Faculty of Commerce & Business Management

The Bachelor of Commerce degree was first offered at the University of Birmingham. The University's School of Commerce was founded by William Ashley, an Englishman from Oxford University, who was the first Professor of Political Economy and Constitutional History in the Faculty of Arts of the University of Toronto. Ashley left Toronto in 1892, spent a few years at Harvard University and then went back to England to the new University of Birmingham where he founded the School of Commerce and began the program - the forerunner of many B.Com degree programs throughout the British Empire. Eighteenth-century economists had divided the English economy into three sectors: agriculture, manufacturing, and commerce. Commerce included the transportation, marketing, and financing of goods. The Birmingham program included economic geography, economic history, general economics, modern languages, and accountancy.