About me

I am an independent scholar from Mid Wales. My research is on global history. The topics that I am currently looking at include:

  • The relationship between trade, industry, and empire in Britain during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and its relationship to the decline of China and India.
  • The role of slavery in the development of the United States.
  • Using the ancestry and life of José Alfredo Martínez de Hoz to tell the history of Argentina from the eighteenth century to the end of the twentieth.

Before becoming an independent scholar, I did a BSc in International Studies with the Open University, then received a scholarship from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) to do a MSc and PhD in Economic History at the London School of Economics, under the supervision of Colin Lewis. I ended up writing a dissertation on ‘The Terms of Trade and the Rise of Argentina in the Long Nineteenth Century’. It was submitted in December 2013, and passed without corrections. Since then, I have continued my research outside of academia. I have published articles in peer-reviewed journals, mainly building on my PhD research, and I maintain an occasional blog on this website, where you’ll also find pages dedicated to the papers I have written and some of the more interesting data and documents that I have gathered.

I live with my wife and our three daughters on a hill in Wales, where I work with my father on his small farm, while also doing various other odd jobs. I consider myself a lucky man.