Stafford, James

James Stafford is a political and intellectual historian of eighteenth and nineteenth-century Europe.

His first book, The Case of Ireland: Commerce, Empire and the European Order, 1776-1848 (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.

Current research interests include the ‘system’ of bilateral free-trade treaties constructed by Britain, France and other European states in the 1860s and 1870s, as well as the politics of energy and natural resources in nineteenth-century Ireland.

He co-convenes the University Seminar in Modern British History, and is also a member of the New York-Cambridge Training Collaboration in Twentieth-Century British History (NYCTC). He is a contributing editor for Renewal: A Journal of Social Democracy.

Publications

Education

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