Liane Hewitt

Incoming postdoctoral research fellow at the Centre for History and Economics Paris.

Liane Hewitt is an historian of European and international political economy. Her research investigates the political, legal, and social struggles to control private monopoly power—from consumer cooperatives’ confrontation of cartels, to bids for worker democracy, to post-war governments’ nationalization of basic industries, to the rise of competition law. Her work ultimately illuminates the historically fraught relationship between market power and democracy during key crisis moments in the history of capitalism.

At Sciences-Po, she looks forward to completing her first book, Monopoly Menace: How Europe Solved the Cartel Problem, 1873-1973. It demonstrates how Europe, once the heartland of cartels in the 1920s-1930s, came to be the world’s most robust competition regulator, under the aegis of the European Union in the 1980s.
A second book project pursues a key insight from the first: visions of economic democracy—rather than simply desires for more competition—motivated most confrontations of private monopoly power in Europe and its empire: from the explosion of worker cooperatives in 1848 Paris, to German socialists’ push for codetermination under Weimar, to West German ordoliberals’ idyll of free competition after 1945 , to anti-colonial nationalists seeking to repossess their mineral wealth.
An article-length project examines how the rise of international cartels between World War I and World War II offered a third way to the failure of laissez-faire and the rise of central state-planning: what contemporaries called « private planning. » Broad areas of interest include historical varieties of capitalism (notably forms of public ownership), European integration and federalism, histories of the left and labour, the origins of competition and antitrust law, neoliberalism and ordoliberalism, regimes of global economic governance, fascism, war planning, and reconstruction.

Her writing has appeared in The Journal of Global History, Histoire@Politique, H-Soz-Kult, Foreign Policy, and Tocqueville 21. The Chateaubriand Fellowship of the French Embassy in the U.S., the Deutsche Akademische Austausch Dienst, the Fondation Jean Monnet pour l’Europe, and the Social Sciences Research Council have generously supported her research. She completed her PhD and M.A. in History at Princeton University in December 2023, and earned a B.A. from the University of British Columbia in 2017.