Salt Beef or Manioc?

The current Gimon Collection visiting scholar, Bertie Mandelblatt, will be presenting a paper entitled "Salt Beef or Manioc? Crises of Food Provisions in the French Antilles between the `Period esclavagiste' and Now" next Thursday, March 12, at Omnivore Books in San Francisco.

More information about the event, as well as about the Culinary Historians of Northern California, is available on the bookstore's website.

Gimon visiting scholar - Bertie Mandelblatt

I’m very pleased to welcome Bertie Mandelblatt, a Postdoctoral Fellow (Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Université de Montréal) whose current project examines the Atlantic exchange networks in the molasses and rum produced in the French Antilles during the Ancien régime.

This project expands her doctoral research focus on the production, exchange and consumption of commodities in the French Atlantic. Her dissertation (University of London, 2008), entitled "Feeding the French Atlantic: Colonial Food Provisioning Networks in the Franco-Caribbean during the Ancien regime," analyzes patterns in both transatlantic and local food provisioning to the colonial, largely slave populations of the Franco-Caribbean, as well as in its consumption during the reigns of Louis XIV, Louis XV and Louis XVI." It reconceptualizes the slave subject as a consumer, as well as a commodity and producer of commodities, whose collective economic effect were felt throughout the Atlantic world. In so doing, it stresses connections and exchanges between the sites of the French Atlantic, reconsidering definitions of 'centre' and 'periphery.'

Bertie will be here at Stanford until March 14, and I hope that many of you will be able to meet her and learn more about her fascinating topic. She will be presenting her work at the March 12 meeting of the Culinary Historians of Northern California; I will be sending out more information about this event in the next few days.

Gimon visiting scholar on campus

David Woodworth, a PhD candidate in history at Johns Hopkins University, is currently on campus doing research in the Gustave Gimon Collection on French Political Economy. He will be at Stanford until the end of January, and I hope that many of you will have the opportunity to meet him.

David's dissertation is entitled: "Public Credit and Plutocracy: War Finance and the nouveaux riches of the French Revolution and Empire, 1789-1815". It explores how the "prominence of these fabulously wealthy men and women at the apex of social and political hierarchies caused a transformation in French attitudes about finance capitalism, public credit, and economic inequality." He will be examining eighteenth century materials of the political in the Gimon Collection, especially works by Du Pont de Nemours, Jean-Baptiste Say, and Jean Herrenschwand.

The new call for proposals for the Gimon Visiting Fellowship in French Political Economy will go out this week and proposals will be due in mid-March. Please let colleagues at other institutions working on appropriate topics know about this research opportunity.