About Me

I am a third year part-time PhD researcher supervised by Professor Mark KnightsLink opens in a new window and Dr. Guido van MeersbergenLink opens in a new window. My research interests include early modern political and mercantile cultures, 'history from below' especially early modern families and kinship networks, overseas encounter and exploration, and material culture.

My earlier professional career was spent first as a Human Resources (HR) practitioner and then as management consultant with 'Big Four' professional services and specialist global consultancy firms.

My Research

The title of my PhD project is Merchants at the Margins: English Merchant Families in the Ottoman Levant, 1670-1730. I am interested in the social, emotional and cultural processes at work amongst merchant families and kinship networks as they traded far from home, subject to multiple institutional regulation, working across cultures, and often with a subaltern status amongst those with whom they traded. My project addresses the issues of family and early modern globalisation in the context of English trade in the Ottoman Levant.

Given the challenges encountered by these merchant families, my project considers their agency in both familial and commercial spheres, and the extent to which they adapted to the circumstances in which they lived and worked. By reconstructing frameworks of family and kinship through topics such as barriers to entering the trade, living arrangements, marriages, partnerships, debt, death, and inheritance, I consider whether the meaning and dynamics of family and kinship changed for these merchant families. In doing so I examine the influence of spatial, temporal and geographic factors on the emotional frameworks of families and kinship.

Merchant families worked across a complex web of institutions and cultures, each with its own affiliations and attributes. Much of the historiography of trade in the early modern Mediterranean has focused on institutions, cosmopolitanism, and cross-cultural working, with the role of merchant families being relatively under-studied. From the perspective of this latter category, my project adds to current scholarship by showing how merchant families interacted with institutions and cultures, both changing them and being changed by them in the process. How merchant families negotiated rules and regulations, including their use (or avoidance) of legal processes, is a topic in which I am interested. Similarly, I also focus on the impact which their exposure to cultural differences had on merchant families.

The timescale I have chosen was a period of transition in English trade in the Levant. Numbers of Levant Company members were dropping significantly, leaving much of the trade in the hands of larger merchant businesses. Despite periods of warfare, natural disasters, and growing competition, volumes of trade did not decline significantly, and fortunes could still be made by some. The role of merchant families in this scenario is my topic for study.

My project therefore explores themes of public and private interests, regulation and agency, corporate organisation and familial and kinship networks, core and periphery, cosmopolitanism and cross-cultural trade.

Academic History

2022-2029 PhD in History, University of Warwick

2019-2021 MA in History (Early Modern) with Distinction, University of Warwick

1992-1994 MBA, University of Birmingham

1979-1982 BA (Hons) in History, University of Lancaster

Memberships

Early Modern and Eighteenth Century Centre, University of Warwick

Global History and Culture Centre, University of Warwick

History Lab, Institute of Historical Research

Postgraduate Member of the Royal Historical Society