Felicia Gottmann is Associate Professor of History at Northumbria University, Newcastle. She earned her BA, MSt, and DPhil at the University of Oxford (with a brief stint at the Université Toulouse Le Mirail, now Jean Jaurès), and has held research and visiting fellowships at the Universities of Dundee, Harvard, Warwick, and Zurich.
As a global and transnational historian of early modern Europe, she studies the movement of goods, people, ideas, and technology to illuminate the transformational processes of early modernity: globalisation, commercialisation, technological innovation, migration, nation-building, and the emergence of political economy as a discipline. Her work is unified by her abiding interest in political economy in all its aspects: as Enlightenment philosophy, as government policy, and as commercial practice.
Her research sets European political economy in its global context as both theory and practice. That was the subject both of her doctoral work on Voltaire’s thought on luxury and of her first monograph, Global Trade, Smuggling, and the Making of Economic Liberalism: Asian Textiles in France, 1680–1760 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). Her second monograph, The East India Companies and Prussia: Transnational Networks, Capital, and States in Europe’s Early Modern Expansion, which she is currently preparing for publication, studies the intersection of state policy and the transnational networks of capital, labour, and expertise that tied together all the various European East India Companies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As Principal Investigator of the UKRI-funded ‘Migration, Adaptation, Innovation 1500–1800’ project, she has been overseeing a globally comparative study of skilled migration across Europe, the Islamic world, and East Asia.
Her next project, a study of the intersection of political economy as Enlightenment thought, governmental and entrepreneurial practice, centred on the figure of Voltaire, precisely aims to resituate the moral and material foundations of European political economy in its global context. She is therefore particularly looking forward to the THP summer school on the topic.
