Submit a Manuscript to the Journal
Business History
For a Special Issue on
Indigenous entrepreneurship under colonialism and beyond: institutional negotiation, exclusion and resilience
Abstract deadline
Manuscript deadline
Special Issue Editor(s)
Himadri Roy Chaudhuri,
Xavier School of Business (XLRI), India
himadri@xlri.ac.in
Mark Tadajewski,
University of York; The Open University; Royal Holloway, University of London, UK
marktadajewski@gmail.com
Andrew Perchard,
Otago Business School, University of Otago, Aotearoa-New Zealand; Birkbeck, University of London; Newcastle Business School, Northumbria University
andrew.perchard@otago.ac.nz
Zoi Pittaki,
University of Dundee School of Business, UK
zpittaki001@dundee.ac.uk
Indigenous entrepreneurship under colonialism and beyond: institutional negotiation, exclusion and resilience
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.
It invites 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.
- Entrepreneurship under legal and financial exclusion: responses to constraints in courts, licensing, taxation, banking, property rights, labour regimes and credit markets.
- Institutional negotiation and boundary work: how entrepreneurial actors exploited institutional gaps, navigated plural legal orders, reinterpreted colonial rules and mobilised intermediaries or brokers.
- Resilience as strategy: cooperative, mutual-aid and associational forms; diasporic, kinship and inter-regional networks; and late-colonial economic nationalism and early decolonisation as sites of institutional reconfiguration.
- Innovation as resistance: technology adoption and adaptation through which entrepreneurs offered alternatives that subverted or circumvented colonial hegemony.
- Comparative or connected histories that use the shared conceptual lens across cases.
- Submissions may use archival research, oral history, biography, microhistory, and comparative or connected history, and may engage postcolonial scholarship, subaltern studies, and critical perspectives on firms, markets and institutions.
Contributions drawing on primary sources such as company records, court records, licensing files, banking archives, trading accounts, petitions, newspapers and vernacular-language materials are particularly encouraged.
Submission Instructions
- Authors are invited to submit an extended abstract or proposal of approximately 800-1,000 words for initial consideration.
- Proposals should clearly set out the article's research question, historical scope, including timeframe and location, sources and methodology, and anticipated contribution to the literature.
- Each proposal should include a tentative title, author name(s), affiliation(s), and contact information.
- Proposals should be sent to himadri@xlri.ac.in, with marktadajewski@gmail.com, andrew.perchard@otago.ac.nz and zpittaki001@dundee.ac.uk copied in.
- The email subject line should read: CFP - Indigenous Entrepreneurship under Colonialism and Beyond Special Issue.
- Final papers should follow Business History guidelines and are typically 8,000-10,000 words, including notes and references.
- When submitting the full paper through the journal submission portal, authors should select "Indigenous entrepreneurship under colonialism and beyond: institutional negotiation, exclusion and resilience" as the special issue designation.
- Paper-development workshop(s) are planned at Newcastle Business School, Northumbria University, following decisions on abstracts.
Expected online publication and launch: Autumn 2028. Expected print publication: early to mid-2029.