BIOGRAPHY
Paul Cheney is an historian of Europe with a specialization in old regime France and its colonial empire. Before beginning his PhD training in history at Columbia University, he studied political economy at the New School for Social Research. He has taught at Columbia University, the European College of Liberal Arts (Berlin), and the Queen's University of Belfast.
The unifying element of Professor Cheney’s work is an interest in early modern capitalism, and in particular the problem of how modern social and political forms gestated within traditional society. Old regime France serves as an excellent case study in this problem because of the way in which it combined real economic dynamism with deep-seated political and social impediments to growth. He addresses France’s integration into a globalized early modern economy in a methodology diverse way, drawing on intellectual, economic, and social history. His first book, Revolutionary Commerce: Globalization in the French Monarchy (Harvard University Press, 2010), examined how French philosophes, merchants, and administrators understood the adaptability of the French monarchy to the modernizing forces of primitive globalization. Currently, he is working on a second book entitled, Cul de Sac: Patrimony, Capitalism, and Slavery in French Saint-Domingue (University of Chicago Press, 2017), a micro-history of one plantation in France’s richest colony. He has published in such journals as The William and Mary Quarterly, Past & Present, Dix-Huitième siècle, and Les Annales historiques de la révolution française.
Professor Cheney will be on leave for Winter and Spring of 2020.
BOOKS
Cul de Sac: Patrimony, Capitalism, and Slavery in French Saint-Domingue. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017.
Revolutionary Commerce: Globalization and the French Monarchy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010.
SELECTED ARTICLES
"The French Revolution’s Global Turn and Capitalism’s Spatial Fixes." In "Forum: The French Revolution is Not Over." Special edition, Journal of Social History 52, no. 4 (Summer 2019).
"Haiti's Commercial Treaties: Between Abolition and the Persistence of the Old Regime." In Balance of Power, Balance of Trade: the Politics of Commercial Treaties in the Eighteenth Century. Edited by Antonella Alimento and Koen Stapelbroek. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.
"Commerce." In The Cambridge Companion to the French Enlightenment. Edited by Daniel Brewer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.
Aufklärung und die politische Ökonomie des Kolonialismus.” In Der moderne Staat und „le doux commerce”–Staat, Ökonomie und internationales System im politischen Denken der Aufklärung. Edited by Olaf Asbach. Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2014.
With Alan Forrest, Lynn Hunt, Mathias Middel, and Karine Rance. "La révolution française à l'heure du Global Turn." Annales historiques de la Révolution française 374 (Dec. 2013). [link requires subscription access].
With Loïc Charles. "The Colonial Machine Dismantled: Knowledge and Empire in the French Atlantic." Past and Present 219 (May 2013). [link requires subscription access]
"A Colonial Cul de Sac: Plantation Life in Wartime Saint-Domingue, 1775-1783." Radical History Review: Special issue Haitian Lives /Global Perspectives 115 (Win. 2013): 45–54. [link requires subscription access]