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.
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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.
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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.
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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:
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