Business history and the resilience of regional economies

Abstract

While resilience has become a key concern within a variety of disciplines in recent years, it requires further development in the field of business history. With the aim of providing new conceptual and empirical insights into the study of regional business history, in this introduction to this special issue we provide a general overview to the literature on regional economic resilience and to the concept of resilience. This is followed by a review of the recent research on business history that uses the resilience concept. We then establish the analytical framework and present the aims and boundaries of our research. In the next section, we briefly describe the content of the articles included in this special issue. We finally discuss these articles in order to shed light on the uniqueness and universality applied to the resilience of regional economies.