If the earlier workshops organized by the Centre, ‘Expansion and Reaction’ (1975) and ‘Reappraisals in Overseas History’ (1976), aimed at producing, respectively, a survey of some of the main problems involved in modern studies of the history of European expansion and a bibliographic overview of the same field as it appears to us to-day, the third colloquium at last got down to work on a specific historical issue. True, the theme of the trading companies of the ancien regime is a vast one, but the purpose of the workshop, as of the centre itself, was primarily comparative, and for this approach the theme chosen proved eminently fit.