Economics for everybody: Colonization and development by Denis Cogneau
Economic and Social History : Research
The aim of the group is to analyze in all their diversity and complexity historical systems of labor and welfare.
The research of the group aims at studying simultaneously demographic context, social practices, and historical evolutions. They rely on many different sources –micro data on individual trajectories, genealogical reconstitution, contextual data at various scale, conscription data, etc.– to analyze the demographic consequences of economic development in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Research works are dedicated to the historical study of economic and social development in non-Western regions, in particular Africa. They analyze the political economy of European colonialism and the decolonization processes, both on the side of the colonized societies and on the side of the metropoles. They are interested in state building and public finance, capital accumulation and firms’ strategies, political and economic networks, from precolonial times to present.
Research in this field has French and international dimensions. In the case of France, the work carried out is mostly based on data from the French estate archives since the beginning of the 19th century, which provides a unique perspective on the analysis of individual trajectories and on the evolution of the concentration of wealth over two centuries. Beyond the French case, research on inequalities is part of the World Inequality Database (WID) and a vast international research programme on the historical evolution of income and wealth inequalities, covering Latin America, Africa and Asia in particular.
Research in this field focuses on environmental transformations and pollution over time through the prism of economic and social history. In particular, it involves using historical methods and data on income and wealth inequalities to compare with the environmental accounts of nations (in particular on greenhouse gas emissions and energy), in order to contribute to the development of a global social history of the environment.
Research in this area covers both the microeconomic dimensions of the financing of companies and macroeconomic issues (money, growth, fluctuations, inequalities).
