Peter Sahlins (born April 26, 1957) is an American historian of France and Europe.
He was a professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley, where he specialized in early modern France.
The interests that form the bulk of Peter Sahlins’ work include the social and legal history of early modern France and Europe.
He has written on a range of topics, including the formation of national identities and frontiers (Boundaries: The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenées, UC Press, 1989 ISBN 978-0520074156); Forest Governance, Peasant Culture and Protest in the Nineteenth Century (The War of the Demoiselles in Nineteenth-Century France, Harvard University Press, 1994 ISBN 978-0674308961); State-Building and Immigration in Seventeenth-Century France (with Jean-Francois Dubost, Et si on faisait payer les étrangers?
Louis XIV, les immigrés et quelques autres, Flammarion, 1999 ISBN 978-2082118064); The Premodern History of Nationality Law (Unnaturally French: Foreign Citizens in the Old Regime and After, Cornell University Press, 2004 ISBN 978-0801488399); and most recently on animals, 1668: The Year of the Animal in France (New York: Zone Books, 2017 ISBN 978-1935408994).