Economistes and the Reinvention of Empire

Pernille Røge is Assistant Professor of History and convener of the Early Modern Worlds Initiative at the University of Pittsburgh. She is author of numerous articles and book chapters on the eighteenth-century French, Danish, and British colonial empires. She is also co-editor of The Political Economy of Empire in the Early Modern World (2013), with Sophus Reinert, and of the International Review of Social History's special issue on 'Free and Unfree Labor in Atlantic and Indian Ocean Port Cities (Seventeenth–Nineteenth Centuries)', with Pepijn Brandon and Niklas Frykman.

• Introduction; 1. A colonial empire in crisis; 2. Empire beyond the mercantile system; 3. Between enslaved territories and overseas provinces; 4. Supplying or supplanting the Americas; 5. A revolutionary crescendo; Conclusion: Ancien Régime legacies.

'For some time, historians have been searching for the links between the first and second French colonial Empires. Røge finds a compelling set of answers in the critique of plantation slavery and empire developed by the Physiocrats beginning in the mid eighteenth century.' Paul Cheney, University of Chicago