David Todd

Holding a degree from Sciences Po and a PhD from the University of Cambridge, David Todd taught at Cambridge and King’s College London before joining the Sciences Po Centre for History in 2021. His research is concerned with the international aspects of French history and the transformations of the global economy between 1750 and 1914.

His main works have examined the dissemination of political economy, under the guise of free trade and protectionist ideologies, in the aftermath of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic era, in his book L’identité économique de la France. Libre-échange et protectionnisme (Paris: Grasset, 2008; English version: Free Trade and its Enemies in France, Cambridge University Press, 2015) and the informal aspects of French imperial expansion, in A Velvet Empire: French Informal Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century, Princeton University Press, 2021).

He is currently working on a new history of political ideas and economic practices in the Mediterranean, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He is especially interested in migrations between France and the Ottoman world, the practical aspects of transactions as revealed by legal sources, and micro-historical approaches to the transformation of Mediterranean economic life between 1750 and 1914.

David Todd teaches an undergraduate course on the political history of the nineteenth century in Paris and Reims and a postgraduate course on “The political economy of empires, 1700-2000”. He is also one of the coordinators of the Centre for History and Economics in Paris, a collaboration between Sciences Po and the Joint Center for History and Economics at Cambridge and Harvard, and chair of the academic advisory council of The Rothschild
Archive, London.