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. Before entering academic life I worked in the private sector at IBM.
My research asks a broad question: how have free societies organised economic and political life in ways that support both prosperity and legitimacy? I am especially interested in the boundaries societies draw around economic and political power—what people consider fair or corrupt, legitimate or illegitimate, and how those judgments change over time.
I have approached these questions from several directions. My current book project examines corruption in early modern England and the development of ideas about public office, private interest, and how corruption is understood and discovered. Earlier work explored constitutional law, the formation of markets, entrepreneurship, and the surprisingly important role of smuggling in connecting early modern economies through the creation of a global offshore of markets.
Much of my recent research has focused on business and social responsibility: why businesspeople have sometimes understood their obligations as extending beyond profit, and how ideas about the social purposes of business have changed over time.
These projects share a common focus on the moral and political foundations of market society—the institutions, values, and expectations that make markets possible and sustain public confidence in them.
My newer work develops these themes in two directions. One project follows entrepreneurs and organisations that have tried not simply to succeed within capitalism, but to improve or transform it. Moving from early cooperative movements to contemporary blockchain ventures, it asks why businesspeople have repeatedly imagined enterprise as a way of changing society.
A second project explores the history of fairness in liberal thought and practice. Fairness is one of the most powerful ideas in modern economic and political life, yet we rarely stop to ask what people mean by it, where those meanings came from, or why perceptions of fairness matter so deeply to the legitimacy of markets and institutions.
As a whole, my work examines how liberal societies build institutions, define legitimate power, respond to failure, and revise themselves over time.
Grants from Canada's Social Science and Humanities Research Council, Wilfrid Laurier University, Harvard University, Oxford University, the University of Tokyo and the Huntington Library have supported my research.
