2024 Winner: Lewis Wade, Privilege, Economy and State in Old Regime France: Marine Insurance, War and the Atlantic Empire under Louis XIV, Boydell & Brewer, 2023
The panel commended Lewis Wade for this book, which deploys substantial archival research in a highly technical field – seventeenth-century marine insurance – and clearly demonstrates the significance of the Paris chamber of commerce for Louis XIV’s monarchy and its European rivals. Privilege, Economy and State in Old Regime France situates its case study within wider historical debates about economic policy, state formation and conflict resolution in the early modern world to make a broader argument about the financial resilience of the absolute monarchy, within the limits of political will. It is beautifully written, and has found some wonderful source material that introduces its characters effectively and makes a book about insurance compelling reading.
Lewis Wade is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at Leiden University and completed his PhD at Exeter University in 2021. The book is available in Open Access here: https://boydellandbrewer.com/9781837650217/privilege-economy-and-state-in-old-regime-france/.
The panel also unanimously agreed to shortlist the following books for the 2024 prize:
- Benjamin Darnell, Maritime Power and the Power of Money in Louis XIV’s France:Private Finance, the Contractor State, and the French Navy, Boydell & Brewer, 2023
- Alexandra Paulin-Booth, Time and Radical Politics in France: From the Dreyfus Affair to the First World War, Studies in Modern French and Francophone History, Manchester University Press, 2023
- Gemma Tidman, The Emergence of Literature in Eighteenth-Century France: The Battle of the School Books,Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment, Voltaire Foundation, Liverpool University Press, 2023
