John Shovlin

Eighteenth-century Europe, particularly France; political economy; international and global politics; international political thought.

John Shovlin’s research focuses on the history of political economy in eighteenth-century Europe. His first book explored the political economic debates that helped catalyze the French Revolution. Since then his research has concentrated on understanding how commerce shaped international and global politics in the eighteenth century. He is currently completing a book on the Franco-British global rivalry 1688–1788, which spotlights efforts to channel military conflict into more pacific, yet still ruthlessly competitive commercial competition. It explores French and British agreements to divide commercial access to the non-European world, to neutralize key zones of global commerce from European wars, and above all to re-establish free trade between France and Britain as a means to reengineer their global relationship. The dilemmas and opportunities of these trading states were grasped and debated in the medium of political economy, and Shovlin frames a new history of political economy grounded in the practical challenges of managing global politics. He explores many of these themes in courses ranging from the seventeenth to the twentieth century on the history of capitalism, the evolution of international and global order, global economic inequality, and the Enlightenment and French Revolution.

National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, 2015–16; Prix Brives Cazes, Académie Nationale des Sciences Belles-Lettres et Arts de Bordeaux, 2014; Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, Harvard University, Visiting Scholar, 2009–10; Remarque Institute Faculty Fellow, NYU, spring 2007; Institut National d’Études Démographiques (INED), Paris, Visiting Scholar, fall 2006.

“Commerce, not Conquest: Political Economic Thought in the French Indies Company, 1719–1769,” in The Legitimacy of Power: New Perspectives on the History of Political Economy, ed. Robert Fredona and Sophus Reinert (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).

“Securing Asian Trade: Treaty Negotiations between the French and English East India Companies, 1753–1755,” in The Politics of Commercial Treaties in the Eighteenth Century: Balance of Power, Balance of Trade, ed. Antonella Alimento and Koen Stapelbroek (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 267–93.

“Jealousy of Credit: John Law’s ‘System’ and the Geopolitics of Financial Revolution,” Journal of Modern History 88 (June 2016): 275–305.

“War and Peace: Trade, International Politics, and Political Economy,” in Mercantilism Reimagined: Political Economy in Early Modern Britain and its Empire, ed. Philip J. Stern and Carl Wennerlind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 305–27.

“The Society of Brittany and the Irish Economic Model: International Competition and the Politics of Provincial Development,” The Rise of Economic Societies in the Eighteenth Century: Patriotic Reform in Europe and North America, ed. Koen Stapelbroek and Jani Marjanen (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 73–95.

“Nobility,” in Oxford Handbook of the Ancien Régime, ed. William Doyle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 111–26.

“War, Diplomacy and Faction,” in The Saint-Aubin Livre de caricatures: Drawing Satire in Eighteenth-Century Paris, ed. Juliet Carey, Colin Jones, and Emily Richardson (Oxford: SVEC, 2012), 95–116.

“Selling American Empire on the Eve of the Seven Years War: The French Propaganda Campaign of 1755–1756,” Past & Present 206 (2010): 121–49.

“Rethinking Enlightened Reform in a French Context,” in Enlightened Reform in Southern Europe and its Atlantic Colonies c. 1750-1830, ed. Gabriel Paquette (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009), 47–62.

“Hume’s Political Discourses and the French Luxury Debate,” in David Hume’s Political Economy, ed. Margaret Schabas and Carl Wennerlind (New York: Routledge, 2008), 203–22. “Political Economy and the French Nobility, 1750-1789,” in The French Nobility in the Eighteenth Century: Reassessments and New Approaches, ed. Jay M. Smith (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), 111–39.

“Emulation in Eighteenth-Century French Economic Thought,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 36, no. 2 (2003): 224–30.

“The Cultural Politics of Luxury in Eighteenth-Century France,” French Historical Studies 23, no. 4 (2000): 673–701.

“Toward a Reinterpretation of Revolutionary Anti-Nobilism: The Political Economy of Honor in the Old Regime,” Journal of Modern History 72, no. 1 (2000): 35–66.