I am a historian of Britain and its Empire, of comparative revolutions, comparative empires, and of northern Europe more broadly. I am both a deeply committed archival historian and a scholar who believes profoundly that historians should engage with the social sciences. My first book, Protestantism and Patriotism, was an entangled and comparative study of English and Dutch politics, culture, and society in the mid-seventeenth century. I traced the decline of apocalyptic thinking and the rise of notions of political economy in England and the Dutch Republic. My second major monograph, 1688: The First Modern Revolution, offered both a major revisionist account of England's Glorious Revolution and a reappraisal of the literature on revolutions more broadly. I showed that far from being an unrevolutionary revolution, the Revolution of 1688 radically transformed English state and society. The revolution, I suggest, can only be understood by placing it in a European and global context. Since 1688 was a radical revolution, I suggest, it is imperative to rethink the nature of revolutions since so much of that literature assumed that the later eighteenth-century French Revolution was the first modern revolution. My third monograph, The Heart of the Declaration, argued that by placing the American Revolution and its seminal document, the Declaration of Independence, in an imperial rather than proto-national context it becomes clear that Americans broke away from Britain not because they resented the imperial state but because they wanted a different kind of state—one that would actively promote social and economic prosperity and equality.

I have just completed a fourth major monograph, that will be published by Yale University Press in 2027, placing the emergence of the global British Empire in a dialogue with the broad social scientific literature on comparative Empires.  I ask why is the legacy of the British Empire so complex and contradictory?  Why did the former British Empire leave in its wake both a series of inclusive institutions and the lasting scars of economically extractive activities?  I argue that the emergence of English and then British imperial institutions were fundamentally shaped by competing partisan agendas.  It was the centrality of partisanship on an imperial rather than narrowly British scale that explains why Britain ultimately lost vast imperial possessions in North America while simultaneously acquiring even more substantial possessions in South Asia.  The patterns of British imperial development can only be understood by embracing a global and imperial optic and rejecting historiographical traditions that are national and proto-national.     

 I am currently engaged in three research projects.  First, I am working on examining the phenomenon of British economic takeoff and divergence from the perspective of imperial consumption rather than imperial consumption.  What role did consumers outside of Britain play in shaping economic development in the long eighteenth century?  Second, I am engaged on an intense study of Britain in the 1780s.  What tied together movements for Parliamentary reform, the abolition of slavery, Irish political reform, the settling of New South Wales, political reform in South Asia, and desires for European free trade?  This project examines the 1780s, rather than the 1790s or early 19th century, as the key moment that the British Empire took an authoritarian turn.  Finally, I am engaged in attempting to revisit the fall of the English Commonwealth and Protectorate and the establishment of the Restoration monarchy from an imperial perspective.  What role did the sugar revolution in Barbados, the re-orientation of the English East India Company, the failure of the plantation project in Ireland have on this pivotal transition in English, British, and imperial history?      

My research has been supported over the years with fellowships from the Harvard Society of Fellows, the ACLS, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center, the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, and the American Philosophical Society. I have been a visitor at All Souls College (Oxford), EHESS (Paris), IMT (Lucca) and the University of Warwick.

I am deeply committed to both undergraduate and graduate education. I am happy to supervise senior theses and doctoral dissertations on any topic in British history, the history of the British Empire, Atlantic history, Dutch history, political economy, revolutions, comparative empires, history of European ideas, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century religious history, and the cultural history of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe.

I have supervised over twenty doctoral dissertations covering a wide range of topics. Some topics have included the origins of humanitarianism in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe, the rise of the Patriot party in the eighteenth-century British Empire, the emergence of associational life in the British Empire, the East India Company and the emergence of British India, politics of the navy and the British Empire, the transformation of British India in the late eighteenth century, the Anglo-French-Indian struggle for the Ohio Valley, British imperial indigenous policy in Scotland, North America, and Bengal, the high church reaction to the Revolution of 1688, the remaking of the Church of England after the Act of Toleration, the Scottish Kirk in the early eighteenth century, the rise of opera in Britain, the making of the English Caribbean in the late seventeenth century, British monetary policy in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the rise of slave labor in the British Empire, Leisler's Rebellion and its consequences, British party politics in the early eighteenth century, the persistence of Catholicism in the British Empire, and many more.

I am a co-convenor of the Empires forum and the Institutions Seminar.  I serve on the boards of the Nicholson Center for British Studies and the Center for International Social Science Research at UChicago.  

I am currently Vice President and President elect of the Social Science History Asasociation.