Speakers

A Professor of Early Modern History at Paris I-Sorbonne, where he received his doctorate in 2013. His dissertation is titled « Une mer jalousée. Juridictions maritimes, ports francs et régulation du commerce en Méditerranée (1590-1740) » and focuses on maritime trade in the Mediterranean and the efforts of states bordering the Mediterranean to control this trade and to establish their jurisdictional authority over certain spaces and activities. Calafat’s current project follows Corsican merchant families established in Southern Europe and Ottoman North African from 1550 to 1650.

Associate Professor of History at Vanderbilt University. Having received her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, she studies the French Ancien Régime and the Revolution. Clay is particularly interested in eighteenth-century debates about the role that consumption and commerce should play in French society. Her first book, Stagestuck: The Business of Theater in Eighteenth-Century France and its Colonies, appeared in 2013, and Clay is now working on a new book to be titled Influence: Profits, Politics, and the Culture of Commerce in France during the Age of the Revolution. In this forthcoming project, she will examine the establishment of chambers of commerce in French cities and how these chambers competed for privileges but, leading up to the Revolution, began to conceive of the French business community as a single corporate body.

Chair in Early Modern History at the European University Institute in Florence. She received a Ph.D. in Economic History from the London School of Economics and is an expert on early-modern Iberian empire.  Grafe’s work compares European legal and commercial institutions and their consequences for state-building and market integration. Her book, Distant Tyranny: Markets, Power, and Backwardness in Spain, 1650-1800, was awarded the Gyorgy Ranki Prize for an outstanding book in European Economic History by the EHA. Grafe and her co-author Maria Alejandra Irigoin are currently at work on a book to be titled, A Stakeholder Empire: The Political Economy of Spanish Rule in the Eighteenth-Century Americas.

Associate Professor of History at the University of California Santa Cruz with a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins. His book, Final Passages: The Intercolonial Slave Trade of British America, 1619-1807, published in 2014, has received numerous awards (James A. Rawley Prize in Atlantic History and Morris D. Forkosch Prize from the AHA, Frank L. and Harriet C. Owsley Award, Elsa Goveia Book Prize). Other histories of the British Atlantic slave trade end when captives arrived at major entrepôts after having endured the Middle Passage, but Final Passages follows enslaved Africans as they were shipped again to Spanish American or British North American ports and were marched overland to plantations. O’Malley has received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to integrate his data on intercolonial slave trade with the Voyages database.

Assistant Professor of History at the University of Pittsburgh. She received her Ph.D. in History from Cambridge University, where she defended her dissertation, “Political Economy and the Reinvention of France’s Colonial System, 1756-1802.” She co-edited The Political Economy of Empire in the Early Modern World with Sophus Reinert, and her forthcoming book is titled Reinventing the Empire: Political Economy, France, and the African and Caribbean Colonies, c. 1750-1800. Røge is an authority on French Empire and French imperial reforms during the second half of the eighteenth century.  Her recent work also focuses on the Danish and Dutch Empires, particularly Danish involvement in the Atlantic slave trade and Danish and Dutch neutral islands or “free ports” in the Caribbean.