Association of Business Historians

The Association of Business Historians (ABH) is a British learned society focused on business history and the history of companies concerned with "The study of all aspects of the historical development of enterprise, businesses and business activity generally and their inter-relationship with the social, cultural, economic and political environment."

In 2009 it was one of the The National Archives' partners in the production of a National Strategy for Business Archives (England and Wales) (2009).

The Association organises an annual conference and an annual Tony Slaven Doctoral Workshop, named for Tony Slaven, one of the ABH's founders. It awards the annual Coleman Prize, named for business historian D. C. Coleman, for a recent Ph.D. thesis in the area of business history, and the Tony Slaven Grant.

The Association of Business Historians was founded in 1990 to promote the study of business history following on from the establishment of the Business Archives Council in 1934.

T S Ashton regarded business history as “ simply a branch of economic history focusing on industry and the firm”. Even in the 1960s Peter Payne argued that business history was “that branch of economic history that finds its source material primarily in company records and takes its starting point the entrepreneur and the firm...it is the grass roots approach to economic history”.

At Liverpool in 1958, Francis Hyde launched the journal Business History , and a year later, in 1959, Peter Payne was appointed as Colquhoun Lecturer in Business History at the University of Glasgow, under Sydney Checkland. This was the first named lectureship in business history in Britain. This led in 1960 to the establishment of the Business Archives Council (Scotland), to begin surveying and saving from destruction the records of Scottish Business. In the 1960s the post Robbens expansion of the universities, especially of the social sciences, greatly increased academic posts in economic history and economics, and triggered much new research and writing in the history of business, but not then any demand for a separate identity for the subject.

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