Assistant Professor
Fall 2023: Thursdays, 2:00 - 5:00 PM (make an appointment by clicking here.)
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.
'The Alternative to Perpetual Peace: Britain, Ireland and the Case for Union in Friedrich Gentz’s Historisches Journal (1799-1800)’. Modern Intellectual History, Vol. 13, No. 1 (2016), 63-91.
‘“Stay at Home”: The Politics of Nuclear Civil Defence, 1968-83’, Twentieth Century British History, Vol. 23, No. 3 (2012) 383-407.
Ph.D. - Cambridge University (2016)
M. Phil. - Cambridge University (2012)
B.A. - Oxford University (2010)