Email: portico-services@ucl.ac.uk
Help Desk: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/ras/portico/helpdesk
- Honorary Professor of British History
- Dept of History
- Faculty of S&HS
I have been at UCL since 1987. Before that I worked in Cambridge, which is where I took my degrees.


Mainly I work on British (not English) history between 1660 and 1800, though I sometimes stray a bit into the nineteenth century. I started out as an economic historian, interested in the early industrial revolution. I now explore the intersections of state and the economy in the period, hitherto especially via parliamentary legislation, but now also the geography of fiscal exaction and in the future, hopefully, smuggling and evading the law. I'm a firm believer in the virtues of simple quantification as an aid both to comprehension and communication.
Mainly in British history, though I've recently developed an MA course on the concept of a seventeenth-century general crisis that requires consideration of European and extra-European history.
1982 | Doctor of Philosophy | University of Cambridge | |
1979 | Bachelor of Arts | University of Cambridge |