Elise Dermineur
Associate Professor of Economic History
http://www.elise-dermineur.eu/
After studying history at the Université de Strasbourg, I received a Ph.D. in History in 2011 from Purdue University for the thesis ‘Women in Rural Society: Peasants, Patriarchy and the Local Economy in Northeast France, 1650–1789’. In 2011, I was a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute, Florence. Between 2011 and 2013, I held a postdoctoral fellowship
at Umeå University. From 2013 to 2015, I worked as a Research Fellow at Lund University on the project ‘Marrying Cultures: Queens Consort and European Identities, 1500–1800’, funded by the Humanities in the European Research Area (HERA). In 2016, I was promoted to Associate Professor.
I spent the academic year 2018-2019 at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. In 2021-2022, I am a visiting fellow at the Robert Schuman Center for Advanced Study at the EUI. Since 2019, I am directing the research initiative Human Economy Lab.
My research interests range widely, from the history of justice and economics to gender and women’s history. Above all, I am deeply interested in the study of traditional communities. My publications include articles published in the Journal of Social History, The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Financial History Review and Social Science History, among others. In 2017, I published Gender and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Sweden, a political biography of the Swedish queen Lovisa Ulrika (1720–1782). In 2018, I published a collection of essays titled Women and Credit in Preindustrial Europe and I co edited Revisiting Gender in European History, 1400-1800.
As a Pro Futura Scientia Fellow, I am currently revising a book manuscript tentatively titled Banking Before Banks, dealing with early financial markets. I am also revisiting the concept of the moral economy in modern societies.
http://www.elise-dermineur.eu/
After studying history at the Université de Strasbourg, I received a Ph.D. in History in 2011 from Purdue University for the thesis ‘Women in Rural Society: Peasants, Patriarchy and the Local Economy in Northeast France, 1650–1789’. In 2011, I was a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute, Florence. Between 2011 and 2013, I held a postdoctoral fellowship
at Umeå University. From 2013 to 2015, I worked as a Research Fellow at Lund University on the project ‘Marrying Cultures: Queens Consort and European Identities, 1500–1800’, funded by the Humanities in the European Research Area (HERA). In 2016, I was promoted to Associate Professor.
I spent the academic year 2018-2019 at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. In 2021-2022, I am a visiting fellow at the Robert Schuman Center for Advanced Study at the EUI. Since 2019, I am directing the research initiative Human Economy Lab.
My research interests range widely, from the history of justice and economics to gender and women’s history. Above all, I am deeply interested in the study of traditional communities. My publications include articles published in the Journal of Social History, The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Financial History Review and Social Science History, among others. In 2017, I published Gender and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Sweden, a political biography of the Swedish queen Lovisa Ulrika (1720–1782). In 2018, I published a collection of essays titled Women and Credit in Preindustrial Europe and I co edited Revisiting Gender in European History, 1400-1800.
As a Pro Futura Scientia Fellow, I am currently revising a book manuscript tentatively titled Banking Before Banks, dealing with early financial markets. I am also revisiting the concept of the moral economy in modern societies.
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normative commitments – of legal rules controlling the substance of contractual exchange, such as a fair price rule, a common complaint against such rules is based on the difficulties of implementing and enforcing them. Rather than proceeding from first principles, it is also possible to examine the consequences of ex ante and ex post rules on the fairness of contractual exchange in contexts in which they have been imposed before testing such consequences against any normative commitments. This approach allows both to examine whether practical limitations on enforcing rules over the fairness of exchange are truly binding and, even if they are, whether such rules can have other either beneficial or negative effects on parties and contract law more broadly. We discuss a case study of credit markets in a rural community in early modern France marked by the relative absence of the State as a regulatory agent. Our analysis suggests, even very provisionally, possible functions of a weak mandatory rule even when over inclusive and difficult to enforce.
