Emma Rothschild, "An Infinite History: The Story of a Family in France over Three Centuries" (Princeton UP, 2021)

New Books in Economic and Business History · Jun 15, 2021 · 1h 9m

Emma Rothschild’s new book, An Infinite History: The Story of a Family in France over Three Centuries (Princeton University Press, 2021) (see the book’s accompanying website here: https://infinitehistory.org), is a beautiful work that, by following the lives of one obscure family over five generations, weaves together a history of France through the momentous revolutions and economic transformations of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In this conversation, Emma talks to Yi Ning Chang about the puzzles of writing micro-, meso-, and macrohistory, about the literary and the historical…