Ben Wubs is Professor of International Business History at the ESHCC Erasmus University Rotterdam, an Appointed Project Professor at the Graduate School of Economics, Kyoto University and a Programme Director of the Erasmus Mundus International Master’s programme GLOCAL.
He is engaged in various research projects related to multinationals, business systems, transnational economic regions, Dutch-German economic relations and the transnational fashion industry. He published International Business and National War Interests. Unilever between Reich and Empire (Routledge) in 2008, and Over Grenzen. Multinationals en de Nederlandse Markteconomie (Boom) in 2009 (with Keetie Sluyterman). As an Erasmus Fellow (2008 to 2012), he conducted research into the Dutch Big Four in Germany: AKU, Royal Dutch Shell, Unilever and Philips, 1920-1960. He co-supervised (with Hein Klemann) an NWO-funded project on Rotterdam and its German hinterland. A synthesis of this project Transnational regions in historical perspective: Rotterdam Port and Ruhr Industry, 1870-2010 is to be published by Routledge in 2019. Ben Wubs is Secretary of RHINe, a collaborative network of economic, business and technology historians consisting of scholars from various universities in Germany, France, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Japan, Denmark, the United States and the Netherlands. With Ralf Banken, he published The Rhine Economy. A Transnational Economic History (Nomos 2017). In addition, he is a council member of the European Business History Association.
His most recent publications on this topics are
- Hein Klemann, Ben Wubs and Marten Boon (eds.), Transnational regions in historical perspective: Rotterdam Port and Ruhr Industry, 1870-2010 (Abingdon/New York: Routledge Economic Geography Series forthcoming 2019).
- Ralf Banken and Ben Wubs (eds.), A Transnational Economic History (Baden Baden: Nomos, 2017).
- Ben Wubs, ‘Dutch Multinationals in Germany in the Interwar Period: from the Rhine Region to a National Focus.’ In: Ralf Banken and Ben Wubs (eds.), A Transnational Economic History (Baden Baden: Nomos, 2017), pp.91-114.
- Marten Boon and Ben Wubs, ‘Property, control and room for manoeuvre: Royal Dutch Shell and Nazi Germany, 1933–1945’, Business History, DOI: 10.1080/00076791.2016.1205034 (2016).
- Hein A.M. Klemann & Ben Wubs, ‘River Dependence. Creating a Transnational Rhine Economy, 1850-2000’. In: Jan-Otmar Hesse, Christian Kleinschmidt, Alfred Reckendrees und Ray Stokes (eds), Europäische Wirtschafts- und Sozialgeschichte (Baden Baden: Nomos, 2014) pp.219-246.
