While the cultural, political, legal and social aspects of French colonialism have received much attention over the past 30 years, the political economy of the French colonial empire has been largely neglected. This conference will bring together a new generation of historians and economists whose work engages with the nature and workings of French colonial capitalism, the reorientation of capital and labor from Haitian independence to the colonization of Algeria, economic life in France’s informal empire, the circulation, production, and consumption of commodities, colonial public finance and inequality, the intersection of racial ideologies with the political economy of late colonialism, and the economic and financial dimensions of decolonization. The conference will delineate the contours of a new political economy of French colonialism in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Conference co-sponsored by ISERP (Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy), the Maison Française, the Department of History and the Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities
