NEWS FROM THE INQUIRE CAPITALISM TEAM
Fall 2021 has been a very productive semester for the Inquire Capitalism Team. Our database of corporate archives continues to grow. There are over 800 curated entries on the catalog and we will continue to expand the list and the diversity of entries. The database now contains more than 100 entries of banks. We have internationalized our search and collected information about banking archives in Europe, Latin America, and the United States. There are also recent entries about publishing companies such as Routledge or Elsevier. In addition, we have worked in adding selected bibliography to each of the entries and we have updated the controlled vocabulary document that helps users find the archives they need.
The Inquire Capitalism database is open for contributions. Send us your contribution through our website or by email to inquirecapitalism@history.clas.ufl.edu. For more information contact Professor Sean Adams, director of the Inquire Capitalism Program at the University of Florida (spadams@ufl.edu).
Fall 2021 interns of the University of Florida’s program in Digital Business History
Profiles
The Inquire Capitalism Internship program offers two students every semester the opportunity to contribute to the Inquire Capitalism corporate archives database and to learn about digital archives and archiving, digital content creation, digital history, and different digital tools that are key for today’s writing and publishing in history and the Humanities job market.
In this new issue of the Inquire Capitalism newsletter, meet the Fall 2021 interns Shannon Scott and Paul Handberg.
Shannon Scott is a third-year History major who is also taking classes to earn Religion and German minors. She started her internship with Inquire Capitalism in August 2021, the fourth digital history project she has participated in after the 2019 SONGS Border Wall presentation, a digital timeline for Medieval Literary Culture, and another timeline for Global History of Prostitution.1 Since she primarily studies 20th-century history with focuses on fascism and on queer history, the history of capitalism plays a significant role in her work. “It’s hard to underestimate the impact that corporations can have on politics and social causes” for example her classes have explored in cases such as the way corporations have attempted to stifle workers’ unions for minority groups.
Through her internship for Inquire Capitalism, Shannon hopes to gain a “behind-the-scenes” understanding of digital curation and the world of business archives, discover in greater depth the influence that capitalism has had on all aspects of life, and learn how to incorporate newfound knowledge of economics and archives into her future work, whether academic articles or creative writing. Initially, she hesitated whether to apply for the internship, as her focus is on areas other than economics, but now she is excited to find information about the history of capitalism and she is confident that she will come away with new skills and experience that will make her a more well-rounded student of history.
[1]Paul Handberg started his internship in Digital Business History in August 2021. He is a second-year undergraduate student at the University of Florida with a double major in History and Finance. He focuses his study of history on the United States in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. He became interested in the Inquire Capitalism internship program as an opportunity to explore the intersection of his majors by developing an understanding of corporate history and their archives. At Inquire Capitalism, he plans on centering his research around companies in the finance sector in line with his majors. “I see the history of America’s financial institutions as a key part of American history. I am interested in learning about how America’s most successful banks came to be to uncover what it takes for a company to be able to withstand the crises they now face.” 
Handberg intends to pursue a career in corporate finance after finishing his education, and he looks forward to building skills in data management and historical corporate research through his work at Inquire Capitalism.
Interview with Dr. Amanda Ciafone (the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign)
talking about her experience researching the Coca-Cola Company in Colombia and India.
The Inquire Capitalism podcast is a new show where we interview scholars and archivists about their experiences working with business records.
[What follows is an edited transcript of Episode 4 of the IC podcast show. Listen to the episode here]
The Inquire Capitalism podcast is a new show where we interview scholars and archivists about their experiences working with business records. The fourth episode of our show features Dr. Amanda Ciafone, Associate Professor of Media and Cinema Studies at the University of Illinois. Her first book, Counter-Cola: A Multinational History of the Global Corporation, published by University of California Press in 2019, examines the Coca-Cola Company and the politics, cultural representations, and social movements around the multinational corporation.
Amanda Ciafone (AC): Counter-Cola: A Multinational History of the Global Corporation, is a history of the Coca-Cola Company’s global expansion and the challenges it faced in international markets: how it established local franchises, marketed itself as a consumer product in diverse context, how it worked in national, economic, political and social climates and regulatory frameworks, and the ways in which it addressed various kinds of social movements and challenges. It focuses on two different regions that represent different moments of Coca-Cola’s expansion. It tells its history from the early 1900s through World War Two through the story of its expansion in Colombia followed by its expansion on the heels of the U.S. military in India. It then takes it up to the present, interweaving the narratives of the business, the cultural responses to its business, and the social movements faced in both locations up until 2018.
Paula de la Cruz-Fernández (PCF): How did you go about accessing the Coca-Cola archives?
AC: I wanted this history to narrate large-scale historical changes, but many of these stories of global change are local and specific and play out quite differently as they are shaped by the specificity of place and the social and cultural contexts. It is essential to be in those places and do research in those locations whether that be oral histories or archival work. With this project, the benefit of writing about a very big, very visible company is that it has a very strong sense of itself, a sense of self-importance. It is good about archiving itself and the people involved with it generally save its materials. And there are popular cultural archives. There are lots of different places where Coca-Cola materials are held. Coca-Cola has a pretty impressive archive itself, which is proprietary and quite restricted.
If you talk to Coca-Cola scholars, one of the big challenges is the inaccessibility of their corporate archives. I requested to work in the Coca-Cola archive and was denied that request based on the kinds of things that I was looking for, but there are other wonderful histories that have been written more from a sense of inside the company that has gotten access to the Coke archives. The most recent was somebody who was actually paid by Coca-Cola to write its history and thus was able to use material that was found there to write other histories. But Bartow J. Elmore, who’s a great environmental historian and tells the kind of history of the material elements that go into Coke and the ways in which they represent a particular kind of extractive capitalism. He was denied access to the Coca-Cola archives. It’s a great frustration.
