Bringing Political Economy Back in

Like so many of the fields that have flourished in history departmentsin recent years, business history has an uneasy relationshipwith political history. When business history first emergedin the United States as a separate field in the 1920s, its foundersstressed the importance of lavishing on business records thesame reverence that political historians accorded the personalpapers of lawmakers. Only in this way, business historians assumed,would it be possible to convince other historians of the centralityof business leaders—and, more broadly, of economic institutions—tothe making of the nation. Much has changed since the 1920s. Yet the adversarial relationshipof business historians toward political history persists. Thismindset is evident