Contact details
- Name:
- Mr Lewis Wade
- Position/Fellowship type:
- EHS Postan Fellow 2022-23
- Fellowship term:
- 2022 to 2023
- Institute:
- Institute of Historical Research
- Email address:
- lewis.wade@sas.ac.uk
- Website:
- https://www.history.ac.uk/people/lewis-wade
Research Summary and Profile
- Research interests:
- History
- Summary of research interests and expertise:
-
Lewis is an historian of early modern France, with a particular interest in commerce, maritime activity and state formation under Louis XIV (r. 1643-1715). As the Economic History Society Postan Fellow, he will start work on a project entitled ‘The Mediterranean as a Laboratory of Globalisation: Languedocian Cloth in Global Markets, 1683-c.1700’.
Lewis’ research explores the commercial and industrial policies of the French monarchy under Louis XIV. Lewis conducted the research for his doctoral thesis at the University of Exeter, with full funding from the European Research Council. His thesis, entitled 'Privilege at a Premium: Insurance, Maritime Law and Political Economy in Early Modern France, 1664-c. 1710’, investigates the Parisian marine insurance market and how it was leveraged by the French state in times of crisis to protect maritime (and especially colonial) commerce where the state itself could not. Lewis’ thesis was awarded the British Commission for Maritime History’s Boydell & Brewer Prize for the best doctoral thesis in maritime history.
As the Economic History Society Postan Fellow, Lewis will finish a monograph (entitled Privilege, Economy and State in Old Regime France: Marine Insurance, War and the Atlantic Empire under Louis XIV) that is under contract with Boydell & Brewer. He will also start work on a new project, entitled ‘The Mediterranean as a Laboratory of Globalisation: Languedocian Cloth in Global Markets, 1683-c.1700’. This will analyse France’s trade in fine woollen cloth with the Ottoman Empire, exploring the ways in which this distinctive trade shaped state policy in promoting global commerce. At the conclusion of his fellowship, Lewis will continue work on this project as a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at Leiden University.
Articles drawing on Lewis’ research are forthcoming in the English Historical Review and Enterprise & Society.