Beatrice Dedinger

Beatrice Dedinger is a Research Engineer at the Centre for History (CHSP) of Sciences Po in Paris. An economist by training, she turned to economic history and has become the scientific director of two flagship projects: RICardo (Research on International Commerce, 1800-1938) and GeoPolHist (a geopolitical entities database from 1816 to the present). Her work focuses on building open-access historical databases that enable quantitative and visual exploration of long-run trade globalization and the political trajectories of world entities.

After completing a PhD thesis on German trade history, Dedinger taught economics, economic history and European economy. For more than a decade she has led the creation and exploitation of an exhaustive bilateral trade dataset covering all the world’s countries, and more recently a companion dataset that codifies every geopolitical entity’s political status on an annual basis. Both resources are freely available through interactive web platforms.

Research interests include:

• History of trade statistics and historical statistics of geopolitical entities
• Long-run patterns of trade globalization
• German commercial and monetary history (19th–20th centuries)
• Quantitative and digital methods in economic history
• Design of open-access historical databases and data-visualisation tools

Grants & funding have been provided by the French National Research Agency (ANR), Sciences Po’s SAB programme, and the Del Duca Foundation (2019-2022), among others.

Public engagement includes frequent conference presentations (World Economic History Congress, Digital Humanities, etc.) and leadership of interdisciplinary seminars that bring together historians, economists and data scientists.