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: Danish Colonial Expansion in a Transimperial World, c. 1660-1815, I trace how a small power on the European periphery built and maintained a thriving global presence in an age of great-power rivalry. Based on archival research in Northern European archives, the book privileges four themes: Denmark’s role as gatekeeper to the Baltic Sea; the crown’s espousal of a policy of “colonization by invitation” which enabled foreigners to help build and profit from Danish colonization; the policy of neutrality in times of war; and the commercial system that combined free ports and protectionist policies. Alongside these research projects, I am involved in an interdisciplinary project on Gun Violence and its Histories. I also convene Pitt’s Early Modern Worlds Initiative which fosters interdisciplinary collaboration and research among early modernists at the University of Pittsburgh.