CfP: Special Issue for Business History Indigenous Entrepreneurship under Colonialism and Beyond2026.6.14 {en}

Special Issue for Business History

Indigenous Entrepreneurship under Colonialism and Beyond:

Institutional Negotiation, Exclusion and Resilience

CFP Launch Date: 1 June 2026

Overview

This Special Issue examines Indigenous entrepreneurial agency under colonial rule, treating colonial institutions as both economic constraints and sociopolitical structures that shaped market access, legal standing and accumulation strategies. Defining Indigenous peoples is challenging given their diversity and presence across every continent. Scholars have nonetheless identified a number of broadly shared characteristics, including prior inhabitation of a territory before the arrival of later settler or dominant populations, some form of subjugation by those populations, the retention of distinct socio-cultural practices and institutions, a deep attachment to ancestral lands and resources, economic arrangements that are often, though not always, oriented around subsistence, and an association with distinctive languages (Peredo et al., 2004, pp. 5–6).

We invite business historical accounts of how entrepreneurs in colonised societies navigated, contested and reworked the rules of commerce, especially where access to courts, licensing, property rights, banking and credit markets was restricted or selectively enforced. Building on recent scholarship calling for a rethinking of entrepreneurship (Lubinski et al., 2025), growing attention to Indigenous and social entrepreneurship in the Global South (Colbourne, Peredo, & Henriques, 2024; Prouchet, 2025), and calls to engage more directly with colonial and postcolonial contexts and legacies in business history (Austin, Dávila, & Jones, 2017; MacKenzie et al., 2021, 2023; Decker, 2022), the Special Issue brings institutions and agency into the same analytical frame.

Objectives and Scope

Submissions should engage one or more of the following questions:

• Entrepreneurship under legal and financial exclusion: How did Indigenous entrepreneurs respond to constraints in courts, licensing, taxation, banking, property rights, labour regimes and credit markets? Relevant submissions might examine colonial courts, licensing, taxation and property rights as constraints or resources for Indigenous enterprise; financial exclusion and entrepreneurial responses through credit markets, banking, informal and hybrid finance; and the emergence of early Indigenous entrepreneurial projects and their historical significance in the context of colonialism and beyond.
• Institutional negotiation and boundary work: How did entrepreneurial actors exploit institutional gaps, navigate plural legal orders, reinterpret colonial rules, and/or mobilise intermediaries and brokers? Submissions might address entrepreneurial boundary work across plural legal orders; and brokerage and intermediation in the politics of market access, including gender, race, caste and ethnicity as cross-cutting dimensions.
• Resilience as strategy: What specific mechanisms sustained enterprise under constraint and with what distributive consequences? Submissions might explore cooperative, mutual-aid and associational forms as economic strategy in late-colonial settings; diasporic, kinship and inter-regional networks in trade, production and credit under colonial regulation; and moments of late-colonial economic nationalism and early decolonisation (c. 1940s–1970) as sites of institutional reconfiguration.
• Innovation as resistance: What were the mechanisms of technology adoption and adaptation through which entrepreneurs offered alternatives that subverted or circumvented colonial hegemony? Relevant submissions might, for example, address technology, innovation and entrepreneurial market response in early and late industrial colonial capitalism (1880–1940), as well as comparative or connected histories that explicitly engage the shared conceptual lens across cases.

Methodologically, we welcome submissions grounded in business historical approaches, including archival research, oral history, biography, microhistory, and comparative or connected history, that make clear empirical and interpretive contributions to the Special Issue’s themes. Engagement with postcolonial scholarship, subaltern studies, and critical perspectives on firms, markets and institutions is welcome, but not required.

We particularly encourage contributions that draw on a wide range of primary sources to recover Indigenous actors, experiences and strategies, such as company records, court records, licensing files, banking archives, trading accounts, petitions, newspapers and vernacular-language materials. Authors wishing to discuss unconventional sources or strategies for overcoming archival silences are warmly invited to contact the guest editors.

Timeline

Informal enquiries welcome

June-September 2026

Abstract / proposal deadline (800–1,000 words)

1 October 2026

Decisions on abstracts

1 November 2026

Paper-development workshop(s)

Newcastle Business School,  Northumbria University

Full paper submission deadline

1 May 2027

First-round peer-review decisions

September 2027

Revised paper deadline

1 February 2028

Final revision deadline

1 May 2028

Final acceptance target

June 2028

Expected online publication and launch

Autumn 2028

Expected print publication

Early to mid-2029

 

References

Austin, G., Dávila, C., & Jones, G. (2017). The alternative business history: Business in emerging markets. Business History Review, 91(3), 537–569.

