The objective of the Conference on Histories of Trade as Histories of Civilisations is to analyse the histories of commerce, understood as a peculiar literary genre that in eighteenth-century Europe investigated economic, political, intellectual and cultural changes generated by commercial society. Some of these histories were published, while others remained manuscript; some were published explicitly using in their titles the expression Histoire du commerce/History of Trade/Storia del Commercio, others disguised the object of their investigation under more general titles (Discours préliminaire, Introduction, Introduzione, An Historical Narrative), recorded change and put the relationship between the creation of wealth and the birth and decline of civilisation at the core of their reflection. From Pierre-Daniel Huet̓’s Histoire du commerce et de la navigation des anciens (1713), to Guillaume-Thomas Raynal̓’s Histoire philosophique et politique des établissements des Européens dans les deux Indes (1770, 1774 and 1780), the authors of these works, and the political and administrative milieux to which in many cases they referred, were also confronted with the benefits and problems related to the discovery of the New World. Indeed, these works turned into genuine histories of European civilisation and colonialism.