Educated at Oxford and Yale, I was Junior Research Fellow at Corpus Christi College, Oxford before taking a permanent post at the University of Kent, then a Chair at Lancaster University. I've held visiting positions at Korea University, the University of Bamberg, and the University of Tokyo.

Research Interests and PhD Supervision

My work assesses the role of global forces in shaping British history across the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. I have a particular interest in trading corporations and the way they broker cross-cultural dialogue about governance and political economy. Much of my work has focused on the East India Company as well as the transatlantic traffic in enslaved African people. My PhD supervision has fallen within these areas.

TASTADE, a global scientific collaboration, will identify and study the tens of thousands of people who financed the transatlantic traffic in enslaved African people to appreciate their significance for European development – not just financially, but culturally, and politically.

Teaching

The rise and fall of African chattel slavery; the East India Company, the global history of London

Expertise and Public Speaking

I've worked with many organisations to help them understand their connection to the history of empire. My work has appeared in newspapers around the world. Recently I have been Series Consultant for the BBC 2 Series, Finding Britain's Slave-traders.

Selected Publications

• Britain's Slave Traders: A Forgotten History (Bodley Head, 2026)
• Global Trade and the Shaping of English Freedom (Oxford University Press, 2023)
• The Corporation as a Protagonist in Global History (Brill, 2018)[ed. with David Veevers]
• A History of Socially Responsible Business, 1600-1950, (Palgrave, 2017) [ed. with David Chan Smith]
• “Freedom’s Debt: The Royal African Company and the Politics of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1672 - 1752”, (Chapel Hill: Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture by University of North Carolina Press, 2013).