Dr Joseph La Hausse de Lalouvière

British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow

Biography

Background

I am a historian of slavery, law and economic life in the French Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds in the long nineteenth century. I received my BA from the University of Cambridge and my PhD from Harvard University. Before joining Edinburgh, I was the  R. H. Tawney Fellow of the Economic History Society at the Institute of Historical Research in London, and later a Research Fellow at Emmanuel College, Cambridge.

 

Research summary

My scholarship explores inequality in the modern era through a focus on civil rights struggles, legal exclusion and Enlightenment thought. My book manuscript in progress, “Enslaving Citizens: The Overthrow of Emancipation in the Revolutionary Atlantic,” investigates the mass enslavement of French citizens of African descent in the Caribbean in the first half of the nineteenth century. I have also begun research for my second book project on the removal of citizens' rights in nineteenth-century France and the French colonial empire. Alongside these projects, I have written about the clandestine transatlantic slave trade after abolition, and about slavery and the French colonial Enlightenment in the Indian Ocean world. I have also co-convened an international research network on “Slavery and French Economic Life” through the Centre for History and Economics in Paris.

 

Publications

Book Manuscript

“Enslaving Citizens: The Overthrow of Emancipation in the Revolutionary Atlantic” (in preparation)

 

Peer-Reviewed Articles

“The Colonial Enlightenment and Slavery in Eighteenth-Century Mauritius” (accepted for publication in French Historical Studies).

“A Business Archive of the French Illegal Slave Trade in the Nineteenth Century.” Past & Present 252, no. 1 (August 2021): 139–77. https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtaa026; Winner of the French Colonial Historical Society 2022 Article Prize

 

Essays

“Undocumented People Between Slavery and Freedom,” Barriers and Borders Project (https://www.histecon.magd.cam.ac.uk/barriers/July2022_event.html), July 2022.

The Imperial Life of Joseph-François Charpentier de Cossigny (c. 1736–1809) [pamphlet]. Réduit, Mauritius: University of Mauritius Press, 2022.

“Enslavement and Empire in the French Caribbean, 1793–1851,” The Long Run Blog, Economic History Society (https://ehs.org.uk/enslavement-and-empire-in-the-french-caribbean-1793-1851/), June 18, 2021.

 

Book Reviews

“Black Spartacus: The Epic Life of Toussaint Louverture. By Sudhir Hazareesingh.” The Journal of Modern History 95, no. 4 (December 2023): 970–72. https://doi.org/10.1086/727380.

“Patriots, Royalists, and Terrorists in the West Indies: The French Revolution in Martinique and Guadeloupe, 1789–1802, by William S. Cormack.” The English Historical Review 136, no. 581 (November 2021): 1070–72. https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceab103

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