About Me
I am currently a professor at Wilfrid Laurier University (Canada) in the Department of History where I teach business and legal history.
My doctoral work was completed at Harvard University after which I served as the dean of Kirkland House, one of the twelve undergraduate residential communities of the university.
I have also worked in the private sector for IBM in brand management.
My research explores the history of political and moral economy with a focus on human cooperation and polarisation. I am now finishing a new book on corruption in early modern Britain that explores how different ideas about corruption - religious, legal, and administrative -- undermined cooperation and led to violence among religious, economic and political groups.
My approach to understanding cooperation historically is institutional. Broadly, I want to know how legal systems and markets have incentivised individuals and groups to co-ordinate their activities, even when those same individuals and groups may have dissimilar beliefs, goals and values. I am particularly interested in the cultural and moral underpinnings of cooperation, especially ideas of fairness and reciprocity, as they shape institutions and facilitate people co-ordinating work and civic life.
I am currently researching projects on the moral economy of liberal capitalism. I seek to understand how capitalist exchange and markets have been represented as fair and cooperative, or challenged on those grounds. I am exploring, for example, the importance of business interests in classical liberal thought, and the reconstruction of eighteenth-century illicit commerce around Great Britain, its global networks, and the moral debate over smuggling that led to the American Revolution.
Grants from Canada's Social Science and Humanities Research Council, Wilfrid Laurier University, Harvard University, Oxford University, and the Huntington Library have supported my research.
My CV is here:
