Pernille Røge

I am trained as a scholar of eighteenth-century France and its colonial empire, with a broader interest in early modern European expansion. My first book, Economistes and the Reinvention of Empire: France in the Americas and Africa, c. 1750-1802, offers an exploration of efforts to reinvent the French colonial empire between the mid-eighteenth century and the rise of Napoleon. The book examines the reciprocal impacts of economic ideas, colonial policy, and practices as they evolved in France, the French Caribbean, and West Africa. It also aims to rethink the French Revolution as a moment of imperial rupture between France’s so-called ‘first’ and ‘second’ colonial empires. In my second book project, A Gateway to Empire: Foreigners, Foreign Capital, and the Riches of Danish Colonial Commerce, c. 1750-1815, I explore the ways in which European and North American merchants, planters, and investors used the Danish colonial empire to generate profits and how this pan-European presence enabled the thinly resourced Monarchy of Denmark-Norway to operate a globe-spanning colonial empire alongside major maritime powers and to enter what historians have referred to as its “flourishing period” of colonial commerce. Based on archival research in Northern European and North American archives, the project is located at the intersection of the history of early modern European empires and the history of capitalism. Alongside these research projects, I am co-organizer of Pitt's interdisciplinary project on Gun Violence and its Histories and founder of Pitt’s Early Modern Worlds Initiative which fosters interdisciplinary collaboration and research among early modernists at the University of Pittsburgh.