This investigation sheds light on the social history of pathogenic dirt and its significance for shaping medical practices during the nineteenth century. It consists of an analysis focusing on Swedish medicine, using 8800 yearly reports written 1820–1900 by Swedish provincial doctors for the National Board of Health in Stockholm. The main argument is that the provincial doctors’ perceptions of the relationship between dirt and health during this century can be better understood by focusing on similarities in the handling of different kinds of pathological dirt over the course of many decades, rather than seeing interest in cleanliness as something mostly unprecedented. A novel cleanliness regime became dominant during the latter third of the century, meant to counter a new hybrid between everyday dirt – bodily emanations from healthy bodies – and matter believed to have caused miasmatic and contagionistic disease. New ideas about filth and its impact on health played a crucial role in the development of public health and sanitation movements, and were a precondition for everyday dirt becoming a central medical problem around the turn of the twentieth century, but as is shown, they built on old precedents. Thus, the miasmatic and contagionistic approach to disease shaped conceptions of hygiene and cleanliness.

Because nuclear power development entails massive initial investments in power plants, along with institutional innovations in regulation, law, and basic physical infrastructure, there are strong grounds to support the pervasiveness of the central state in the industry. Furthermore, considering the scale economies in reactor installation, standardization in design, and enhanced learning by doing, little scope remains for the consideration of decentralized business interests. This article argues that competition, in the sense of rivalry between firms, can nonetheless be a driving force behind the nuclear industry. To illustrate the point, we draw a comparative, eventful history of two Iberian nations, Portugal and Spain: Portugal has failed several attempts to introduce nuclear power, while Spain has become one of the largest nuclear power nations in Europe. A fine-grained analysis of the circumstances surrounding the nuclear history of both countries is presented, highlighting the key variables of business history and the role of the central state and political actors in economic policy.

This article contributes to historiographical examinations of gender and capitalism in eighteenth-century India. Focusing on the fragile nature of revenue farming ventures in this period, the article illustrates how propertied women in the Eastern Gangetic plains used matriarchal authority and affect to lead their agrarian and mercantile family firms into commercial transactions. The article shows that the household was the locus of these commercial relationships and that of the competing and layered sovereignties of distinct state and non-state actors. At the same time, matriarchs exercised their authority beyond it. Travelling in palanquins, or having their kin conduct transactions on their behalf, they asserted their maternal authority and social status in different publics to protect their firms’ interests. In a second key argument, the article suggests that Mughal law, fostered by native officials in the early colonial courts in Banaras, facilitated propertied women’s participation in this economy. Matriarchs demonstrated a keen understanding of this fractured jurisdictional landscape and used it to their advantage as they manoeuvred from one legal forum to another. The third argument of this article illustrates that colonial regulations redefined, and could even compromise, propertied women’s engagements in land revenue transactions. These shifts were made possible through the mobilization of gender and specific understandings of womanhood and the household. In this article, I show that these attempts to disenfranchise propertied women in Banaras were intimately connected to the Company’s vision of a colonial public in which it could monopolize sovereignty.

The theme of the 2024 Business History Conference was “doing business in the public interest,” but what does it actually mean to “do business in the public interest?” This presidential address challenges the idea of shareholder primacy as the main purpose of business enterprises historically and examines various ways that business historians might approach the idea of businesses acting in a public interest. In particular, it analyzes instances in which corporations made a decision in the public interest without clear evidence that it would benefit their bottom line; cases where it would demonstrably hurt their bottom line to prioritize the public; corporations that made a decision allegedly in the public interest that actually turned out to be bad for the public interest; and corporations that made a decision that was bad for the public interest that also turned out to be bad for their own bottom line.

During the opening phase of the Irish civil war, Dublin’s O’Connell Street was subjected to large-scale destruction of properties and businesses for the second time since the 1916 Rising. Utilizing newly available compensation claims as well as state and local government records, this article examines four aspects of the post-civil war restoration of O’Connell Street for the first time: the scale of the destruction; the compensation scheme devised by the Irish government which accorded O’Connell Street a unique status in the Damage to Property Compensation Act of 1923; the context of the town-planning regulations introduced, as well as the concerns of property owners, the local authority and central government; and the process of reconstruction – how compensation was paid, what properties were rebuilt, in what manner and when.

This article explores the long roots of swadeshi (economic self-reliance) in nineteenth-century India, focusing on attempts at industrial revival through pedagogical institutions, exhibitions, and associations. These roots, which influenced the Swadeshi Movement and Gandhian swadeshi activity in the early twentieth century, demonstrate how it is impossible to understand swadeshi without taking an extensive global perspective. Indian thinkers engaged in contemporary global economic debates and with British imperial deliberations on free trade and protection; they fine-tuned comparative perspectives on the Indian economy through international travel and their readings of global history. In a similar spirit, Indians forged core swadeshi techniques through observing associational, institutional, and technological innovations across the British empire and the wider world. History was a powerful motivating force. Popular conceptions of deindustrialization under colonial rule fired Indians’ imaginations about a past when the country was a global powerhouse for manufactured exports—and directly stimulated specific swadeshi endeavours. Situated at the confluence of profit-making and patriotism, swadeshi enterprise in the nineteenth century created some unexpected alliances: between Britons and Indians, colonial officials and nationalists, and urban intellectuals and small-town entrepreneurs.