Valeria Giacomin, Bocconi University

Youssef Cassis, European University Institute

Jan Logemann, University of Göttingen

Chinmay Tumbe, Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad

Cities have long stood at the crossroads of business and globalization. From medieval market towns and colonial entrepôts to industrial metropolises and financial hubs, cities have mediated the flows of goods, capital, people, and ideas that underpin capitalism in the global economy. Urban historians have shown that cities emerged historically as centres of exchange and specialization, often linked to hinterlands through flows of agricultural surplus. Empires and colonial systems further embedded cities into international circuits as ports, administrative hubs, and commercial nodes.

Seminal work in global urban studies presented cities as nodes in world-spanning networks, structuring hierarchies of capital and connectivity. Global history showed how urban elites concentrated wealth, power, and influence, thereby shaping the material foundations and institutional infrastructures of global capitalism. Urban economics further investigated how agglomeration in cities created both opportunities and constraints, with scale economies, dense networks, and rising costs shaping business practices and organizational forms.

Business history has traditionally focused on firms, entrepreneurs, and institutions that expanded across borders, while the urban contexts that enabled and structured these processes have often remained in the background. Rather than serving as passive contexts, cities constituted the institutional and infrastructural foundations of global business. Viewed through the lens of business history, they were arenas in which firms and institutional actors structured, negotiated, and transformed the processes of global capitalism. At the same time, informal and hybrid actors, including bazaar traders, migrant entrepreneurs, and diasporic networks, leveraged urban density and connectivity to embed themselves in global circuits.

Histories of financial centres demonstrate how global cities such as London, Paris, and New York as well as small states or city states such as Singapore, Dubai and Luxembourg developed specialized institutions, practices, and reputations that anchored international finance. Studies of maritime transport and shipping reveal how port cities concentrated shipping companies, dockside services, and logistics infrastructure, making them indispensable to global circulation. Research on manufacturing, construction, and real estate further highlights how urban economies were shaped by industrial production and building enterprises, illustrating the long-term interplay between property markets, urban growth, and business development.

Urban hinterland studies show how the fortunes of firms and industries cannot be understood apart from their urban nodes. Comparative work on international entrepôts such as Singapore, Batavia or Bombay highlights how colonial and imperial cities functioned as organizing points for regional economies within wider global value chains. Expanding on these insights, this special issue invites contributions that engage with cities as business environments in a systematic way. Encouraging a genuinely global comparative perspective, the issue is especially interested in research on regions such as Japan, Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America which remain underrepresented in existing scholarship.

By integrating case studies on a broad scope from across world regions and diverse historical periods, the issue seeks to contribute cumulatively to a comparative and theoretically informed understanding of how cities shaped business globalization. In positioning cities as central agents of global capitalism, the issue builds on existing literatures in business, financial, and urban history, seeking to connect and extend these fields through new empirical evidence and cross-regional dialogue. The issue intends to position cities as active, historical agents of globalization in business history.

Potential topics

• Cities as Nodes of Global Finance, Trade and Manufacturing: How did businesses use cities as hubs of commerce, credit, and investment in globalizing economies? What role did stock exchanges, banks, trading houses, and merchant guilds play in embedding global capital within specific urban contexts? How did these institutions transform cities into command points of globalization?
• Cities, Real Estate, and Global Investment: How did property markets and urban real estate development become globalized? From colonial land concessions and foreign-owned plantations to the rise of multinational property firms, how did investment in land and real estate shape the growth, form, and business dynamics of cities? How did flows of capital into real estate, from banks, funds, and transnational investors, transform urban space and embed cities in global financial circuits?
• Urban Infrastructures of Globalization: Ports, warehouses, transport corridors, and communication systems were often financed, managed, or operated by businesses. How did firms shape, invest in, and benefit from urban infrastructures that connected production and consumption across continents? Conversely, how did these infrastructures reshape urban space and labor markets?
• Migration, Informality, and Urban Globalization: How did informal markets, migrant entrepreneurs, and diasporic communities leverage urban density, mobility, and transnational connections to build alternative circuits of trade, credit, and labor that sustained 'globalization from below'? How did these actors navigate, shape, and transform colonial and postcolonial urban systems over time? In what ways did these resilient networks engage with or circumvent formal business institutions, adapting to and contesting existing hierarchies while transforming cities into laboratories of hybrid and transnational economic life?
• Resilient Cities: Crisis, Adaptation, and Environmental Change: How did wars, revolutions, financial crises, pandemics, or deindustrialization reshape urban hierarchies, and why did some cities adapt and recover while others declined? How did firms, investors, and local institutions respond to these ruptures, reconfiguring urban economies and spatial organization? What does a long-term perspective reveal about the intertwined dynamics of crisis, resilience, and ecological transformation in shaping global urban capitalism? How have urban business activities contributed to, and been transformed by, environmental change, from extraction and industrial pollution to pressures for sustainability and climate adaptation?

Timeline

• April 15, 2026: Deadline for extended proposals (800–1000 words)
• November 1, 2026: Full paper submissions through Business History Submission Portal
• September 1, 2027: Final revised papers due