Introducing the eventful temporality of historical research into international business

•Historical methods contribute to greater plurality in international business.•They can enable research into phenomena that are difficult to observe or access.•They provide a richer and contextually sensitive understanding of institutions.•Historical accounts focus on events as key elements of long-run processes. Historical research represents an alternative understanding of temporality that can contribute to greater methodological and theoretical plurality in international business (IB) research. Historians focus on the importance of events within their historical context and structure their accounts through periodisation, assume that the temporal distance between the past and present determines the temporal positionality of researchers, and seek to reconstruct past events through historical sources, which require critical interpretation. Historical research provides an alternative methodological approach to temporality, context, and distance with relevance to a range of IB theories.