Erik Thomson

• HIST 1200 - An introduction to the history of Western Civilization
• HIST 2390 - Early Modern Europe, 1450-1789
• HIST 2670 - History of Capitalism
• HIST 4000/7772 - The Economic History of Modern War

Much of my research has concerned what historians call "early modern" Europe, or the period from the mid-fifteenth to the end of the eighteenth century and more specifically Sweden, France and pan-Northern European networks during the Thirty Years War. However, more recently, I've added more serious study of the Hudson's Bay Company's global business for the French and other allied governments during the First World War. I usually find myself drawn to sources that allow me to explore the ways in which commerce, war and statecraft overlap, whether in political, economic and legal theory or in the entrepreneurial activities of bankers, businessmen, diplomats and politicians. 

I currently serve as Vice President of the University of Manitoba Faculty Association and as a member of CAUT's Academic Freedom and Tenure committee. 

• PhD, The Johns Hopkins University, 2004
• BA (Honours), Queen's University, Kingston, 1996

• "Representing the Protestant International: The possessions of Jean Hoeufft, merchant banker," In Gender, Materiality and Politics: Essays on the making of power Anna Nilsson Hammar, Daniel Nyström and Martin Almbjär, eds. (Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2022). 
• "Jean Hoeufft, French Subsidies and the Thirty Years War", and with Svante Norrhem, "Introduction", Subsidies, diplomacy and state formation in Europe, 1494-1789: Economies of Allegiance, Svante Norrhem and Erik Thomson, eds. (Lund: Lund University Press, 2020). 
• “Axel Oxenstierna and the shaping of Swedish diplomacy,” in Statesmen and statecraft in the early modern world, Paul M. Dover, ed.(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 115-139. 
• “Trade and Commerce” in The Encyclopedia of Empire. John Mackenzie and Nigel Dalziel, eds. (Chicester: John Wiley & Sons, 2016). 
• “Perpetual Peace, effeminacy, and technology: Adam Smith and Eighteenth Century Debates,” in The Material of World History. Tina Mai Chen and David S. Churchill, eds. Routledge Approaches to World History, 9. (New York and London: Routledge, 2015), 133-149.
• “The Gallican Mines: Martine de Bertereau’s Restitution de Pluton, Astrology, Providence, and Empire during the reign of Louis XIII,” in Sanja Perovic, ed. Sacred and Secular Agency in Early Modern France: Fragments of Religion (London: Continuum press, 2012), 68-82.
• “Beyond the military state: Sweden’s great power period in recent historiography,” History Compass, 9, 4 (April, 2011): 269-283. 
• "Le Travail du diplomate et la diffusion des idées politiques à l’époque moderne : la Fronde vue par le résident suédois Schering Rosenhane (1648-1649)" Histoire, Economie & Sociétés, (Avril, 2010): 5-15.
• “The Dutch Miracle, Modified: Commercial governance and imperial war in the early seventeenth century,” Grotiana, 30 (2009): 107-130. 
• “France’s Grotian moment? Hugo Grotius and Cardinal Richelieu’s Commercial Statecraft,” French History, (December, 2007): 377-394.
• “For a comparative history of early modern diplomacy: commerce and French and Swedish emissarial cultures during the early seventeenth century,” Scandinavian Journal of History. 31, 2 (June, 2006): 151-172.