Research Interests

My work explores the cultural, political, and legal dimensions of economic change in Britain since the 1700s. I have published on subjects ranging from the early history of corporate governance and the regulation of commercial fraud, to the history of the financial press and the growth of advertising.

My current research has two strands. The first explores gender and financial markets, focusing on the neglected history of women stockbrokers in the century before they were admitted to the London Stock Exchange in 1973. My book on the subject is published in 2025 by Oxford University Press. The second strand examines the financialisation of everyday life in Britain since the mid nineteenth century. Concentrating on ordinary people and everyday experiences rather than financial elites and ideologies, this research seeks to provide a history of finance 'from below'. It is particularly interested in the spatial, material, and emotional dimensions of people's engagement with finance.

Before this, I collaborated on an AHRC-funded project exploring the history of financial advice since the eighteenth century. Tracking the genre from domestic advice manuals of the eighteenth century to modern-day blogs, it considers how financial advice has actively made and remade the very markets about which it advises. Our book, Invested: How Three Centuries of Stock Market Advice Reshaped Our Money, Markets, and Minds, was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2022.

My earlier research explored different facets of corporate culture in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain. My first monograph, Creating Capitalism, won the 2008 Economic History Society Prize for best first monograph in Economic and Social History; my second, Shareholder Democracies (co-authored with Mark Freeman and Robin Pearson), won the Ralph Gomory Prize for best business history book of 2012. My third, Boardroom Scandal, was published by Oxford University Press in 2013.

Besides books, I have also published articles in many leading historical journals, including English Historical Review, Historical Journal, Historical Research, Journal of British Studies, and Past & Present.