In the absence of archives: Epistemic repair and the remaking of business history
商业史的证据惯例源于西方企业与国家档案，当档案缺失时，这些惯例限制了研究范围。本文提出“认知修复”概念，基于越南、中国、摩洛哥和土耳其的六篇文章，区分了四种操作来重建证据、严谨性和历史学家任务，对扩展研究范围的实证学科有启示。
Business history’s evidentiary conventions were forged in close proximity to the corporate and state archives of Western economies. As the discipline has expanded, these conventions increasingly function as constraints: where formal archives are absent, fragmentary, or inaccessible, they delimit the scope of what can be known. We develop the concept of epistemic repair to name and address this problem. Drawing on six articles spanning Vietnam, China, Morocco, and Turkey, we propose a framework that distinguishes four operations through which scholars are reconstructing what the discipline treats as evidence, how it establishes rigor, and what it asks of the historian. These operations range from recognizing source traditions the discipline has overlooked to producing new evidentiary forms where no record ever existed. The framework has implications beyond business history: any empirical discipline whose methods were built for one set of conditions faces comparable challenges when its ambitions extend beyond them.