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. 

Representative Publications

Economistes and the Reinvention of Empire: France in the Americas and Africa, c. 1750-1802 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019)

Free and Unfree Labor in Atlantic and Indian Ocean Port Cities (1700-1850), eds. Pepijn Brandon, Niklas Frykman, and Pernille Røge, International Review of Social History, 64, Special Issue 27, (April 2019)

The Political Economy of Empire in the Early Modern World, eds. Sophus Reinert and Pernille Røge (Palgrave, 2013)