John Shovlin

Associate Professor of History

Education

University of Chicago, PhD 1998

Areas of Research/Interest

Early modern Europe; political economy; international order; empire; history of capitalism.

BIO

John Shovlin’s research focuses on the history of capitalism in Europe from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. His first book explored the political economic debates that helped catalyze the French Revolution. A recently completed book, Trading with the Enemy, analyzes the Franco-British global rivalry 1688–1788, spotlighting 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. The dilemmas and opportunities of these trading states were grasped and debated in the medium of political economy, and the book frames a new history of political economy grounded in the practical challenges of managing global politics. His current research focuses on understanding how capitalism shaped global politics, and vice versa, from the seventeenth century to the present. Shovlin explores related themes in his teaching which ranges over the last four centuries, with a focus on political economy, empire, international relations, and the history of capitalism.

Fellowships and Honors

  • 2015-2016 National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship
  • 2014 Prix Brives Cazes, Académie Nationale des Sciences Belles-Lettres et Arts de Bordeaux,
  • 2009-2010 Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, Harvard University, Visiting Scholar
  • 2006 Remarque Institute Faculty Fellow, NYU
  • 2006 Institut National d’Études Démographiques (INED), Paris, Visiting Scholar

Books

  • Trading with the Enemy: Britain, France, and the 18th-Century Quest for a Peaceful World Order
    New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2021
    Trading with the Enemy: Britain, France, and the 18th-Century Quest for a Peaceful World Order
  • The Bordeaux–Dublin Letters, 1757: Correspondence of an Irish Community Abroad, co-edited with Thomas Truxes and Louis Cullen for the British Academy’s Records of Social and Economic History series
    Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013
    The Bordeaux–Dublin Letters, 1757: Correspondence of an Irish Community Abroad
  • The Political Economy of Virtue: Luxury, Patriotism and the Origins of the French Revolution
    Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2006) [paperback 2007]
    The Political Economy of Virtue

Articles

  • Les compagnies de commerce française et britannique au XVIIIe siècle : rivalités et conciliations
    Une diplomatie des lointains: la France face à la mondialisation des rivalités internationales, XVIIe–XVIIIe siècles, ed. E. Schnakenbourg and F. Ternat
    Rennes: PUR, 2020
  • Commerce, not Conquest: Political Economic Thought in the French Indies Company, 1719–1769
    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
    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, pp. 267–93
  • Jealousy of Credit: John Law’s ‘System’ and the Geopolitics of Financial Revolution
    Journal of Modern History 88, June 2016: pp. 275–305
  • War and Peace: Trade, International Politics, and Political Economy
    Mercantilism Reimagined: Political Economy in Early Modern Britain and its Empire, ed. Philip J. Stern and Carl Wennerlind
    Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, pp. 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, pp. 73–95
  • Nobility
    Oxford Handbook of the Ancien Régime, ed. William Doyle
    Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012, pp. 111–26
  • War, Diplomacy and Faction
    The Saint-Aubin Livre de caricatures: Drawing Satire in Eighteenth-Century Paris, ed. Juliet Carey, Colin Jones, and Emily Richardson
    Oxford: SVEC, 2012, pp. 95–116
  • Selling American Empire on the Eve of the Seven Years War: The French Propaganda Campaign of 1755–1756
    Past & Present no. 206
    Oxford University Press, 2010, pp. 121–49
  • Rethinking Enlightened Reform in a French Context
    Enlightened Reform in Southern Europe and its Atlantic Colonies c. 1750-1830, ed. Gabriel Paquette
    Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009, pp. 47–62
  • Hume’s Political Discourses and the French Luxury Debate
    David Hume’s Political Economy, ed. Margaret Schabas and Carl Wennerlind
    New York: Routledge, 2008, pp. 203–22
  • Political Economy and the French Nobility, 1750-1789
    The French Nobility in the Eighteenth Century: Reassessments and New Approaches, ed. Jay M. Smith
    University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006, pp. 111–39
  • Emulation in Eighteenth-Century French Economic Thought
    Eighteenth-Century Studies 36 no. 2
    2003, pp. 224–30
  • The Cultural Politics of Luxury in Eighteenth-Century France
    French Historical Studies 23, no. 4
    2000, pp. 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, pp. 35–66