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The purpose of this paper is to present a reflexive review of ANTi-History written as a reply to a critique by James Reveley, published in the Journal of Management History, called “Firm objects: new realist insights into the sociohistorical ontology of the business enterprise.”

Reveley’s critique of ANTi-History focuses on three aspects, namely, matters of ontology, actors and relationalism. Using the logic of ANTi-History, the author reviews each and offers a reply.

This paper demonstrates that ANTi-History is inspired by amodern thought. This condition negates the need and desire to classify social and physical objects in the study of history. Drawing on Actor-Network Theory, ANTi-History assumes that historical actors are heterogeneous, and the consequence is that both human and nonhuman actors should feature in the study of history. The focus, in using ANTi-History, should be in-between the human and nonhuman actors that make up the past and history. This is the premise of using a relational lens.

The review of ANTi-History is structured as a reply to critiques of the approach. In reflecting on these criticisms, the author realizes that ANTi-History has gotten beyond its originators. As one of those originators, the author inspired to continue to develop its strange potential.

The purpose of this paper is to theorize the social role of management systems and their political connections using ANTi-History. In so doing, it engages with academic conversations around the writing of business history. The paper focuses on subjective experience in the context of colonial privateers and the vice-admiralty court in the Napoleonic Wars era.

ANTi-History is proposed as a theoretical lens to examine the entrepreneurial work of privateers. ANTi-History destabilizes the idea of history as a dominant account of the past and is interested in controversies as to how history is produced. This paper also brings-in Bourdieu’s notion of officialization because historical knowledge is situated in official practices that conceal translations and political strategies that enable actor-networks to act as one.

The controls of the vice-admiralty court not only perpetuated the inherited British class system, but also created versions of reality that came to be accepted as recorded history. This shows that the rules and regulations of the court were not neutral accounting activities. The systems constituted the identity of actors and produced privateer history as a modernist knowledge of the past and officialized by western, white, male, elites.

The “historic turn” in management and organization studies has not been fully realized more than a decade after its introduction. This paper engages with the historic turn by providing a specific exemplar of history as applied to officialized accounts of colonial privateers. Using ANTi-History as a methodological approach also makes a contribution by promoting it beyond a prolonged descriptive phase.