Geoffrey Jones

Geoffrey Jones is the Isidor Straus Professor of Business History, and Faculty Chair of the School''s Business History Initiative. He holds degrees of BA, MA and PhD from Cambridge University, UK. He has an honorary Doctorate in Economics and Business Administration from Copenhagen Business School, Denmark, and an honorary PhD from the University of Helsinki, Finland. He taught previously at the London School of Economics, and Cambridge and Reading Universities in the UK, and at Erasmus University Rotterdam in the Netherlands. He has held Visiting Professorships at Gakushuin University, Tokyo, and Universidad de los Andes, Bogota. Elsewhere at Harvard, he serves on the Executive Committee of the Harvard Center for African Studies, the Faculty Committee of the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies, and on the Policy Committee of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies.

Professor Jones researches the evolution, impact and responsibility of global business. He has written on the history of international entrepreneurship and multinational corporations, specializing in consumer products including beauty and fashion, as well as services such as banking, reinsurance and commodity trading. He has written extensively on the business history of emerging markets, especially in Latin America and Turkey, and launched and co-ordinates the Creating Emerging Markets project at the Harvard Business School.  Professor Jones developed and teaches the Entrepreneurship and Global Capitalism course, which explores the role of entrepreneurship in the globalization cycles of the last two hundred years, in the second year of the MBA program. He is a Fellow of the Academy of International Business.

Professor Jones''s books include British Multinational Banking 1830-1990 (Oxford University Press, 1993), Merchants to Multinationals (Oxford University Press, 2000), (edited with Franco Amatori) Business History around the World (Cambridge University Press, 2003), Multinationals and Global Capitalism: From the Nineteenth to Twenty First Century (Oxford University Press, 2005), Renewing Unilever. Transformation and Tradition (Oxford University Press, 2005), and (edited with Jonathan Zeitlin) the Oxford Handbook of Business History (Oxford University Press, 2008). Professor Jones''s Beauty Imagined (Oxford University Press, 2010) provides the first history of the global beauty industry from a business perspective. His new book on Profits and Sustainability: A Global History of Green Entrepreneurship (Oxford University Press, 2017) provides the first global history of green entrepreneurship from the nineteenth century until the present day.