Doi, datapackage and Zenodo

We are proud to share our work with the community : the TOFLIT18 dataset has been released on Zenodo  (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6573396 )!

This publication is an archived version of the live dataset which is hosted and versioned on github (https://github.com/medialab/toflit18_data). The dataset has been documented using the the datapackage format (https://specs.frictionlessdata.io/data-package/#introduction). The variables are described in this file: https://github.com/medialab/toflit18_data/blob/master/datapackage.json

This datapackage also helps us keep our data tidy. We use automatic validation which guarantee we spot data errors. Thus the datapackage is not only a documentation but also a data integration tool.To cite the dataset please use the DOI from zenodo. To monitor the last updates refer to the github history. For any questions, remarks or issues feel free to submit an issue on github: https://github.com/medialab/toflit18_data/issues 

Image from https://www.flickr.com/photos/cilipmarketing/15420989977/in/photostream/. CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Historical Methods: A Journal of Quantitative and Interdisciplinary History (2022)

Loïc Charles, Guillaume Daudin, Paul Girard, Guillaume Plique « Exploring the Transformation of French and European Trade and Economy in the Long Eighteenth Century (1713-1823) : the TOFLIT18 Project », Historical Methods: A Journal of Quantitative and Interdisciplinary History (2022)

Exploring the transformation of French trade in the long eighteenth century (1713–1823): The TOFLIT1

The TOFLIT18 project documents French bilateral international trade flows from the 1710s to the 1820s. This article presents the TOFLIT18 dataset and its exploration tool (the “datascape”). We make four contributions: first, we discuss the institutional framework in which the sources were produced; second, we present our method to standardize the col- lected data and reduce the variety of commodity names, partners, and measurement units; third, we document how ad hoc classifications can be created to aggregate the dataset; fourth, we describe the use of our datascape in a case study of the loss of Canada by France. We show how the datascape’s interactive data visualizations can help quantitative historians analyze key events in French and European eighteenth century.

DOI: 10.1080/01615440.2022.2032522

Magazine L’Histoire : Et la France se spécialisa dans le luxe

Loïc Charles, Guillaume Daudin «Et la France se spécialisa dans le luxe», *L’Histoire*, n°493, Mars 2022

Faut-il pourtant prêter à Colbert et au colbertisme tout le crédit de la puissance passée et actuelle de l’industrie française du luxe ?  Pas si sûr… Il faut d’abord rappeler l’importance de la société de cour de Versailles – qui ne doit rien à Colbert et tout à l’orgueil de son monarque absolu, Louis XIV – qui fut un puissant modèle de consommation attirant toute l’Europe à sa suite. Ainsi, comme l’ont bien montré les historiens français, la création de la mode et des fameux articles de Paris qui font les beaux jours des élites européennes et américaines dès la fin de l’Ancien Régime et pendant tout le xixe siècle sont issus de ce désir d’imitation de la cour versaillaise. Mais de manière plus essentielle, l’analyse du commerce français de 1750 aux années 1820 remet en cause quelques certitudes bien ancrées sur l’histoire de l’industrie du luxe.

ici

Dialogue, n°62 French Trade in the 18th century: Inflation and Revolution

Guillaume Daudin and Edouard Pignède «French Trade in the 18th century: Inflation and Revolution», Dialogue, n°62, Septembre 2021

The text is here ou ici en français


The French Revolution of 1789 was preceded by a crop failure crisis that
played a decisive role in triggering the revolution (Labrousse, 1944). Although this crisis was one of the most severe of the French Old
Regime, its demographic repercussions were very limited compared with
the impacts of the 1693-94 and 1709-10 crises, which claimed
approximately two million lives each, but did not have such radical
political repercussions. Alexis de Tocqueville pointed in his day to a
“paradox of growing dissatisfaction”, arguing that the political impacts of
the difficulties of 1789 were greater because they were preceded by a
prosperous period (Daudin, 2005).

However, this prosperity does not show up in the indices of real wages,
which stagnated in the decades prior to the French Revolution (Ridolfi,
2019). Is this the right indicator? Real wages provide information on the
situation of the urban working class, who spent most of their budget on
food. They say nothing about the effect of industry- and foreign trade-
related economic change on the urban middle classes or the peasant
classes. This article contributes to research into other signs of economic change. It examines international trade price trends, since international trade was the most buoyant part of the French economy in the 18th century. It hence contributes to the literature on the economic causes of the French Revolution (Weir, 1991). Following a presentation of the database and the construction of our indices, we explore market integration trends, variations in terms of trade, and observed structural price differences.