Loïc Charles is an economic historian and historian of economics who works on topics such as the history of eighteenth-century French government and trade, the history of Enlightenment social sciences, and the history of visualization in economics. He has published in journals such as Past & Present, History of Political Economy and Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine, and is the co-author, with Christine Théré, of The Physiocratic Movement and the French Enlightenment: Science, Culture and Society (Cambridge University Press, 2019). Charles co-directs a French National Research Agency project that aims to build a comprehensive database of French eighteenth-century external trade.

During his residency at the Neubauer Collegium, Charles worked on a study of the interactions between the nascent science of political economy and the practice of the French economic administration in late eighteenth century in order to assess the impact of the former on the latter. Secondly, he looked at the classification practices of the administrative actors in the context of the measurement of the French balance of trade, and more generally economic exchanges throughout the ‘long’ eighteenth-century (1715-1815). The third study investigated the status of visuals and visualization in the social sciences during the first part of the twentieth-century.