History

My research focuses on re-thinking the relation between Britain and its empire in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I am particularly interested in the ways in which empire impacted upon metropolitan life, how the empire was lived 'at home', and how English identities, both masculine and feminine, were constituted in relation to the multiple 'others' of the empire. Civilising Subjects looks at the process of mutual constitution, both of colonizer and colonized, in England and Jamaica in the period between the 1830s and the 1860s. My recent book, Macaulay and Son: Architects of Imperial Britain (2012), focuses on the significance of the Macaulays, father and son, in defining the parameters of nation and empire in the early nineteenth century.

I was Principal Investigator of the ESRC-funded project Legacies of British Slave Ownership,(2004-12), and now of our new ESRC/AHRC funded project The Structure and Significance of British-Caribbean Slave-Ownership, 1763-1833 (2013-16)

YouTube Links

Britain's Legacy of Slavery

Voicing Slavery (Lunch Hour Lecture)

Podcasts

Macaulay and Son: an imperial story (IHR)

Theses Previously Supervised

 -'Thinking with missionaries': an investigation into missionary discourses about the peoples and places they encountered in India and Southern Africa, c.1840-1910

 -Historical production in spaces of empire: Locating the histories of Sir James Mackintosh

 -Philanthropy in Birmingham and Sydney, 1860-1914: class, gender and race

 -Reconfiguring colonial subjectivities

 - Relative Distances: family and empire between Britain, British Columbia and India, 1858-1901

 -'All is race': race, nation and Empire in the writings and praxis of Benjamin Disraeli

 -The Benevolent Merchant: George Hibbert and the staging of West Indian identity, 1757-1837

 -Vice beyond the pale: representing the 'white slave' traffic in Britain 1879-1912

 -Constructing Ionian Identities: the Ionian Islands in the British Imagination: 1815-1864

 -Black Migration and Community Formation: the re-making of Brixton and Notting Hill, 1958-1981

 -A complicated calling: female British medical missionaries and professional identity, 1874-1920

 -Domestic servants in England and India in the 19th Century

 -'Possessing Slaves': Ownership, Compensation, and British Metropolitan Society at the Time of Emancipation

Select Publications

- Macaulay and Son: Architects of Imperial Britain (2012)

-ed. with Keith McClelland, Race, Nation and Empire. Making Histories, 1750 to the Present (2010)

- Civilising Subjects: metropole and colony in the English imagination, 1830-1867
- (2002) awarded the Morris D. Forkosch Prize by the American Historical AssociationCultures of Empire: colonizers in Britain and the empire in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A reader (2000)
- with Keith McClelland & Jane Rendall, Defining the Victorian nation: class, race, gender and the reform act of 1867 (2000)
- with Leonore Davidoff, Family fortunes: men and women of the English middle class, 1780-1850 (new edn. 2002)
- 'Of Gender and Empire: reflections on the nineteenth century', in P Levine (ed) Gender and Empire, (2004) 46 - 76
- Edited with Sonya o. Rose, At Home with the Empire: metropolitan culture and the imperial world, (2006)
- 'Imperial Careering at Home: Harriet Martineau on Empire' in A Lambert and A Lester (eds) Colonial Lives Across the British Empire. Imperial Careering in the Long Nineteenth Century, (2006) 335 - 359

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