The Centre for History and Economics is pleased to announce a new research project on French empires, as part of the Cambridge-Harvard Mellon Research Programme on Exchanges of Economic and Political Ideas since 1760. The project will be concerned with exchanges of ideas within and across empires, with the empire (or successive empires) of French ideas, and with the globalization of the history of France and the French colonies. It will also seek to explore online sources of information about recent scholarship on these and related questions, in France and elsewhere, and archival and digital resources for the history of French empires. The programme of workshops and conferences will begin in 2008, and the subjects to be discussed are expected to include:
Information and colonies in the ancien régime The economic, social and legal ideas of the Napoleonic period Free trade ideas and ideas about the slave trade, c. 1830 Decolonization and ideas of development