Silvia Conca Messina is an Associate Professor of Economic History at the University of Milan. Her research interests include economic and business history in Italy during the 18th-20th centuries, European economic development, and the history of Italian industrialisation. She has published and edited several books and articles in leading journals. Some of her notable works include „Cotton Enterprises: Networks and Strategies“ (Routledge, 2016) and „Nobility and Business in History: Investments, Innovation, Management and Networks“ (Routledge, 2023). Currently, she is researching the evolution of merchant family firms and the transformation of the Italian agro-food sector.

Andrea Colli  is Professor of Economic History, Global History and Geopolitics at Bocconi University in Milan. His research interests include the history of Italian capitalism and its interactions with the political system, various aspects of family capitalism on a national and international scale, and the evolution of public and private forms of capitalism over time. Currently, his research activities mainly focus on the relationship between globalization and geopolitics from a historical and contemporary perspective. His most recent book, written with Veronica Binda, is entitled “Globalization. A Key Idea for Business and Society” (Routledge, London 2024). He currently teaches Master’s and Executive courses on the history of international relations, geopolitics and the impact of geopolitical dynamics on international economics and business.

Will Davis is an architectural historian broadly interested in plant-human interaction. Recent research considers histories of agribusiness, resettlement, resistance, and the plantation system through the material records of architecture and land. At the Accademia di Architettura, Università della Svizzera italiana (USI), Davis is jointly appointed at the Institute of the History and Theory of Art and Architecture (ISA); and the Institute of Urban and Landscape Studies (ISUP), where he leads the SNSF Ambizione project, Voyaging Vapors: Plant Histories of Plantation Architectures (2024–2028). Davis completed his PhD at the University of California, Los Angeles in 2021. The project, Palm Politics: Warfare, Folklore, and Architecture, won the Society of Architectural Historians David B. Brownlee Dissertation Award. He was recently a Princeton Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Princeton University (2022–23), and is an Associate of the Science, Technology, and Society Cluster at the Asia Research Institute (ARI), National University of Singapore. Davis is a contributing editor of ARDETH Journal (Turin, Italy), and founding member of ANZA East Africa (Dar es Salaam, Tanzania).