Colbourne, R., Peredo, A.M., & Henriques, I. (2024). Indigenous entrepreneurship? Setting the record straight. Business History, 66(2), 455–477.

Decker, S. (2022). Postcolonial transition and global business history: British multinational companies in Ghana and Nigeria. Routledge.

Lubinski, C., Prouchet, L., Ferri, C., Jepsen, N.C. & Lei, W. (2025). Rethinking the histories and ideologies of entrepreneurship. Management & Organizational History. Online First.

MacKenzie, N.G., Perchard, A., Miller, C., & Forbes, N. (2021). Business–government relations and national economic models. Business History, 63(8), 1239–1252.

MacKenzie, N.G., Perchard, A., Miller, C., & Forbes, N. (Eds.) (2023). Varieties of capitalism over time. Routledge.

Peredo, A.M., Anderson, R.B., Galbraith, C.S., Honig, B., & Dana, L.P. (2004). Towards a theory of indigenous entrepreneurship. International Journal of Entrepreneurship and Small Business, 1(1/2), 1–20.

Prouchet, L. (2025). Connecting the dots: Business history research on social entrepreneurship in the Global South. Business History. Online First.

 

Submission Requirements

Authors are invited to submit an extended abstract or proposal for initial consideration. Submissions should be approximately 800–1,000 words and clearly set out the article’s research question, historical scope (including timeframe and location), sources and methodology, and anticipated contribution to the literature. Please also provide a tentative title, author name(s), affiliation(s), and contact information.

Proposals should be sent by 1 October 2026 to himadri[at]xlri.ac.in, with the other editors copied in: marktadajewski[at]gmail.com, andrew.perchard[at]otago.ac.nz, and zpittaki001[at]dundee.ac.uk. The email subject line should read: “CFP – Indigenous Entrepreneurship under Colonialism and Beyond Special Issue.”

Formatting and Length: Final papers should adhere to Business History guidelines (typically in the range of 8,000–10,000 words, including notes and references). Authors will be provided detailed instructions for manuscript preparation upon acceptance of proposals. We welcome informal inquiries if you have questions about the fit of a topic or the preparation of your proposal. All articles will be submitted through the Submission Portal for the journal in order to be peer-reviewed before acceptance for publication.

Guest Editors

Himadri Roy Chaudhuri, Ph.D. in Marketing (University of Calcutta, India) is Professor of Marketing and Consumer Culture at the Xavier School of Business (XLRI), India. Dr. Chaudhuri has published widely in leading international journals, including the Journal of Business Ethics, Journal of Business Research, Journal of Macromarketing, Journal of Consumer Affairs, Journal of Homosexuality, and the Journal of Public Policy & Marketing, among others. His scholarship contributes to critical perspectives in marketing, often bridging cultural theory, ethics and policy concerns.

Mark Tadajewski, Ph.D. in Marketing (University of Leicester), is Honorary Professor of Marketing at the University of York, Visiting Professor at the Open University, and Visiting Professor at Royal Holloway, University of London. His research critically interrogates the foundations of marketing theory and practice, with particular attention on how geopolitics shape the discipline. In business history, his work has examined alternative forms of business education and their influence on sales and managerial practice.

Andrew Perchard, PhD in History (University of Strathclyde) is Honorary Research Professor at Otago Business School, Ōtākou Whakaihu Waka / University of Otago, Dunedin, Aotearoa–New Zealand, and Visiting Professor, Birkbeck, University of London, and Honorary Visiting Professor, Newcastle Business School, Northumbria University, both UK. His research has focused particularly on the subject of business–government relations and corporate political activity, deglobalisation and globalisation, as well as regional development and energy and industrial policy.

Zoi Pittaki, PhD in Economic History (University of Glasgow) is a Senior Lecturer in Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the University of Dundee School of Business. Her research interests include entrepreneurship and institutions, entrepreneurship and growth, social entrepreneurship and historical institutionalism.

Source: Special Issue for Business History Indigenous Entrepreneurship under Colonialism and Beyond – Call for Papers, H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online, licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 US.