A History of Socially Responsible Business, c.1600-1950

Assesses the full range of social obligations that corporations held historicallyInvestigates the social life of the corporation from three key perspectivesProvides a long-term outlook on the oscillation between cultural norms that encouraged socially responsible business and states who tried to force businesses to behave responsibly

William A. Pettigrew is a Reader in History at the University of Kent, UK, the founding Director of the Centre for the Political Economies of International Commerce (PEIC) and the Lead Investigator of a Leverhulme Trust grant project on England’s seventeenth-century overseas trading companies. He is the author of Freedom’s Debt: The Royal African Company and the Politics of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1672-1752 (2013).

David Chan Smith is an Associate Professor at Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada. He is currently researching the history of corporate social responsibility and beginning his next project on Matthew Boulton, innovation during the Industrial Revolution, and the emergence of global carbon networks. His first book, Sir Edward Coke and the Reformation of the Laws (2014), is a study of the early modern common law.