Business schools and museum learning in historical perspective: Lessons from the forgotten history of commercial school museums

This article highlights a little-known aspect of business education history: Between the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, most commercial schools in Europe and beyond equipped themselves with ‘commercial museums’ intended for their students’ education. These museums exhibited ancient and contemporary commodities with a technical and symbolic vocation. Using several business training institutions’ archives and a documentary investigation, this study details how these commercial museums provided an original and viable space to facilitate business student learning outside the classroom setting. Such history is instructive today in two ways. First, it shows the importance of promoting materiality in business education through sensory pedagogy and ‘object lessons’, and second, it provides guidance to contemporary museums seeking to reach business students in terms of valorisation of their collections.