Mircea Raianu is a historian of capitalism and economic life broadly construed, with a primary focus on contested ideas and legal structures of the corporation. He is currently Associate Professor of History at the University of Maryland, and holds a PhD in History from Harvard University (2017) and a BA in History from the University of California, Berkeley (2009). He is the author of Tata: The Global Corporation that Built Indian Capitalism (Harvard University Press, 2021), and several related articles and book chapters on subjects such as company towns and industrial photography.
Project Statement:
Giving Away the Company: Global Experiments with Common Ownership under Capitalism
My ongoing book project explores the creation of alternative forms of corporate organization through transnational exchanges of ideas and legal techniques from the late 1920s to the early 1980s. It centers on the Scott Bader Commonwealth, a British chemicals company converted by its founder into a worker-owned enterprise, drawing in part on the Gandhian concept of “trusteeship,” and the Industrial Common Ownership Movement (ICOM) it pioneered. Other case studies include cooperatives, foundations, and employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs), mainly in the United States and Western Europe (Italy, France, and Spain). The concluding chapters are situated firmly in the deindustrializing landscapes of the British Midlands and the American Rust Belt in the 1970s and 80s. They examine how attempted or realized worker takeovers, from the Triumph Meriden cooperative and the Lucas Plan in Britain to Tembec in Canada and the campaigns against the closures of the Youngstown and Weirton steel mills in the US, reimagined the companies they tried to save.
