Liane Hewitt
Liane Hewitt is a postdoctoral research fellow at Sciences Po’s Centre for History and Economics Paris. She is an historian of European political economy in a global context. Her work centrally investigates the historically fraught relationship between monopoly power and democracy during key crisis moments in the history of 20th century capitalist governance. During her fellowship, she looks forward to completing her first book, Monopoly Menace: How Europe Solved the Cartel Problem, 1873-1973. The project asks how Europe, once the heartland of cartels and trusts in the 1920s-1930s, came to be the world’s first - and still only - supranational anti-monopoly regulator under the aegis of the European Union. The project recovers forgotten European anti-monopoly solutions, including the promotion of cooperatives, nationalizations, co-determination, and patent reform. Her next manuscript, Democracy’s Final Frontier, will tell the first comprehensive intellectual and institutional history of economic democracy, from the explosion of worker cooperatives in Paris during the 1848 revolutions, through to the wave of global post-war nationalizations of basic industries and natural resources after 1945 (spurred on by decolonization in the Global South), to the late 20th century neoliberal ideal of “shareholder capitalism” undergirding the fabulous expansion of the stock-market. Broad areas of research and teaching interest include: historical varieties of capitalism (notably varieties of corporate governance, property ownership, and planning); business-government relations, the comparative history of American and European competition, tax, patent, and corporate law regimes; the relationship between monopoly and fascism in the Third Reich and Vichy France, total war economies, monopoly power and energy governance, co-operatives and historical alternatives to the joint-stock corporation, as well as histories of labour, socialism, and the workplace.
Liane’s writing on international and economic history has appeared in The Journal of Global History, Histoire@Politique, H-Soz-Kult, Foreign Policy, and Tocqueville 21.
Her transatlantic scholarship has been supported by the Business History Conference, the Chateaubriand Fellowship of the French Embassy in the U.S., the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique’s GREDEG lab, the Deutsche Akademische Austausch Dienst (German Academic Exchange Service), the Fondation Jean Monnet pour l’Europe (Lausanne, Switzerland), the Social Sciences Research Council, and Princeton University.
Liane recently completed her Ph.D. and M.A. in History at Princeton University in December 2023. Before that, she earned a B.A. in Honours History with International Relations from the University of British Columbia in 2017.
Email: liane.hewitt@sciencespo.fr