Dr Lewis Wade
Department: History
Discipline: History
Project Summary
My dissertation, entitled 'Privilege at a Premium: Insurance, Maritime Law and Political Economy in Early Modern France, 1664-c. 1710’, was written as part of the transnational project 'Average - Transaction Costs and Risk Management during the First Globalisation (Sixteenth-Eighteenth Centuries)'. The dissertation studies the activities of Louis XIV's forgotten royal institutions, the Royal Insurance Chamber (1668-86) and the Royal Insurance Company (1686-c. 1710). In so doing, it sheds light on how insurance was used as a tool of economic policy to further the interests of the French state.
Supervisory Team
Primary supervisor: Prof. Maria Fusaro
​Secondary supervisor: Prof. Nandini Chatterjee
Wider Research Interests
My research interests centre primarily on early modern commerce and law in the Mediterranean and Atlantic worlds, with a particular enthusiasm for the experiences of France, England and the Ottoman Empire in the seventeenth century.
