Raw Capital

A synthesis of business history with new understandings of creative materiality in the natural world

Raw Capital advances the integration of business history and environmental history by going beyond pollution and environmentalism, beyond evolutionary and animal history, to reach for a deeper synthesis of economic activity with new understandings of creative materiality in the natural world.

Adopting a new materialist approach to business history, the scholars featured in this volume integrate animals, plants, microbes, climate, and the diversity of natural phenomena as creative factors in their analyses of business and economic activity. This collection interrogates the deep ways that elements and systems of the environment make up the stuff of business history, contributing not only as material acted upon but actively as creative participants. Raw Capital sets human-centered business, the firm, and economic decision-making on an equal playing field with elements and systems of nature, to more closely interrogate the mutually constitutive existence of business and environment.

Putting the natural world in a position of equality with business allows the contributors to the volume to ask novel questions. Why do microbes constitute partners in brewing operations? Why does the unique blood chemistry of the horseshoe crab reshape public health? How do sprawling urban economies and the water cycle reshape one another? What are the creative powers that chimpanzees, battery acid, gasoline, and prairie chickens bring to bear upon business?

The closer one looks, the more difficult it is to identify a line where nature becomes capital and business becomes separated from the environment. Raw Capital revels in this messy, material nature of business history.

Contributors: Michael M. Belding, Brian C. Black, Kristin Brig-Ortiz, Talia Burnside, Ann Norton Greene, Gregory A. Hargreaves, Stephen R. Hausmann, Raymond M. Hyser III, Timothy J. LeCain, Cody Patton, Brigid Prial, James Morton Turner, Nicole Welk-Joerger, Kristoffer Whitney.