Dr Joseph La Hausse de Lalouvière

British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow

Contact details

Address

Street

Room G.218
Old Medical School (Doorway 3)

City
Edinburgh, EH8 9AG
Post code

Biography

Background

I am a historian of modern Europe and empire. I received my BA from the University of Cambridge and my PhD from Harvard University. Before joining Edinburgh, I was the R. H. Tawney Fellow of the Economic History Society at the Institute of Historical Research in London, and later a Research Fellow at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. I am currently a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of History, Classics, and Archaeology, and will start as a Lecturer in Modern History here in 2027.

 

Research summary

My work explores slavery and citizenship in France and the French empire across the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds. My book manuscript in progress, “Enslaving Citizens: The Overthrow of Emancipation in the Revolutionary Atlantic,” investigates the mass reenslavement of freed people of African descent in the French Caribbean in the first half of the nineteenth century. I have also begun research for my second book project on citizenship and its removal in nineteenth-century France and the French colonial empire. Alongside these projects, I have written about the clandestine transatlantic slave trade after abolition, and about slavery and the French colonial Enlightenment in the Indian Ocean world. I have also co-convened an international research network on “Slavery and French Economic Life” through the Centre for History and Economics in Paris.

 

Publications

Book Manuscript

“Enslaving Citizens: The Overthrow of Emancipation in the Revolutionary French Atlantic, 1793–1850” (in preparation)

 

Peer-Reviewed Articles

“The Colonial Enlightenment and Slavery in Eighteenth-Century Mauritius,” French Historical Studies 48, no. 1 (February 2025): 1–35, https://doi.org/10.1215/00161071-11503616.

“A Business Archive of the French Illegal Slave Trade in the Nineteenth Century,” Past & Present 252, no. 1 (August 2021): 139–77, https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtaa026. Winner of the French Colonial Historical Society 2022 Article Prize

 

Essays

“How Permeable Was the Barrier to French Citizenship in the Nineteenth Century?” Barriers and Borders Project (https://www.histecon.magd.cam.ac.uk/barriers/July2024_event.html), July 2024.

“Undocumented People Between Slavery and Freedom,” Barriers and Borders Project (https://www.histecon.magd.cam.ac.uk/barriers/July2022_event.html), July 2022.

The Imperial Life of Joseph-François Charpentier de Cossigny (c. 1736–1809) [pamphlet]. Réduit, Mauritius: University of Mauritius Press, 2022.

“Enslavement and Empire in the French Caribbean, 1793–1851,” The Long Run Blog, Economic History Society (https://ehs.org.uk/enslavement-and-empire-in-the-french-caribbean-1793-1851/), June 18, 2021.

 

Book Reviews

“Black Spartacus: The Epic Life of Toussaint Louverture. By Sudhir Hazareesingh.” The Journal of Modern History 95, no. 4 (December 2023): 970–72. https://doi.org/10.1086/727380.

“Patriots, Royalists, and Terrorists in the West Indies: The French Revolution in Martinique and Guadeloupe, 1789–1802, by William S. Cormack.” The English Historical Review 136, no. 581 (November 2021): 1070–72. https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceab103

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