1The question is legitimate. Why do we need a further journal of economic history? It may seem like a rash decision, when we know that the readership of French-language journals in the humanities and social sciences has been falling for the last twenty years. Certainly, the attraction of English-language journals, which dominate the international rankings, has a lot to do with it: “publish or perish” is accompanied by an ever more exacting hierarchy of publications, which is gradually spreading across the humanities, foremost among them history, having already conquered their social science counterparts. Another factor to be taken into account is the decline of Francophonie, increasingly poorly defended by France itself, including its government. For this reason, in economic history, the defence of French research today can no longer be identified solely with the battle in support of the French language.
2The purpose of this new journal therefore is not to publish work only in French, nor researches solely on France and the French-speaking world. Papers in French will certainly be welcome, as will those on France and the area of influence of its language. Nevertheless, the aim is primarily to publish French research and to encourage, from the French-speaking area as a priority, but not only from there, leading-edge studies in global and especially European research. This entails welcoming texts in English, which, like it or not, is now the universal language of economic history. It also implies a considerable amount of translation to optimally facilitate, in accordance with international standards, free flow between the two languages (particularly by means of summaries and relatively long abstracts and, where appropriate, through bilingual introductions). However, bearing in mind that the reader is always sensitive to the homogeneity of a given issue of a journal, the practice adopted will be to have varia (issues in French interspersed) with special issues in English. However, as a general rule, items other than papers will be presented in French, as in the first issue.
3These items will, as practised by a number of reputed French journals, first consist of primary-source original documents, a transcript of a debate among specialists or a critical analysis of a book considered exceptionally important for the discipline, two or three reports on recent books, in addition to which there will be the presentation of an archival collection of relevance to new research and information about major scientific events due to be held over a time frame of about a year. Finally, French-English bilingual abstracts – a third language is not excluded in certain circumstances – and short, but precise and explicit, biographies will complete the content of such issues.
4The field covered by the journal is primarily general economic history, while being very much open to varied approaches: retrospective econometrics (or “cliometrics”) will therefore take its place alongside more traditional academic work. Similarly, business history, in its various forms, will also have a place in the journal. The same goes for labour history, the social history of consumption, and the history of economic elites and of economic and social thought. Far from being limited to historians in the strictly disciplinary sense of the term, the journal will welcome research on the history of science and technology, or indeed architecture and town planning, such as historical studies by economists, managers, sociologists and even geographers and philosophers.
5Moreover, even though the history of contemporary worlds will be preponderant, work on antiquity, the Middle Ages and modernity, or even prehistory, will be welcome. This openness also applies to cultural topics, none of which are excluded, even if the large majority of papers published will concern Western worlds. I thus hope that this new French historical journal will fill a gap in the field of economic history, a field that is now no longer occupied by other long-standing and prestigious journals.
