ABSTRACT
Business history and international business are cognate subjects. There are few, if any, studies of international business that do not require a proper study of context. International business decision making must be made relevant by a considered evaluation of the circumstances surrounding that decision. This often means putting it into its historical context. The contributions that the study of international business can make to business history are the input of appropriate theory and appropriate research methods. The best international business theory can illuminate the seemingly disparate strategies of firms in given historical circumstances and can provide an integrated, overarching conceptual structure of the study of business history. The research methods used in international business are also worthy of scrutiny by business historians. As David Cannadine (2008, p. 29) says,
as most historians recognise, analysis without narrative loses any sense of the sequencing (and unpredictability) of events through time, while narrative without analysis fails to convey the structural constraints within which events actually take place … there is in practice a long continuum extending from ‘pure’ narrative to ‘pure’ analysis, which means that the best history is situated somewhere between these extremes, seeking simultaneously to animate structure and contextualise narrative.
