After completing my PhD at Cambridge University and post-doctoral work at Kent University, I joined The University of Manchester in 2018 as a Presidential Fellow in Economic Cultures. I was appointed Senior Lecturer in 2022, Professor in 2024, and Director of the Centre for Economic Cultures in 2025. Between 2024 and 2029 I am Principle Investigator for the ERC-funded project INTRECCI.

I am interested in histories of globalisation and capitalism and have conducted research in Africa, America, Asia and Europe, working to understand how everyday lives and behaviours bring about systemic changes in local and global economies. My first book Merchants: The Community that Shaped England’s Trade and Empire was a 2021 Aspects of History Book of the Year and won the Ralph Gomory Prize in 2023. My second book, Ruthless: A New History of Britain's Rise to Wealth and Power, will be published in 2025.

My research interests, at their broadest, seek to uncover the origins of our globalised world and the impact that this long history of economic transformation still has today. Over the past millennia, international trade has driven economic development, restructured societies, and brought about the vast movement of goods, people and ideas. Yet, as recent de-coupling from China and conflict with Russia has shown, the globalised system can be fragile. Whereas the supremacy of unipolar ‘western’ institutional practices defined late twentieth century globalisation, the twenty-first century looks set to see international trade take place in a multipolar institutional context. Understanding the impact of these changes requires new ways of thinking about global institutional development: ones that recognises enduring, alternative institutional norms that have never fully been subsumed within ‘western’ practice. This raises important questions about how globalisation developed in the first place, as the traditional model of European imperial expansion imposing institutions on the world is unfit for purpose. We must ask instead why global actors adapted, adopted or opposed institutional transformation and how these processes shaped and reshaped what would become the common institutions of global international trade.

My first book focused on the individuals and institutions that underpinned England's commercial expansion in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and set the foundations for much of Britain's consequent economic development. Building on this, my forthcoming book Ruthless examines the ways in which Britain's economy developed through to the early nineteenth century - an expansion that was fuelled by innovative and entrepreneurial activities in Britain, but also the impact of colonialism, slavery and empire. Understanding the processes of 'capitalism' and the origins of Britain's industrialisation requires bringing these together. 

These foundations underpin my current and ongoing research agenda, which is supported by an ERC Starting Grant for the INTRECCI project. This project will use archives from across the world and an interdisciplinary methodology to deliver a global and intrinsically comparative analysis that will reveal globalisation’s multipolar and adaptive institutional origins. Specifically, it will focus on institutional transformation between 1450 and 1750 in three vital nodes of the premodern world economy – the Gulf of Guinea, the Gulf of Khambhat, and the Straits of Malacca. By developing a systematic approach for analysing institutional transformation across linguistic, imperial and cultural boundaries, this project will integrate local and global analysis of premodern trade to challenge long held beliefs about the origins of capitalism, globalisation and European economic dominance.Instead of focusing on states, empires, or corporations, I peek under the hood of these seemingly monolithic, homogenous entities to find the individuals who were the beating heart of this processes. 

I believe that focusing on people – their everyday activities and values and their experiences of contact with the outside world – helps us to understand the cultural conditions of global capitalism in a much more nuanced way. Rather than finding a state-centric and rigid model of globalisation imposed on the world from boardrooms in Amsterdam and London, we instead discover that the origins of global capitalism are de-centred, open to the roles played by men and women from all walks of life across the world. We can see economics not only as trade-flows and stock markets but also as the day-to-day activities of individuals, families and communities. This is the central focus of a textbook I have written with Richard Smith on Global Trade in the Premodern World, which introduce students to millenia-long histories of trade, travel and globaliastion across Eurasia.

My work has been published in numerous academic journals and books, and I have received prestigious funding awards from the British Academy, Arts and Humanities Research Council, Economic and Social Research Council and European Research Council, among others, that has allowed me to undertake cutting edge research into histories of capitalism and globalisation. I was elected to serve as Council Member for the Hakluyt Society (2017-21) and the Economic History Society (2021-24).

In addition to my academic work, I maintain strong relationships with finance and policy sectors, with a particular focus on economic security, innovation, and long-run economic change. Including through work with the Manchester Institute of Innovation Research, I provide expert advice on topics related to innovation, technology and systemic economic challenges.

I have supervised a number of MA and PhD students in economic hsitory and I welcome enquiries from students interested in any aspect of histories of capitalism and globalisation, especially in the pre-modern world.