Andrew Popp

About

View research profile and publications

E-mail

ap.bhl@cbs.dk

Telephone

Office: +4538153672

Mobile: +4541853672

Departments

Department of Business Humanities and Law

Room: POR/18.B-2.134

View research profile and publications

Subjects

History USA United Kingdom

Primary research areas

Business history in Britain and beyond

Business history studies the historical evolution of businesses, industries, and business systems in their full economic, social and cultural contexts. My work has been primarily focused on Britain in the late eighteenth and nineteenth-centuries. However, I sometimes stray towards the United States of America and the twentieth or even twenty-first centuries.

Intimate histories of everyday economic life

In recent years my focus on the history of entrepreneurship and family business has evolved into an interest in exploring the relationship between business history and the histories of emotions and the everyday. I think of this as doing intimate histories of everyday economic life.

My research helps us to understand today through better understanding of the past.

My research helps develop historical awareness. Thinking historically – being knowledgeable about and conscious of the past – helps us better understand current challenges, preparing us to find solutions. History does not simply provide convenient blueprints. Instead, with its emphasis on context, it helps us better grasp complexity and the problems and challenges of human action. History, with its focus on time, also helps us better understand dynamics and processes of change.

Recent research projects

An intellectual biography of Josiah Wedgwood

Josiah Wedgwood is one of the most famed and illustrious entrepreneurs connected to the first Industrial Revolution that took place in Britain in the eighteenth-century. He has been written about extensively and authors have often drawn on his copious correspondence. However, there is no work dedicated to the intellectual biography of this very important thinker. This project explores the contemporary currents that fed into Wedgwood’s thinking, the intellectual contributions that he himself made, and – most importantly – how thought and action were linked and expressed through his entpreneurial endeavours

The economic lives of Florence and Ray

In contrast to Josiah Wedgwood, Florence and Ray Miller were “nobodies,” quietly living out their lives in eastern Ohio across the first eight decades of the twentieth-century. This project, again based on correspondence, traces out the lives Florence and Ray built together in the context of American capitalism.