Stafford, James

James Stafford is a historian of politics, law and intellectual life in Europe since 1700, interested in debates and struggles over property, trade and global order.

His first book, The Case of Ireland: Commerce, Empire, and the European Order, 1750-1848 (Cambridge, 2022), offers a fresh account of Ireland’s place in European debates about commerce and empire during a global era of war and revolution. Drawing on a broad range of writings from merchants, agrarian improvers, philosophers, politicians and revolutionaries across Europe, the book shows how Ireland became a field of conflict and projection between rival systems of political economy, associated with the warring empires of Britain and France. In so doing, it provides new interpretations of central events in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Irish and British-imperial history: the United Irish rising of 1798, the British-Irish Union of 1801, and the Great Famine of 1845-51.  

His second book project, Shadow Politics: Tariffs, Treaties and Trade Wars in Nineteenth-Century Europe, examines nineteenth-century European trade diplomacy from a perspective that looks beyond traditional oppositions between ‘free trade’ and ‘protectionist’ policies. It reconstructs the complex political and legal norms that made European commercial negotiations into a recognisable ‘system’, and analyses treaties and tariff schedules as sites for creating knowledge about commodities, production processes, and the place of Europe in a ‘world economy’ that was being refashioned by imperial exploitation and rivalry.

Other research interests include the history of Irish political and economic thought, the longer-run history of agriculture and the ‘agrarian question’ in European empires, and contemporary British and European politics, about which he has written for the Guardian, Dissent, and Renewal, among others.

In 2024-5, he will be an Alexander von Humboldt fellow at the Freie Universität Berlin.

Publications

Education

Ph.D. - Cambridge University (2016)
M. Phil. - Cambridge University (2012)
B.A. - Oxford University (2010)