Business history with liberal bias: A critical reflection on “political risk”

Borrowing insight from realism and Marxism, this essay reviews how business historical literature define and analyze political risk. The essay argues that by adopting frameworks that separate business from politics, many business historians present a tacit liberal bias, which enables them to tackle how multinational enterprises respond to political risk while at the same time preventing them from asking about the cause and mechanism of it, as management scholars and international relations historians have done. The exisiting paradigm serves the interests of capital, and fails to explain economic statecraft of the 21st century. The essay calls on the business history community to move out of liberal presuppositions and take a diversity of philosophical positions on the relationship between international business and the nation-state.