100 books like Entrepreneurial Families

Having long wondered about how our world has been shaped by such commodities as tea, coffee, and sugar, I was fascinated by this carefully researched study of how cotton has shaped our world since the first cotton clothing 5,000 years ago in (what is now called) Pakistan.

The great thing about this book is its global reach, following cotton around the world as folks learned how to use it. While this is serious academic research, the author’s ability to relate local lives and key individuals to the broader forces shaping the globalizing cotton market keeps the story humming along.

I learned how British military power was key to Britain’s ability to relocate the global heart of cotton textile production from India to Manchester, boosting European wealth by deindustrializing India—a reminder that who wins and loses crucially depends on political power, not just market forces.

It has been broadly recognised in recent years that the traditional perception of early-modern Atlantic business as a male-dominated space is outmoded and inaccurate. In this superb book, Ellen Hartigan-O’Connor shows that the women who participated in commerce – from all ranks of society – were not exceptions in exclusively male-dominated markets but were ‘quintessential market participants’. Appealing strongly to my own approach to business history, Hartigan-O’Connor marries social and economic history, providing an updated view of who the commercial players were in eighteenth-century America.

Sheryllynne Haggerty is not the first to consider the issues of risk, obligation, and reputation in early-modern business – I might have chosen Craig Muldrew’s earlier The Economy of Obligation, for instance – but what marks this book apart is its interdisciplinary approach to business culture. Throughout, Haggerty skillfully interweaves the broad range of primary material she uses – including merchants’ letters, accounts, state papers, newspapers, and trade directories – with a theoretical framework drawing explicitly on socio-economic theory. The use of fascinating case studies and an engaging writing style makes this, despite being an excellent example of a scholarly monograph, accessible to a broader audience.

I have included a work of fiction in this list both because it is an extraordinary example of period fiction and because it highlights the potential richness of many of the stories we tell as historians. Several of the books I’ve highlighted in this list, as well as my own work, draw on the records of specific people – often merchants, but also consumers and manufacturers – to explore issues surrounding business history. Imogen Hermes Gowar’s Jonah Hancock exemplifies the risk and uncertainty navigated by early-modern merchants as well as the potential cost of their ambition and expertly navigates the ways in which information spread through the streets and in the coffee-houses of eighteenth-century London. This novel was well-deservedly shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2018.

Dombey and Son, first published in 1846–8, is, for me, a take-down of Victorian gender roles.

Mr. Dombey is everything Victorian men were meant to be: unemotional, focused on money and commerce, driven by duty not passion – and he is clearly in the wrong. He entirely dismisses his daughter, Florence, caring only for his business and for the son who will inherit it; for him, girls and women are scarcely human.

Through the characters of Mr. Dombey and his daughter, Dickens sets up a debate between traditional Victorian ideals of masculinity and femininity – in which femininity emerges victorious. There is so much I find wonderfully proto-feminist in Dombey and Son – I haven’t even started on the wonderful character of Edith! – and I can’t recommend it enough.

This novel, set in sixteenth-century Venice, reminds us that the Italian Renaissance was a great time to be a devotee of the pictorial arts. And it does so without getting caught up in the scandals surrounding the Borgias, who are almost as overdone as the Tudors. Luca Vianello is the heir to Venice’s premier gondola maker, until tragedy sends him off on a journey through poverty and hard work that ends when he becomes the personal boatman of the painter Trevisan. Morelli, who trained as an art historian, is intimately acquainted with the former Italian city-states, and like the other novels on my list, hers immerses you in Renaissance everyday life at a very personal level.

The Prince of Steel Pier begins with a line which immediately grabbed my attention: “It’s nine o’clock on Friday morning and Mrs. Goldberg is definitely dead.”

Joey, the main character, is on vacation in Atlantic City and helping out at his grandparents’ hotel. He is a self-conscious boy who  wants to prove to his big Jewish family that he is more than a “squirt.” Along the way he gets himself into unexpected trouble with mobsters in Atlantic City.

Set during the 1970’s, this book features an endearing protagonist navigating adolescence to learn what family and Jewish tradition mean to him. I particularly enjoyed Joey’s honesty as he observes his own behavior and struggles to create a new self-image. 

As someone perpetually in search of a good romcom, I found this story of three sisters who have inherited their family’s wedding planning business delightful.

While there is no shortage of spats and disagreements as each sister attempts to define her role within the business and family, when disaster strikes, it’s lovely to see them rally together and help each other find her own happily ever after. 

The Chronicles of Ghadid follows a family of assassins in a fantastical desert world—but rather than play it safe by following stealthy assassination quests, Doore throws her assassins into the fray against undead armies and unkillable spirits. The result is a truly unique setting with haunting action sequences, bound together by the close ties of family and budding romances. Also, necromancers and undead camels, how could you go wrong?

This was a feel-good read about a 3-generation rivalry between two sisters in a small town involving fried chicken. (You cannot go wrong with southern food in a novel, I’m just saying.)

What I thoroughly enjoyed about this book was how the plot got thicker and thicker, revealing the backstory throughout the story in a way that made me #TeamAmanda one minute and #TeamMae the next. I like digging deep into a character’s life, and this one did so in a way that made me sympathetic to both sisters, rooting for their reunion until the very end.

I’m trying my best not to give away the ending…suffice it to say; it helped me reframe my thinking around getting to the heart of a long feud that started before you even got here.