The project seeks to analyze, over the long term (17th -21st), in France, the place and role of women in business management activities, from economic sectors currently feminized. It starts from the observation that, despite the increase in gender diversity at work and the feminization of many professional activities, the world of business elites, whether they are top-managers, directors of boards or chairman and CEO of small or large firms, remains predominantly male. The long-term perspective aims to study the historical variation of gender norms and gender regimes and their effects in the context of changing economic and legal contexts. It investigates the legal constraints on women’s business leadership and their évolution from the late XVIIth to the XXIst century.By articulating economic sociology, sociology of elites, sociology of management work taken from the angle of the history of firms, the history of law (business law and civil law) and the history of gender, it contributes in an original way to the revival of the history of the presence of women in the top-managerial positions in firms and to the re-examination of gender differences in the control of capital. It develops an unprecedented hypothesis consisting in analysing the value of the business leaders, in the sense of credit and trust given to an economic agent allowing him to obtain a position and a status in economic relationships, at the prism of gender. For this reason, it articulates value built by law, by conjugal and family arrangements and by the symbolic dimensions of gender. It participates in the analysis of social and economic inequalities related to gender, of the process of inclusion and exclusion of women from the control of business, and of the identification of difficulties in accessing the rights for women.

This research will analyse the expertise mechanism in one of the most important economic sectors - the building industry - during the early modern times. How were the technical, regulatory and controlling language used by the experts to coerce society? How did the technical competence of experts become an authority, even sometimes an “abuse of authority”? We intend to start by undertaking a large and multidisciplinary (legal, economic and architectural) research programme concerning building expertise using a unique archive collection (A.N. Z1J) which contains all the Parisian building surveyors’ reports from 1643 to 1792. 1690 was the year when architects were first officially able to be recognized as experts in the way that masons and carpenters had been for a long time. At that time, the community of surveyors was divided into two different groups: the architects and the contractors who were as well competitor as complementary. The basis of our work will be to build two bodies of knowledge in parallel: first, the creation of a prosopography of the 234 experts working from 1690 to 1790 by studying multiple sources (manuscripts and printed literature); secondly, the production of an inventory and an analysis of surveyors’ reports. Reflecting the great size of the archive collection, we intend to work on a group of around 10 000 expert assessments, chosen from 1 year in 10, from 1696 to 1786. Each case will be inventoried, indexed, scanned and analysed in detail. The regular series of reports will be studied serially, and to a depth corresponding to their contents. Three key issues are at stake: The first one concerns the balance between risk and social innovation. How did risk situations lead to technical and even social innovation? One of our hypotheses is that the confrontation between doubts can lead to the resolution of conflicts between opposing parties. As building surveyors belonged to two different communities (craftsmanship and art), did the expertise depend on the roots of each particular expert? Experts often innovated while working. Does it mean that expertise may lead to innovation? The second issue addresses the involvement of the law in the democratic decision making. How can the law be used by non-lawyers? The spread of legal principles through society can be found in the different levels of public activities as well as in those of private ones. In our project, we ask how and why did experts, who were familiar with the law, but were not qualified lawyers, set out lawyers’ arguments and convince judges to adopt their positions. The third issue concerns the organization of real estate value. What were the standards necessary to build a kind of hierarchy of material things? Face to market forces, strict and unbiased standards could be undesirable, knowing that the rigour of the market would find equilibrium between different standards of valuation. How did surveyors precisely build and use both objective and subjective standards to estimate the value of real estate? Accepting the possibility of an “abuse of authority” by the expert, would the sharing of expertise by different kinds of social actors possessing different kinds of knowledge reduce the risk of abuses of authority and, furthermore, reduce technical risk in general? The results of the research will be disseminated through a collaborative knowledge basis on a dedicated website in which the two corpuses will be accessed by the scientific community. The analysis of cases will be editorialized in the form of virtual exhibitions for the general public. The final, general report of the results will be recorded in a book and the project will end with two national and international workshops.

