Exploring the transformation of French trade in the long eighteenth century (1713–1823): The TOFLIT18 project

Abstract The TOFLIT18 project documents French bilateral international trade flows from the 1710s to the 1820s. This article presents the TOFLIT18 dataset and its exploration tool (the “datascape”). We make four contributions: first, we discuss the institutional framework in which the sources were produced; second, we present our method to standardize the collected data and reduce the variety of commodity names, partners, and measurement units; third, we document how ad hoc classifications can be created to aggregate the dataset; fourth, we describe the use of our datascape in a case study of the loss of Canada by France. We show how the datascape’s interactive data visualizations can help quantitative historians analyze key events in French and European eighteenth century.