ABSTRACT
Business history emerged in the 1950s as a sub-discipline of economic history, and its initial domain of investigation was the characterization of the evolution of entrepreneurs and firms at the individual level. Progressively, business history became a discipline in itself, enlarging the scope of analysis, and developing closer connections with the broad economic field of industrial organization. With this transformation, business history – now often called ‘new business history’ – can be defined as the analysis of the evolution of the structures and behaviours of firms and industries over long periods of time, within a framework which explicitly takes into account markets and institutions that shape these structures and behaviours. Today, research programmes mixing business history with the theory of the firm and industrial dynamics are burgeoning.1 The major goal of these common research programmes is to characterize the robustness of key results obtained in industrial organization on specific periods analysed by business historians, and to generate new propositions, especially on the question of what determines the boundaries of the firm or the boundaries of the industry.
