Mallory Hope is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at Yale University. Her research seeks to understand economic development and financial capitalism from the perspective of early-modern overseas trade. Mallory’s dissertation is a history of preindustrial insurance markets in France. She is building a large, original database of marine insurance rates that were charged during the eighteenth century to cover merchandise, ships, and African captives sent to sea. Her dissertation uses quantitative methods to probe merchants’ economic strategies as they organized voyages and coped with risk, confronting both environmental hazards and the risk of attack or capture. Her thesis is also a legal history that asks how strict proscriptions against life insurance in Catholic France were overcome so that insurance policies, even those sheltering investments in the slave trade, could gain a foothold in French courts.

She's invited at the CSO until the 31st july 2021.