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Sovereign Debt Diplomacies aims to revisit the meaning of sovereign debt in relation to colonial history and postcolonial developments. It offers three main contributions. The first contribution is historical. The volume historicises a research field that has so far focused primarily on the post-1980 years. A focus on colonial debt from the 19th century building of colonial empires to the decolonisation era in the 1960s-70s fills an important gap in recent debt historiographies. Economic historians have engaged with colonialism only reluctantly or en passant, giving credence to the idea that colonialism is not a development that deserves to be treated on its own. This has led to suboptimal developments in recent scholarship.

The second contribution adds a 'law and society' dimension to studies of debt. The analytical payoff of the exercise is to capture the current developments and functional limits of debt contracting and adjudication in relation to the long-term political and sociological dynamics of sovereignty. Finally, Sovereign Debt Diplomacies imports insights from, and contributes to the body of research currently developed in the Humanities under the label 'colonial and postcolonial studies'. The emphasis on 'history from below' and focus on 'subaltern agency' usefully complement the traditional elite-perspective on financial imperialism favoured by the British school of empire history.

About the Author:
Pierre Penet, Researcher, École Normale Supérieure Paris-Saclay, CNRS-IDHES, Juan Flores Zendejas, Associate Professor, Paul Bairoch Institute of Economic History, University of Geneva

Juan Flores Zendejas has a PhD in Economics from Sciences Po Paris. Before joining the Department of History, Economics, and Society at the University of Geneva as an Associate Professor in 2008, Flores Zendejas held a tenure-track position at the University Carlos III in Madrid (Spain). He has been invited professor in other universities in Mexico, Spain, Uruguay, and Switzerland. He has also worked for the Mexican Government and as external consultant to the Mexican Senate, to the private sector, and to the OECD. Flores Zendejas works on financial crises and sovereign defaults in a long-term perspective, and on the economic history of Latin America.

Pierre Pénet holds a PhD in Sociology from Northwestern University and Sciences Po Paris (2014). He is a CNRS researcher at the École Normale Supérieure Paris-Saclay (IDHES) and a former Fellow at the Paris Institute for Advanced Study (2019-20). His expertise straddles the boundaries of economic sociology and the history of quantification. He has worked extensively on topics of credit rating agencies, the European debt crisis, austerity pro- grammes, and the legal doctrine of odious debt. His work has been published by the British Journal of Sociology, European Journal of Sociology, Poetics, Sociologie du Travail, etc. His forthcoming book on financial prophecies will study the economists who claim to have predicted the 2008 financial crisis.