[Translate to Anglais:]
Comptes et profits marchands
d'Europe et d'Amériques, 1650-1850
Merchant accounting and profits
in Europe and the Americas, 1650-1850
Conférence internationale, Paris 8, 9 et 10 juin 2011
Ways and means of trading in the "Age of Commerce"
This conference aims at producing a better understanding of the construction and operation of commercial activity at a time when it became the engine of European colonial expansion across the Atlantic and much of the rest of the world. Upon close examination, the theoretical tools of modern economics do not easily apply to trade in the Early Modern Era.
We will try to follow up on recent and innovative directions of research, such as the reconceptualization of profit as a qualitative rather than quantitative assessment linked to credit and reputation, and of interpersonal networks as strategically built means of access to credit and tools of risk-avoidance, the exploration of both economic and non-economic constraints on discrete exchanges as well as the narratives used to legitimize these constraints, or the analysis of the way in which product quality scales, in spite of the fuzziness of their vocabulary, interact with the instituional framework of quality control set up by Early Modern States. We hope to achieve an overview of the strategic and tactical choices of the actors of the time, by confronting all available sources, from account books to correspondence...
Entrance free, no registration fee
Papers can be download
Some contributors asked for password protection of their papers; persons interested in participating in the conference can request the password information by contacting [formulaire de contact conférence]
University of Chicago Center in Paris, 6 Rue Thomas Mann, 75013
D. Margairaz (U. Paris 1) : Pourquoi commercer des marchandises ?
S. Haggerty (U. Nottingham) : Business Culture in the British-Atlantic, 1750-1815
A. Dubé (Omohundro Inst.) : Profit for a King
A. Bartolomei (U. Nice) : La dépersonnalisation de la relation de commerce aux XVIIIe et XIXe siècles.
T. Burnard (U. Melbourne) : Slave Prices, Productivity and Profit in Jamaica, 1674-1784.
P. Cheney (U. Chicago) : Cul de Sac : a Noble Sugar Plantation in Eighteenth-Century Saint Domingue
A. Potofsky (U. Paris 7) : Colonial Wealth and Parisian Construction during the French Revolution
C. Rosenthal (U. Harvard) : Accounting for Control: Plantation Accounts in an Age of Commerce
S. Sarson (U. Swansea) : Economic Strategy and Tactics among Tobacco planters in the Early National U.S.
Reid Hall, 4 rue de Chevreuse, 75006 Paris
X. Lamikiz (U. Madrid) : Transatlantic flow of price information in the 18th c. Spanish colonial trade
N. Perl Rosenthal (U. Columbia) : Merchants, sailors and "crowd-sourced" commercial information in America, ca. 1750-1800
T. Paul (U. Edinburgh) : Credit, Information and Trust in British Urban Commerce, c. 1730 to 1770
M. Martin (U. Paris 1) : Le commerce en commission de l'indigo en Europe : David Lindo, 1730-1741.
M. Covo (Ehess) : L'inertie d'un micro-réseau marchand, Baltimore-Saint-Domingue (1788-1793)
R. Lewis (U. Virginia) : The Strategies of Commercial Expansion in Salem, Massachusetts, 1783-1795
B. Deschanel (U. Paris 1) : La famille Pinet à Gap et ses réseaux d'affaires (1785-1816)
M. Alves (Australian U.) : Jozé Nunes da Silveira and the Macau-Lisbon Trade in the Early 19th c.
M. Llorca (U. Chile) : John Wylie: the tenacity of a Scottish merchant in Latin America, c. 1808-1835
Reid Hall, 4 rue de Chevreuse, 75006 Paris
J. Hardwick (U. Austin) : Financial transactions, cultural practices, economic change in 17th c. France
G. Daudin (U Lille) : Paying transaction costs in 18th c. France
Y. Lemarchand (U. Nantes), L. Pineau-Defois (U. Nantes), C. McWatters (U. Alberta) : Comptes et récits de la Maison Chaurand
P. Gervais (U. Paris 8) : Profits et pertes, liens privilégiés et gestion des flux de profit au XVIIIe siècle
T. Vanneste (Netherlands) : Networks of Credit and Commercial Society: An Empirical Analysis
K. Waterman (Netherlands) : Practicalities and Motivations in the Intercultural Fur Trade in Colonial New York ; Evidence from Two Trade Ledgers in Dutch, 1695-1732
J. Villain (U. Paris 1) : Le recouvrement de créances chez trois marchands lorrains au XVIIIe siècle
V. Santarosa (Yale U.) : The Joint Liability Rule and Bills of Exchange in 18th-c. France