Yesterday, on 26 January I gave my lecture on "Ladjevardi's Family Capitalism", as an Example of Family Businesses during Pahlvai period at History Department, Royal Holloway, university of London.

First of all I am going to give here at least three reasons why the subject of family capitalism is important:
The first reason is that family businesses account for the majority of the private economies in developing countries, makes up forty percent of the Fortune 500 companies in the US, generate about two- thirds of German GDP, and employ about one-half of the labor force in Britain.
The second reason is that in the era of Economic globalization when the companies tend to be downsizing, the case of family businesses should be paid more attention than other sort of models of economic firms in terms of efficiency, capital and so on.
The third reason is that in Iran some argue that major obstacle towards the development of a capitalist economic system has been the nature of family business which prevent the differentiation between the members of family, which is the main motivation for expanding the firm by accumulation of the capital. (As you may know the majority of production units in Iran are small and employed family members. This was the case in the post and pre-revolutionary eras, with a major difference that in the post-revolutionary era large –scale family production units have been confiscated and they are either para-governmental organizations, i.e., foundations, or state run units).

I also have to emphasis that the subject of businessmen, either in form of family or non-family firms, in historical perspective, in Iran has received very little detailed attention, mainly because, unlike politicians, bureaucrats and clergy they do not write their memoirs, and the very nature of their work leaves little in the way of archival material, and most of research so far has been based on official data. However, in this research we are based mainly on interviews and first hand documents.

I hope the paper will be soon submited to relavant journal for publication consedration, as I have many feeback and comments from Professor Rabinson, Dr Martin , Dr Tafreshi and other Phd and postgraduate students at Royal Holloway, University of London.

For more on Family capitalism see:
Italy
Bangeladesh
Harvard