Dr Lenny Hodges

Overview

Biography

I joined Birkbeck in 2022 as a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow. Previously I have held postdoctoral fellowships at LSE, Lancaster University, and the John Carter Brown Library. I completed my PhD at King's College London in 2020.

I am a historian of early modern empires, with a particular specialism on the French empire and the European presence on the Indian subcontinent. 

 

Qualifications

• PhD, King's College London, 2020

Honours and awards

• Early Career Fellowship, The Leverhulme Trust, June 2022
• Center for New World Comparative Studies Fellow, John Carter Brown Library, April 2021
• Postdoctoral Fellow, Economic and Social Research Council, April 2020
• Ralph Gibson Bursary, Society for the Study of French History, April 2017

Research

Research interests

• Global early modern history
• Legal history
• French empire
• Race and slavery
• Colonial India
• Trading companies
• Early modern diplomacy

Research overview

I am a historian of the early modern French empire, with a particular focus on the French presence in India. 

My current book project is a monograph on the French Company of the Indies (Compagnie des Indes, 1664-1769), provisionally entitled Company of Kings: India, Empire and the Ancien Régime in the Eighteenth Century. The book uses the history of the trading company to examine the nature and effects of France's intensifying global connections in the eighteenth century. It demonstrates how a diverse cast of actors, from Mughal princes to Jesuit missionaries helped shape the trajectory of the Company, tracing their interests across a wide range of themes both in India and France. 

I am also interested in the role of law, broadly defined, in the construction of early modern empires. This is a theme I have approached from a variety of perspectives, including the practice of legal pluralism in British Bombay, the use of Mughal legal documents (parwanas) in Southern India, and in legal diffusion across the French empire.

Publications