I am from the UK and studied history first at Oxford and then Cambridge. I've also had spells working in the UK Parliament and editing a social-democratic policy journal, Renewal. After postdoctoral work in the Research College 'World Politics' at Bielefeld University I joined the history department at Columbia University as an Assistant Professor in 2021.

My research concerns the history of Europe in the world during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with a focus on economics, politics and intellectual life. My first book, The Case of Ireland: Commerce, Empire and the European Order 1750-1848, is a history of political and economic thought in and about Ireland during the 'global age of revolutions', which shows how Ireland became a space of rivalry and projection between the ideologies and political economies of the rival French and British empires. As a Humboldt fellow at the FU Berlin, I'm working on a new research project that examines nineteenth-century European trade diplomacy from a new perspective. Looking beyond conventional oppositions between ‘free trade’ and ‘protectionist’ policies within nation states, my work seeks instead to reconstruct the complex international norms that made European commercial negotiations into a recognisable ‘system’. It also seeks to connect diplomatic history to the spatial, material and environmental dimensions of international trade, analysing treaties and tariff schedules as sites for creating knowledge about commodities, production processes, and the place of Europe in a global political economy that was being refashioned by imperial exploitation and rivalry.

Selected publications

The Case of Ireland: Commerce, Empire and the European Order, 1750-1848, Cambridge University Press, 2022

'The Alternative to Perpetual Peace: Britain, Ireland and the Case for Union in Friedrich Gentz’s Historisches Journal (1799-1800)’. Modern Intellectual History, Vol. 13, No. 1 (2016), 63-91.

‘“Stay at Home”: The Politics of Nuclear Civil Defence, 1968-83’, Twentieth Century British History, Vol. 23, No. 3 (2012) 383-407.