Geoffrey G. 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, and an honorary Doctorate in Economics and Business Administration from Copenhagen Business School. He taught previously at the London School of Economics, and Cambridge and Reading Universities in the UK, and has held Visiting Professorships at Gakushuin University, Tokyo, Erasmus University, Rotterdam, and Universidad de los Andes, Bogota. Elsewhere at Harvard, he serves on 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 history of global business. He has written extensively on the evolution of international entrepreneurship and multinational corporations, specializing in consumer products including beauty and fashion, as well as services such as banking and trading. In 2010 he was elected 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 most recent book, Beauty Imagined (Oxford University Press, 2010) provides the first history of the global beauty industry from a business perspective. He is now researching the history of green entrepreneurship over the last fifty years.