10th Australasian Cliometrics Workshop will be held at the University of Adelaide Nov 6 2023. The host Florian Ploeckl <[email protected]> welcomes enquiries and proposals by July 16. The next conference of the Asia-Pacific Economic and Business History Society will be held at the University of Hawaii Feb 17–182024. The conference host Professor Sumner LaCroix invites proposals for the program by Sept 20. More detail at https://economichistorysociety.wordpress.com/call-for-papers/. Professor Zhiwu Chen will present the 2024 Noel Butlin Lecture during the conference. The 2024 meeting in Hawaii follows the highly successful 2023 Asia-Pacific Economic and Business History Conference hosted by Dr. Claire Wright Feb 10–11 at the University of Technology Sydney. Among the highlights of an excellent program was the 2023 Noel Butlin Lecture by Professor Grietjie Verhoef, who graciously has provided the following synopsis so that readers unable to attend the conference might have some sense of her arguments. Thank you Professor Verhoef! Kris Inwood, editor Synopsis of ‘Measure of Significance. Human Capital in Business History’ by the 2023 Noel Butlin lecture by Professor Grietjie Verhoef. Innovation in scientific research contributes to enhanced understanding of historical development and delivers a steady stream of new knowledge. In Business History research a constructive focus on women delivered a corpus literature that identified and explained the agency of women in business and entrepreneurship. This research is outlined to confirm the acknowledgement of women's agency as entrepreneurs in business since the sixteenth century. There is not a dispute about women's agency and leadership. Women in business received systematic attention since the late 1970s, although the great momentum forward occurred since the late 1980s commencing with the scholarly journal Feminist Studies (1972), followed by the 1989 Journal of Women's History and Women's History Review (1991). In scholarly outlets beyond these journals women in business entered as actors negotiating the social context of their time. Historical research highlighted women's roles as members of families, as agents of social reform, education, and political activism. Scholars addressed the barriers to entry posed by social norms and the so-called ‘separate spheres' of women and men. As gender as a ‘useful category’ of analysis (Scott, 1986) gained traction, women rose to visibility in the literature on business. A significant contribution by Angel Kwolek-Folland in 1998 with A History of Women and Business cemented the focus on women in business, claiming “Women have always been in business in America” (Kwolek-Folland, 1998, p. 1). Mary Yeager's three volumes Women in Business (Yeager, 1999) collated diverse scholarly work on women in business, refuting the ‘separate spheres' and domesticity paradigm (Vickery, 1993). Between the mid-1980s and the turn of the millennium historical research made it clear that women have been in business long before the sixteenth century (Davis, 1982). The discourse about what constitutes ‘business’ directed closer attention to entrepreneurial activities beyond the small enterprise, such as, that philanthropic activities of the nineteenth century that were identified as nothing but business operations (Ginzberg, 1990). Successful negotiating barriers to entry and innovative engagement in creating and supplementing existing market opportunities, highlighted women's agency in operating from micro-enterprises to big industrial business (Buddle, 2011; Lewis, 2009). Recognising women beyond the family enterprise during the industrial revolution (Barker, 2017; Scott & Tilley, 1975; Sharpe, 2001) displayed women's ingenuity in supplementing social needs with entrepreneurial opportunities. Facilitating lodging, providing domestic services, and offering opportunities of leisure and social interaction, facilitated consumption and a livelihood to many, including small business owned by men (Lewis, 2020). Numerous histories of women in business mean that scholars no longer fail to identify women because it was believed that ‘women do not exist in business’ (Craig, 2016, p. 4). Women are expected in all spheres of business, in all geographies, although not evenly distributed across the world. The Aston Bishop volume Female entrepreneurs in the long nineteenth century introduced the diversity of context, geography, and industry of women in business during the long nineteenth century (Aston & Bishop, 2020). Dismantling the ‘separate spheres’ also took down the ‘vital industry’ domain occupied by men (Preiss, 1998). Women appear in all spheres of business—beyond ‘the firm’ and in industries, business groups, family business—big and small, business management and multinational corporations, and women and men appear simultaneously as actors in those sectors. Women appeared in the steel industry, in printing and iron mongering, in the craft of silversmiths and boot-making (Gamber, 1998). Women invested in productive enterprise as investing partners (Hernandez-Nicolás & Martinez, 2020; Verhoef, 2020), but also as stock market investors (Laurence et al., 2009; Rutterford & Maltby, 2006, 2007). Women in finance, banking, and equity investment since the mid-nineteenth century, produced several enlightening histories of women in finance. Women were all but ‘typically’ risk averse or ignorant of the world of finance. From local family business involvement, women spread the family firm into global markets (Igersheim & Le Chapelain, 2022; Kahn, 2016). Women in all types of enterprise, in different geographies and markets successfully challenged the former male-centred conceptualisation of an entrepreneur. Women's agency in scholarly enterprise and in actual business practice, indeed afforded women an undisputed place in the history of business. In the twenty-first century women perform central roles as entrepreneurs, owners, and managers of and in business. By sharpening the focus on gender as a category of analysis, women's visibility was enhanced. The complex nature of collaboration and/or competition between women and men in business has received less attention because of the feminist agenda. In a recent Special Issue of Business History in 2022 the editors asked whether ‘more attention to gender and feminist theory (would) make business institutions more or less loveable?’ (Dean et al., 2023). Taking stock of women's actual presence in business, as well as in the scholarly literature on business and women, suggests that a new analytical approach, or a shift in the exploratory paradigm to understand the dynamics of collaboration between different actors in business, that would be women and men, may deliver a degree of ‘scientific disruption’ that could advance the understanding of the role of women (and men) in business. This perspective should be applied to the full scope of Business History research. From management theory complex leadership theory may serve useful in this endeavour.

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