This paper explores rural communities confronted by the process of conversion and confessionalization in Montbéliard from 1524 to 1660 and intends to demonstrate that peasants adapted somehow to the new faith but kept their own beliefs, rituals and social norms, refusing therefore an acculturation process.
normative commitments – of legal rules controlling the substance of contractual exchange, such as a fair price rule, a common complaint against such rules is based on the difficulties of implementing and enforcing them. Rather than proceeding from first principles, it is also possible to examine the consequences of ex ante and ex post rules on the fairness of contractual exchange in contexts in which they have been imposed before testing such consequences against any normative commitments. This approach allows both to examine whether practical limitations on enforcing rules over the fairness of exchange are truly binding and, even if they are, whether such rules can have other either beneficial or negative effects on parties and contract law more broadly. We discuss a case study of credit markets in a rural community in early modern France marked by the relative absence of the State as a regulatory agent. Our analysis suggests, even very provisionally, possible functions of a weak mandatory rule even when over inclusive and difficult to enforce.
This paper explores rural communities confronted by the process of conversion and confessionalization in Montbéliard from 1524 to 1660 and intends to demonstrate that peasants adapted somehow to the new faith but kept their own beliefs, rituals and social norms, refusing therefore an acculturation process.
This chapter examines the strategies of widows in rural communities, with particular reference to the legal and social changes affecting their marital status in the eighteenth century. Indeed, the examination of marriage contracts (and to a lesser extent donations and wills) shows a tangible evolution of the role and activities of widows, the consideration they received, not only within their households but also within their communities. Marital status is, of itself, a useful category of historical analysis. Single and married women had different rights and daily experiences than widows. Focusing on widows, we can emphasize the changes of status that occurred for these women but also, and more importantly, the changes experienced over time throughout the eighteenth century.
Call for papers
13th European Social Science History Conference, Leiden, The Netherlands, 18 – 21 March, 2020
Organizers: Elise Dermineur (Umeå University) and Jaco Zuijderduijn (Lund University)
Since the crisis of 2008, debt has increasingly become a major concern in our contemporary world. Abyssal public debt, ever growing student loans, credit card indebtedness and concern regarding the housing bubble regularly appear on the front page of newspapers worldwide. But what is exactly debt? Is it a financial tool sustaining growth or is it the evil of our modern societies auguring its downfall? The last financial crisis has clearly proven that the paradigm of debt was poorly understood, even -and perhaps above all- by economists. We clearly need a better comprehension of the mechanisms and threats associated with debt. In this respect, historians of early financial markets can highlight critical points.
Recently, David Graeber suggested a concept he labelled “everyday communism” in reference to the solidarity and norms of cooperation existing among people when it comes to the structure and organization of their traditional communities, from the management of common lands to neighbourly and daily mutual assistance (Graeber, 2011). With this concept in mind, he proposed studying the evolution of the paradigm of debt over the last 5,000 years, with special reference to the transition from “everyday communism” to “impersonal arithmetic”; this latter model based on inequality, oriented towards profit making and the de-personification of exchange, in other words our current situation.
Nowadays we are used to fully de-personalizated forms of exchange between individuals and (multinational) financial corporations. Whether this is the logical or even optimal outcome of historical processes, is questionable though: it may be that current institutions only make sense within the current economic paradigm, as Tomáš Sedláček has argued (Sedláček 2011). Societies moving to a new, more sustainable economic paradigm, might require a different configuration of financial markets, and a different paradigm of debt.
The session asks which configurations of financial markets existed in history, and what the pros and cons were. Were historical, personalized markets efficient in the sense that they generated enough supply and demand? How well were creditors protected against defaults, and how well were defaulters protected against creditors seeking compensation? What did it mean to be able to meet your counterparty in a financial transaction in the streets, to be a creditor or debtor in everyday social exchange? And how did economies and societies move from personalized to de-personalized exchange – and why did they?
We invite colleagues to submit a 250-word abstract before March 14 2019 to Jaco Zuijderduijn:
jaco.zuijderduijn@ekh.lu.se
For info on the ESSHC 2020: https://esshc.socialhistory.org/news
References:
Graeber, D., Debt: the first 5000 years (New York 2011).
Sedláček, T., Economics of good and evil. The quest for economic meaning from Gilgamesh to Wall Street (Oxford 2011).