About us
This is the Centre for Business History

The Centre for Business History in Stockholm is a non-profit association focused on preserving and presenting Swedish business history. We help our member companies preserve their historical material in structured archives, both physical and digital. We also help them use their history as a strategic asset, a practice called history marketing. Through our research secretariat, we also conduct independent research and initiates actademic projects in interdisciplinary collaboration. 

To actively preserve and present your company’s history is to invest in your brand, your organization and your business. At the Centre for Business History, we’ve worked since 1974 with exactly that: preserving and presenting corporate stories. And in doing so, we’re also preserving Sweden’s business history.

The Centre for Business History is organized as a non-profit association, with a wholly-owned service company. Like any non-profits, we are ultimately owned by our members – and the members in our case are the companies and organizations we work with. We finance our activities through membership fees and commercial services, that we offer our members and other companies. To be able to offer these commercial services, we operate the service company, Centrum för Näringslivshistoria AB, which is wholly owned by the non-profit association Föreningen Centrum för Näringslivshistoria. Our research projects are financed by external trusts and research grants. We are politically independent and all our work is based on scientific, historical grounds.

Meet all who work here

In our archives in Bromma (Stockholm) and Uppsala, our professional archivists manage over 7,000 corporate archives on behalf of the corporations’ management and owners. This means over 85,000 shelf meters of photographs, advertisements, prototypes, company magazines, packaging, board notes, project plans, design sketches, films and audio tapes. This also makes us one of the world’s leading business archives.

More about how companies preserve their history

We also help our client companies use their own unique heritage as leverage for strategy, marketing and organizational development. We call this history marketing.

More about how companies present their heritage

We also show how business in general contributes to society’s development. Our research centre highlights the untold stories of Swedish business society.

More about our research centre

We welcome schools, organizations, researchers and media to visit our archives. You may need clearance from the company whose archive you want to visit, but we’ll help you apply for that.

More about searching our archives

Over the years we have initiated, produced and published books based on the source material that is found in our archives. Initially we did this in cooperation with other publishers, but since 2016, we run our own publishing house, called Business History Publishing. .

Read more about our publishing house