Business in various different forms and orientations keeps burgeoning across the world. The course will explore how business relates to us as modern individuals belonging to different communities and as allegedly rational market agents. More specially, the course will dwell on how business affects everyday life, personal identity, social and political interactions, cultural attitudes, ideologies and more broadly our horizons. In this sense, the focus of the course will be placed on understanding the beginnings of modern business as a social institution in its many manifestations in Western Europe and North America and its evolutionary development throughout the twentieth century.