It is generally agreed that an economic agent is successful to the extent that he/she can generate profit, or more accurately "value", especially by improving the production function or the market strategies. The strategies thus picked determine what value is created, and the most efficient ones gain privileged status through competition. However, what seems obvious for economic theory is far less clear historically, since the very definition of profit is somewhat confused, and the evaluation of profit-generating strategies far from self-evident, as soon as one turns to eras preceding the XIXth century and industrial development.. Merchants, the most clearly profit-oriented agents in pre-industrial times, have often been studied. But their profits and actual practices (accounting, business plans, profit-seeking strategies generally speaking) have turned out to be almost impossible to analyze with post-1850 conceptual tools, so much so that one would be hard put to find one complete balance sheet of a merchant firm anywhere in the historiography. The building of quantified analyses of merchant accounts has so far been defeated by a number of features of these accounts, including the indeterminacy of price and quality hierarchies, the impossibility to trace goods through the various transactions, and the high proportion of assets not accounted for or of a non-quantifiable nature such as information, credit or networks. There are actually very few data on the topic, which means that merchant entrepreneurial strategies remain to this day largely opaque, with serious consequences for the understanding of what was after all the starting point of XIXth-century industrial development. We propose to start with the structure of Early Modern merchant accounting, and use its internal coherence to highlight agent strategies both quantitatively and qualitatively, following a two-pronged thrust. On one hand, we plan to record each transaction as the evolution of a specific account in a universe of creditor and debitor accounts; on the other hand, we will build categories of products with their associated prices without trying to differentiate within these sets of products. Rather than trying to understand discrete transactions,we end up with a global vision of a series of accounts, each associated with a tendency toward profit or loss, as well as a series of associated sets of products / prices, each also linked to a positive or negative balance. We can thus avoid the pitfalls which one meets with when attempting to analyse discrete transactions, and build an approximation of what the merchant entrepreneur himself "saw" in his accounts, in other words a perceived profit rather than a profit per se. In a second stage of this study, we plan to confront this perceived profit with the qualitative data one can derive from letters, diaries, etc., and eventually with actual merchant strategies. This should enable us to better understand the latter, and in particular to weigh the influence exerted on them by historically contextual variables such as kinship, socio-cultural networks, ideological and generally non strictly economic preferences, as well as the legal-institutional or customary framework agents operated in. In practice, entering individual accounting transactions into a database is an extremely time-consuming process, and we believe that the project can only be completed for ten archival funds or so, picked for their wealth of data, since we need to combine quantitative and qualitative sources. We will concentrate on a limited number of large merchant cities, Bordeaux, Nantes, Rouen, Nancy, Verviers, Amsterdam, London, Boston, and Philadelphia. Beyond the synergies born from the putting in common of the intellectual resources of a good proportion of the researchers interested in this question in France, a first, concrete result will be the building of a digitized data set of accounting transactions, available for statistical analysis. But our main goal is to reach more precise conclusions on how merchant entrepreneurs perceived their profit, and what strategies this perception brought about. This should help us understand better the economic evolutions of the Early Modern period, little known and hard to explain because of the lack of detailed information on agent behaviour. Our conclusions should also be applicable to more recent periods, since they could be used to understand better the continuities and discontinuities in the economic strategies of agents, and how much the historical context influenced the latter.

Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) is a very powerful analytical tool employed in a wide range of situations, such as elucidation of organic structures, biochemical studies, pharmaceutical analysis or in vivo spectroscopy. However, it suffers from major limitations due to strong overlap between peaks, and this is particularly true for complex metabolic mixtures. Therefore, 1D NMR offers a limited capacity for the precise quantification of interesting biomarkers in complex samples. Fortunately, two dimensional (2D) spectroscopy allows the unraveling of spectral complexity along a second dimension and thus presents a great potential to unambiguously and simultaneously measure a larger number of metabolite contributions. However, it is still rarely used for quantification, first because quantitative analysis by 2D NMR requires a calibration procedure due to the multi-impulsional nature of 2D NMR experiments, and above all because of the prohibitive experiment duration that is necessary to obtain such a calibration curve, due to the multi-scan nature of 2D NMR experiments. Fortunately, the past few years have witnessed the emergence of a novel and promising method that makes it possible to acquire a whole 2D spectrum in a fraction of a second. This so-called “ultrafast 2D NMR” method, proposed by Pr. Lucio Frydman, is based on a single-scan approach. Very recently, we have successfully implemented this methodology at the CEISAM laboratory. We have proposed several methodological developments to make ultrafast 2D NMR suitable for quantitative analysis of mixtures, thus enlarging the application range of this promising method. Based on this experience, the ambition of the QUANTUM project is to develop a complete methodology to set ultrafast 2D NMR as a standard tool for fast and precise quantitative analysis of complex metabolic mixtures. This project will consider original NMR developments and programming aspects, focusing on the resolution and sensitivity aspects of ultrafast methods. A complete analytical validation of these optimized methods will be carried out, in order to make them applicable to quantitative studies of real metabolic samples such as tumor cell extracts. At the end of the project, we will propose a package including the analytical strategy, the pulse sequences and the pre-acquisition and processing routines for quantitative ultrafast 2D experiments, that will be easy to implement in routine. This package will be available online on the CEISAM website, for free distribution to the academic community Our interest in ultrafast 2D NMR is an emergent research axis in our research group, which has an international expertise in isotopic analysis applied to natural product authentication and for elucidating metabolic pathways. However, even though we started working on ultrafast 2D NMR in 2007, we became in three years the second group in the world (first in Europe) regarding the number of papers on ultrafast 2D NMR. Moreover, we are the authors of the only paper published so far reporting the application of ultrafast 2D NMR to quantitative analysis. Fortified by our experience and in order to enlarge the diffusion of ultrafast methods, we wish to make ultrafast 2D NMR accessible in routine to a large number of research groups in the world, by developing adapted programs integrated to existing commercial software, and by making these available to the scientific community. Finally, the QUANTUM project will be an opportunity to develop fast quantitative 2D NMR methods applied to metabolomic studies, which really constitutes a new approach in the CEISAM laboratory. It should open new application perspectives that are currently out of the laboratory expertise.