Everybody who does business history has to figure out the ways to talk about their project in order to reveal a history to the public. One of the good things, though, in the context of writing about Coca-Cola, is that there are lots of robust shadow archives for the Coca-Cola Company. In the United States there are two. The first would be at Emory University, which is the Atlanta- based university that has received a lot of Coca-Cola patronage over the years. The business school is named after a Coca-Cola CEO. Most of the Coca-Cola CEOs from the early to mid-twentieth century have left their papers to Emory. Robert Woodruff, John Sibley, Roberto Goizueta, their papers are at Emory.
And Emory also has a general Coca-Cola collection that they’ve collected over the years with all the correspondence between most of the executives and other people. That’s a wonderful place to do research. They have a really strong sense of the importance of public access.
To those archival materials because they know the limits elsewhere. The other place that is really rich is the Library of Congress, which received at the time the largest corporate donation of materials to a public archive when it received the Coca-Cola collection of marketing materials. It has access to just enormous amounts of Coca-Cola marketing and advertising materials from the 20th century. And it’s constantly being updated by the Coca-Cola archives in Atlanta.
Sean Adams (SA): When you have an iconic brand like Coca-Cola that is aggressively putting out an image and a narrative of their liking through the World of Coke and that sort of thing, do you find it more difficult as a historian to then write your own kind of narrative or do you find that it’s easier because most people understand that Coke is going to say about themselves what best suits their brand?
AC: I find it a lot easier, honestly. And that’s partly what attracts me to a company like this. I’m a very materialist historian. I like the idea of being able to analyze what a company’s narration of itself reveals about its priorities, the regulatory context that it’s working with, and how its executives are airing their concerns about how they’re going to make business happen. Both sets of records are important, and you can put those into the conversation in a really rich way. The kind of public and popular history of a company like the Coca-Cola Company, in which so much of its value is based on how we understand it and how we think about it and the kind of emotional response we have to it as a brand and a product, is more valuable to them than any specific contract, they understand that if it all went bust tomorrow if they lost, all of their factories tomorrow, they’d still be able to go get a massive loan because the Coke brands is the most valuable thing.
Or even in factories, it’s also the ways in which we understand the products through their references in television, the advertising that we consume in our daily practices of consumption, and interaction with each other through these products and through the brand. I think that’s a really important part of the history of the company and of the narrative. It’s such a significant part of their business itself, that kind of symbolic production.
The kind of massive investment in advertising, marketing, and its structure is a lot of the material relations of franchised production by specific factories or companies who basically pay for access to the brand. That symbolic capital is what makes that product valuable, so I’m always impressed both by the perseverance and the level of interest.
PCF: What are the main sources you had access to in India and Colombia? You talked about oral histories and about this employee’s newsletter … It would be great to talk a little bit about what those sources can tell us.
AC: The histories in Colombia and India could not have been told without the archival materials and the archivists in particular cities in those countries. I was lucky to be a fellow of the Luis Ángel Arango Library in Bogotá, which is a wonderful place to do research. In the periodical reading room it was mostly me working through newspapers, but also the journals associated with the National Association of Manufacturers, the ANDI, and the role of Coca-Cola industrialists within that organization. The place that was very helpful was the Biblioteca Pública Piloto de Medellín para America Latina, which is a great mid-20th century historical formation itself.
UNESCO and the Colombian government founded the library in Medellín, which was held up as a model library for four other global south projects. I went there because I was actually in Medellín to do research about one of the big companies that franchise Coca-Cola began early on in Medellín. I was also there for conferences by one of the Coca-Cola workers’ unions.
Historians are researching multiple time periods at the same time as part of a narrative. So it was with the workers thinking about more recent history by afternoon and night. I had gone to the library to look for a famous Medellín-based poet who had written a book called La Chispa de la Vida, which is one of the Coca-Cola slogans from the time. This is an iconoclastic, Columbian poet, a countercultural poet in the 1950s. But they had this worker’s newspaper also called La Chispa de la Vida. I had been looking for this book of poetry, but instead, I got drawn to the newspaper reading room and found this. And it’s this unbelievable text because it’s from the industrial relations, human resources arm of this franchise, which is expanding and buying up all these other franchises in Columbia and becoming itself a large Colombian company run by Americans, but in partnership with different Colombian businessmen.
It’s already a transnational company and is investing in bottlers in other parts of Latin America. This is an unbelievable document narrating to the workers what the history of the company is. It’s being published in the 1970s, but it’s telling the history of the company since the 1940s in Colombia, so just unbelievably helpful, but at the same time, revelatory about the priorities of the company in terms of like what kind of workforce they wanted, how they were talking about the management, and the potential for positive interactions between managers and workers, the paternalistic ways about how workers live outside the company could be improved.
So they’re providing advice on how to be a good father, what your relationship should be with your children, and material about workers’ sports teams, celebrations, and marriages or childbirth. At the same time brain injury is being reported on the job, and you can send cards to injured workers in your plant. But it is just unbelievably helpful documentation for how this bottler was representing its US managers and owners to Colombian workers and narrating the story of what the bottling business was, as well as all this unbelievable stuff about Coca-Cola and how the kind of pride associated with being part of this kind of international brand and how workers can sort of tap into that to motivate their work going forward.
[Interviewed recorded, edited, and broadcasted by Dr. Paula de la Cruz-Fernández]