Jenny Mander is an intellectual historian at the University of Cambridge, specializing in eighteenth-century France, the rise of the novel, colonial thought and early globalization. She has a special interest in the abbé Raynal, and is an editor of the new critical edition of Raynal's Histoire des deux Indes.

David Midgley is Professor emeritus of German Literature and Intellectual History at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of Writing Weimar: Critical Realism in German Literature, 1918-1933 (Oxford 2000), and his research is currently focused especially on the major works of Alfred Döblin.

Christine D. Beaule is Associate Professor of Latin American and Iberian Studies, University of Hawai?i at Manoa. Her research combines anthropological archaeology with the study of historical texts and is focused on the comparative impact of colonialism on material culture and indigenous sociopolitical organization in South America and the Philippines.