A History of Socially Responsible Business, C.1600-1950

This book examines the changing reciprocal relationships between corporations and their various social obligations over the very long term - from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. Chapters from emerging and established business historians assess the full range of social obligations that corporations held historically. By adopting an innovative methodological approach that is long-term and comparative, this book offers a challenge to the literature on corporate history and will be of interest to researchers and academics in the field of finance and business history.

William A. Pettigrew is a Reader in History at the University of Kent, UK, the founding Director of the Centre for the Political Economies of International Commerce (PEIC) and the Lead Investigator of a Leverhulme Trust grant project on England’s seventeenth-century overseas trading companies. He is the author of Freedom’s Debt: The Royal African Company and the Politics of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1672–1752 (2013).

David Chan Smith is an Associate Professor at Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada. He is currently researching the history of corporate social responsibility and beginning his next project on Matthew Boulton, innovation during the Industrial Revolution, and the emergence of global carbon networks. His first book, Sir Edward Coke and the Reformation of the Laws (2014), is a study of the early modern common law.