History

My main research interest is eighteenth-century Britain and Ireland, and particularly their place in the wider world. I have published books on war, the state and society in Britain, Ireland and North America and on Britain and Ireland's relationship with continental Europe. I am now working on a project on the continental European contribution to Britain's empire in the eighteenth century, and European imperial collaboration in the same period.

I teach general courses on British History, 1688-1860, and Colonial and Revolutionary North America. My document-based special subject focuses on the relationship between Britain and its North American colonies between 1760 and 1776 - the opening part of the American Revolution.

Areas of Research Supervision: Eighteenth-Century British, Irish, American, Atlantic, military and international history.

Theses Recently or Currently Supervised:

 -Patronage in the Church of England, 1770-1801

 -The interlinking of India and America in British imperial policy from 1765 to 1774

 -British and Spanish intelligence systems in the War of Jenkin's Ear (1739-1744)

 -British Intellectual History and the historiography of Ancient Persia (1890s-1930s)

 -Migration, freedom and enslavement in the revolutionary Atlantic: the Bahamas, 1783-1800

 -Anglo-German military interactions, 1689-1815

 -The Continental Army and American identities, 1775-1783

 -Anglo-Dutch relations, 1775-1795

Select Publications

- The British Isles and the War of American Independence (2000)
- War, State and Society in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland (2006)

- 'Christians, Catholics, Protestants: The religious links of Britain and Ireland with Continental Europe, c. 1689-1800', English Historical Review (2009)

- 'The British Army, "Military Europe", and the War of American Independence', William & Mary Quarterly (2010)

- Britain, Ireland, and Continental Europe in the Eighteenth Century: Similarities, Connections, Identities (2011)

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