Transformations of the French Economy through the Lens of International Trade, 1716-1821 – TOFLIT18

The volume and dispersion of primary sources makes the process of collecting and putting them into a usable form a time-consuming and costly one. The team includes therefore includes social scientists with consolidated experience in the construction and management of large databases (notably MARPROF, NAVIGOCORPUS, RICardo and SoundToll Registers Online). They will bring their expertise to cross-test our dataset with other types of information on trade (shipping and merchants accounts). The collaboration of researchers who are currently working on similar set of foreign trade statistics for important economic partners of France – Great-Britain and the Austrian Netherlands – will allow both crosschecking and building comparative studies.

The first step was to gather the data. After scourging various local archives, we have found (in addition to the national data that were known before the begining of the project) data for Bayonne, Bordeaux, Caen, Grenoble/Lyon/Valence (just one year), La Rochelle, Marseille, Montpellier, Rennes and Rouen. In some cases, data are only available for an handful of years. We are still looking for more data in Lyon, Dunkerque and other areas, but this is mostly done. We have setup a server to keep the pictures – more than 350 Gb of them.
Transcription was the second step. Using a mix of interns and external contractors, we have digitized more than 300,000 observations of trade flows. We are currently treating tens of thousands of additional ones. At the end of 2015, we will probably have between 350,000 to 400,000 observations and we will stop there.
We are currently working on making the raw digitized data useable for research. We hade underestimated the amount of transcription mistakes and the lack of normalization in the names of goods. We have more than 35,000 different merchandise names in the raw data. We had to setup explicit, exhaustive rules for spelling normalization. These bring us down to approximately 17,500 merchandise names. We use some simplifications rules to bring that down to 15,000 and we have created two simplified, less than 15 group-classifications.
In parallel, we made progress in the development of the data exploration software. We have set up most specifications and have started exporting the data to Neo4J, which will be datascape software.
Beside the methodology papers, we already have worked on papers using our data. Tow of them are comparing French data with foreign data : one with the Austrian Netherlands data, another on Hamburg and the Baltic trade as measured through the Sound. Two other papers are studying specific sectors of trade : the medecine trade and the grain trade.

The result database will include the bilateral value (with 20-30 different partners) of trade flows at the national level from 1716 to 1821, a merchandise (600-1000 different goods) and partner breakdown from at least 1750 onward, unit values and quantities from 1771 to 1792 and regional trade data. The project will transfer this database in the public domain and make it easily useable by the research community.
The collected data can partly substitute for the lack of domestic macroeconomic series. We will use them to improve dramatically our knowledge of the French economy and our understanding of the economic mechanisms it was subjected to, both at the national and regional level. Two main avenues of research will be privileged. First, we will investigate the evolution of French specialization, both across French regions and in comparison to other countries. How was it linked to the contrasted economic development of France and Britain? What does it tell us on the determinants of international trade? Second, we will study the effects of policy choices on the French economy: France went through several wars and politic upheavals. It also went through stark changes in its commercial policies: from mercantilism to mitigated free trade in the 1760s with its colonial empire, to a number of free-trade treaties in the 1780s, followed by the closing up of the economy under the Empire. What were the effects of these policy choices?

« Cross-checking the Sound database with the French Balance du Commerce data », in The Baltic in European maritime history, 1600-1800, sous la dir. de Jan Willem Veluwenkamp et Werner Scheltjens, à paraître 2016.
- Loïc Charles and Guillaume Daudin «Eighteenth-century international trade statistics, Sources and Methods», Introduction to a special issue of Revue de l’OFCE: Observations et diagnostics économiques, July, n°140, p. 7-36, 2015
- Loïc Charles and Guillaume Daudin, «France, c. 1716- c.1821», Revue de l’OFCE : Observations et diagnostics économiques, July, n°140, p. 237-248, 2015
- 18th Century International Trade Statistics: Sources and Methods, n° spécial de la Revue de l’O.F.C.E., 2015/4, n° 140, juillet 2015, 401 p. (Revue qui figure au classements de l’AERES (économie) et de la section 34 du CNRS)
- Visual network storytelling, Paul Girard, Mind the Graph session, ARS'15, Capri, 29 Avril 2015
medialab.github.io/manylines/ars2015/

The project “Transformations of the French Economy through the Lens of International Trade, 1716-1821” (TOFLIT18) aims at improving our knowledge of the French economy during the period that laid the economic ground for the entry of France and Europe in the modern industrial era. The French administrative trade statistics are the most comprehensive and coherent source of quantitative information available for the French economy at that time. These data were produced locally and aggregated at the national level by the Bureau de la Balance du Commerce from 1716 on (Charles and Daudin 2011). Despite several administrative reshufflings, the techniques of gathering and presenting the statistics on French foreign trade went almost unchanged up to the 1820s: they provided the total value, and sometimes the unit values, of merchandise and partner-specific trade flows; we have already photographed an almost complete series of yearly statistics.
These documents are unique as they provide quantitative information on several geographical levels. As such, they can be used to study the economic effects of international trade on the French economy as a whole, on the economy of a single region, of a port town as well as on the economic behaviors of individual agents, e.g. a merchant or a community of merchants from a single town/region. They can also be used to get a more accurate understanding of the interplay that existed between these different geographical levels.
The volume and dispersion of primary sources makes the process of collecting and putting them into a usable form a time-consuming and costly one. The team includes therefore includes social scientists with consolidated experience in the construction and management of large databases (notably MARPROF, NAVIGOCORPUS, RICardo and SoundToll Registers Online). They will bring their expertise to cross-test our dataset with other types of information on trade (shipping and merchants accounts). The collaboration of researchers who are currently working on similar set of foreign trade statistics for important economic partners of France – Great-Britain and the Austrian Netherlands – will allow both crosschecking and building comparative studies.
The result database will include the bilateral value (with 20-30 different partners) of trade flows at the national level from 1716 to 1821, a merchandise (600-1000 different goods) and partner breakdown from at least 1750 onward, unit values and quantities from 1771 to 1792 and regional trade data. The project will transfer this database in the public domain and make it easily useable by the research community.
The collected data can partly substitute for the lack of domestic macroeconomic series. We will use them to improve dramatically our knowledge of the French economy and our understanding of the economic mechanisms it was subjected to, both at the national and regional level. Two main avenues of research will be privileged. First, we will investigate the evolution of French specialization, both across French regions and in comparison to other countries. How was it linked to the contrasted economic development of France and Britain? What does it tell us on the determinants of international trade? Second, we will study the effects of policy choices on the French economy: France went through several wars and politic upheavals. It also went through stark changes in its commercial policies: from mercantilism to mitigated free trade in the 1760s with its colonial empire, to a number of free-trade treaties in the 1780s, followed by the closing up of the economy under the Empire. What were the effects of these policy choices?