Giulio Talini was trained at the University of Pisa as a historian of the Enlightenment under the supervision of Antonella Alimento. He obtained his PhD in Global History from the Scuola Superiore Meridionale in Naples in April 2025, during which he also had the opportunity to work on his thesis as a visiting researcher at the Centre de Recherches en Histoire Internationale et Atlantique in Nantes and as a Gustave Gimon Fellow on French Political Economy at Stanford University.
His doctoral research, which he is currently preparing for publication as a monograph, examined the relationship between local knowledge and imperial economic policy, as well as the role of economic experts in the governance of the French Caribbean plantation colonies during the second half of the eighteenth century. Building on a line of enquiry already present in his thesis and in one of his articles, he now investigates issues of property, political economy, and agrarian reform in slave-based plantation societies between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Within the Turin Humanities Programme, Giulio will focus on French abolitionism and agrarian justice between 1788 and 1848. He will examine how abolitionists, administrators, economists, planters and enslaved Africans imagined the post-emancipation world, experimenting with proposals for land redistribution or the sharing of plantation profits. In this way, the end of slavery emerges not only as a moral and political turning point, but also as an economic and agrarian one.
