Home Events & Conferences Event History 2010 Events Immigrant Entrepreneurship Panel
Immigrant Entrepreneurship (BHC Panel) Print E-mail

March 26, 2010
GHI-organized Panel at the Business History Conference
University of Georgia, Athens
Participants: Hartmut Berghoff (GHI), Uwe Spiekermann (GHI), Hasia R. Diner (NYU), Jason Lim (National University of Singapore), Mark K. Bauman (Editor, Southern Jewish History)

The United States famously declares itself "a nation of immigrants" and "the land of opportunity." The importance of immigration in the nation's economic development - be it as a source of low‐cost labor or of highly skilled human capital - has long been acknowledged by scholars and policy‐makers alike. Similarly, the American economic system's openness to entrepreneurial activity is generally recognized as one of its defining characteristics and a central factor in its continued vitality. This panel seeks to identify links between these two integral elements of American history: entrepreneurship and immigration.

The panel will begin by introducing a theoretical framework for understanding immigrant entrepreneurship in American history, but will also introduce the German Historical Institute's new project on German‐American Entrepreneurship: Immigrant Entrepreneurship: German‐American Business Biographies, 1720 to the Present. Other presentations in this panel will focus other aspects of immigrant entrepreneurship, including the ethnic experience and small‐scale entrepreneurial activity of Jewish peddlers in the New World, the role of the Chinese merchant class in Singapore and Malaya in trade with China, and a biographical approach to the German‐American immigrant entrepreneur, Claus Spreckels.

Program

  • Hartmut Berghoff, German Historical Institute
    "Are Immigrant Entrepreneurs Different? Questions and Concepts of a New Research Initiative"

  • Uwe Spiekermann, German Historical Institute
    "Claus Spreckels: A Biographical Case Study of Nineteenth-Century American Immigrant Entrepreneurship"

  • Hasia R. Diner, New York University
    "Peddlers: A New World Jewish History"

  • Jason Lim, National University of Singapore
    "The China Trade for the Chinese Merchants in Malaya and Singapore during Decolonization, 1945-1965"