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Tom is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in History. He works at the interstices between intellectual history, economic history, and legal history, with a focus on Britain and its empire in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. He also has intersecting interests in the history of economic and political thought in Europe.
Tom is currently preparing the manuscript of his first book, Capitalist Feudalism: Law, History, and Political Economy in Eighteenth-Century Scotland, for publication with Cambridge University Press. The book offers a history of the surprising role of feudalism in shaping both 'liberal' political economy and agrarian capitalism in late eighteenth-century Scotland. His second project, 'Capital Accumulation in Britain, 1685-1914' uses land registration data to provide a new account of the relationship between colonial wealth, metropolitan landownership, and economic growth in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain.
Before joining UCL in January 2023, Tom held a post-doctoral research fellowship at the University of Turin and completed his undergraduate and graduate education at the University of Cambridge. His research has been supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Isaac Newton Trust, King’s college Cambridge, the Lewis Walpole Library, Fondazione 1563, and the Leverhulme Trust.
Publications
- 'The Endurance of Entail: feudal law, political economy, and land reform in late eighteenth-century Britain’, English Historical Review (forthcoming, 2025).
- ‘The “antient” history: land, “slavery”, and feudal political economy’, in Felix Waldmann and Max Skjönsberg eds., The Cambridge Companion to David Hume’s History of England (Cambridge, forthcoming 2026).
- ‘The Scottish Enlightenment and the Remaking of Modern History’, The Historical Journal 66/4, 746-72.
- ‘Property, Space, and Sacred History in John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government’, Modern Intellectual History 15/2 (2018), 327-352.
- ‘David Hume the Polymath’, History of European Ideas 43/6 (2017), 683-686.
Please note that as a postdoctoral fellow, Tom is currently unable to supervise prospective doctoral students.
