The past in the news and the start of conference season

There's a lot of business history to catch up with

Today, it’s a bit of a mixed one as conference season has begun in earnest. Suppose you need a break from earnest conversations and intellectual discourse, or you just want to introvert for a bit and read some business-history-adjacent writing and podcasts, well. In that case, today’s missive contains a cornucopia of fascinating material for a hot summer day! And some musings on our failure to research the history of certain types of businesses — especially unethical ones…

But for starters, something less controversial (even though it references HS2 - Britain’s ill-fated high-speed railway project). The Financial Times ran a great piece on learning from the past by focusing on how the Victorians financed big infrastructure projects:

Clearly, the Victorians have always loomed large in all sorts of historiography. But as the FT points out, not only do we still live in the cities that the Victorians’ ingenuity built (at least in the UK, and in their equivalents’ achievements in other countries around the world), we could also learn from their approach to financing infrastructure.

The article draws some interesting conclusions, especially around the current disaster that is the High Speed 2 Railway (HS2) — much over-budget and overdue — which will provide an alternative connection between London and Birmingham, but was going to link Manchester and other cities as well (now axed), largely due to the failure of financing.

Mentality of improvement and the industrial revolution

Elsewhere on Substack, Ian Leslie’s great newsletter “The Ruffian” featured a really interesting interview with Anton Howes, a historian of the industrial revolution and head of innovation research at The Entrepreneurs Network.

Howes favours a cultural explanation for this significant transition in productivity and human lives, pointing out that a mindset of continuous tinkering and innovation is what drove these profound changes. Well worth a listen and another great example of how historical topics are made relevant to contemporary audiences.