ABSTRACT
What about women? Male is a gender too. What about race? Not all entrepreneurs are white and male. What about entrepreneurship? Not all societies have paid attention to entrepreneurs, and of those that have, no society has ever valued female entrepreneurs as highly as males. The odd coupling of three historically-fluid social categories of difference—gender, race and entrepreneurship—challenges some key, taken-for-granted, assumptions underlying the history and historiography of global business: that the identities of entrepreneurs and scholars who write about them do not matter to how entrepreneurship has come to be assessed and evaluated; that histories and theories of entrepreneurship are gender neutral; that globalization is not a gendered and racialized process of change. This entry shows how gender and race have challenged the masculinism and whiteness of global business history. It describes how gendered and racial histories of imperialism and colonialism have made analyses of power dynamics central to an understanding of globalization processes and practices. It urges reconsideration of entrepreneurship as a source of information about social identities and inequalities as well as empowerment.