This project studies, from a historical point of view, the processes of patrimonialization of which mathematics was the object, from the 18th to the 20th century, via printed media gathering what is worth preserving in terms of mathematical knowledge (encyclopedias, specialized or generalist dictionaries, complete works of mathematicians, collections of treatises and manuals) or intended to gather and index a part of the knowledge already produced (libraries, bibliographic indexes). By studying these processes over time and from a social and cultural history perspective that mobilizes local, national and international scales, the project aims to understand what constitutes mathematical heritage at a given time and for a given community, how it is created through selection, appropriation, and adaptation of knowledge and practices, and how a heritage is mobilized in order to practice mathematics, to build the identity of a group or to legitimize the discipline. The period studied (from the 18th to the 20th century) and the large geographical scale (France, Great Britain, the United States, Italy) allow us to inscribe this process in the long term and to take into account the diversity of social logics that preside over the constitution of mathematical heritages (professional circles, teaching, general public). The project is based on a reflection on digital humanities, as a tool of patrimonlaiization but also as a research tool for SHS works and as a communication tool allowing a large public to have access to a more and more important part of the cultural and scientific heritage. The creation and the animation of a digital platform allow us to take advantage of these possibilities, but also to revive and to make known to a large public, in particular teachers, unknown parts of the mathematical heritage, The project addresses the heritage of mathematics according to three complementary issues, in which quantitative analyses and case-based approaches are combined: - Heritage dynamics and communities: The project aims at identifying and listing, notably by means of a bibliographic and biographical knowledge base, various heritage groups according to periods and geographical and/or socio-professional spaces. For this purpose, it relies on dictionaries and encyclopedias specifically dedicated to mathematics, as well as the inclusion of mathematics in publications of this type intended for specific communities (engineers, craftsmen, women, etc.) or for a large public, both in France and abroad, - Patrimonialization by selection and accumulation: supports, places and actors The project also proposes to write a history from below of the forms of patrimonialization of mathematics, aiming at restoring the interactions of individual, collective and institutional logics, in order to understand the processes of constitution of heritages (selection, constraints, classification, inventories), the stakes of these initiatives (preservation, transmission, delimitation of domains) and their uses (learning, construction of new knowledge, memory). - Legitimization of heritage and memory of mathematics. Based on a detailed study of the heritage trajectories of particular mathematical knowledge, the project will reveal the modes of legitimization of what constitutes, in a given social space, "good" knowledge and "good" practices, the re-actualization that this legitimization allows and the forms of oblivion that it induces. The examination of the posterity of the actors and actresses of mathematics will lead us to question the processes of construction of genealogies and filiations, and the role of " figures of mathematicians" in the construction of values and identities associated with mathematics.

Corporate finance through equities marks the modern period, affecting entire sectors of the economy. The first joint stock companies were inspired at the beginning of the seventeenth century in France models from England and the United Provinces. The ACTIMOD project is a social history project which, with a database of identified shareholders participating in the different companies, should allow to see the social and cultural characteristics of shareholding in France and its evolution, and to highlight a active investor group that weighs on the economic and political choices of the state and announces the influence groups of the contemporary era. They are one of the keys to understanding the economic changes that occur at the end of the modern period.

Counting in a colonial situation. Crossing disciplinary approaches and scales of analysis, the project studies the production of statistics in the African territories of the French empire, from the beginning of the 19th century to the independence of the 1960s. It provides information on colonial governance and its transformations, as well as on the power relations and inequalities that it conveys; it sheds light on the interplay of public and private actors, colonisers and colonised, who, in metropolitan France and in the territories, use these indicators, participate in their production or refuse to contribute to them. More broadly, and even if it focuses on economic statistics (activity, production, prices, labour), the survey sheds light on both the empire of figures in the colony and the impact of the colonial experience on the production of statistics. By reconstructing the institutional, social and intellectual history of their production, by looking at the raw materials, behind the scenes of the surveys and the construction of statistical categories, we intend to show the extent to which the figure is structuring, how it creates links and how, by classifying, it hierarchises and excludes. The aim is thus to clarify how counting, keeping accounts if one is a producer or making statistics if one is an administrator, is a manifestation of power. The investigation will provide further information on the specificities of government in a colonial situation, by underlining the forms of autonomy of the actors present in the field, the tensions that oppose them, and by specifying whether - and how - statistics were able to constitute a 'technology of distance'. Our work will also question the inevitable approximations, hidden under the rigour of numbers, which maintain the illusion of a knowledge-power among administrators and in colonial economic circles, participating in the "colonial gaze", the distorted and deformed prism that the administrations have of the colonised territories, and more widely of their own power. In the end, the investigation will allow us to better understand what counting means, to interpret statistical and accounting conventions in a colonial situation, and to show how and in what way the empire of numbers sheds light on the process of colonisation.