Civilising business: The imperial episteme of early US business school education

America’s first university business schools were established in an imperial episteme. The Wharton School of Finance and Commerce, the University of Chicago’s College of Commerce and Administration, and Berkeley’s College of Commerce were established between 1891 and 1898 upon the discipline of political economy. That discipline relied on theory produced by and for the British East India Company (EIC) and produced faculty who directly served the United States’ colonisation of the Philippines. Business school proponents and their faculty pronounced that it was their Protestant Christianity that gave them the innate capacity and therefore responsibility to cultivate the lands of others and to engage their populations in productive labour. Extant scholarship has located these institutions’ origins in American progressive ideals. An examination of arguments for the creation of these institutions and their earliest textbooks reveals that those ideals were embedded in a wider and deeper episteme marked by imperial principles and logics.