I did my BA at the University of East Anglia (with a year at George Washington University in Washington DC) in American History and Politics and then a PhD at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, where I worked with Jack P. Greene and Ronald G. Walters.  After a brief spell as a lecturer at Towson State University in Baltimore, I joined Swansea in 1992 and am now Senior Lecturer. I am a fellow of the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia, a member of many academic societies, and am on the organising committees of the British Group in Early American History and the European Early American Studies Association.     

Current research

I am currently completing a book entitled The Tobacco-Plantation South in the Early American Atlantic World in the series on The Americas in the Early Modern Atlantic World (eds. Jack P. Greene and Amy Turner Bushnell) to be published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2012.  That book completes the work I started for my PhD.  I have in the meantime developed research interests in the development of the early British-American empire and in particular I am researching the impact of the Glorious Revolution in the British-American Atlantic world from 1688 to the US Bill of Rights of 1791.   

Principal publications

Books

• British America, 1500-1800: Creating Colonies, Imagining an Empire (London: Hodder Arnold , 2005)

Book-chapters & journal articles

• 'Yeoman Farmers in a Planters’ Republic: Socioeconomic Conditions and Relations in Early National Prince George’s County, Maryland', Journal of the Early Republic, 29 (2009), 63-99
• ' "The torment with the servants": Management and Labor in a Southern Maryland Plantantion Household in the Early Nineteenth Century', Maryland Historical Magazine ,102 (2007), 131-155
• 'Similarities and Continuities: Free Society in the Tobacco South before and after the American Revolution', in Eliga Gould and Peter S. Onuf (eds.), Empire and Nation: the American Revolution in the Atlantic World (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 136-158, 341-345
• ' "Objects of distress": Inequality and Poverty in Early Nineteenth-Century Prince George's County', Maryland Historical Magazine, 96 (2001), 141-162
• 'Chronology', in Jack P. Greene & J. R. Pole (eds.), A Companion to the American Revolution (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 707-742
• 'Distribution of Wealth in Prince George's County, Maryland, 1800-1820', Journal of Economic History, 60 (2000), 847-855.
• 'Landlessness and Tenancy in Early National Prince George's County, Maryland', William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 62 (2000), 569-598
• ' "One must differentiate oneself a little": Economy, Society and Refinement in Early National Prince George's County, Maryland', Borderlines: Studies in American Culture, 5 (1998), 253-273

Recent conference papers and invited lectures:

• ‘“[T]he way to make a huge fortune, easily and without risk”: Economic Strategy and Tactics among Tobacco-South Planters in the Early National United States’ Marprof International Colloquium on Merchant Practice in the Age of Commerce, 1650-1850, University of Chicago Centre in Paris, and University of Paris 7 – Denis Diderot, June, 2011
• ‘“From those who had the sheriff at their heels”: Credit and Debt in the Atlantic Tobacco Trade and its Effects on a Local Economy and Society: A Case Study of Post-Revolutionary Prince George’s County, Maryland’, European Early American Studies Association, University of Paris 7 – Denis Diderot, April 2010.
• I am on the organising committee of a conference on “1812 in the Americas” to be held at the University of Brest in June 2012 and I organised and hosted the annual conference of the British Group in Early American History at Swansea University in September 2007. 

Principal research awards, fellowships, & prizes

• Funding for the Annual Conference of the British Group in Early American History, 2007, from the US Embassy, the Mellon Foundation (Cambridge University), and the Omohundro Institute for Early American History and Culture (Williamsburg, Virginia)
• British Academy Small Travel Grant, 2006
• Awarded proxime accessit in Royal Historical Society Alexander Prize Essay Competition 1996 for ' "Dependence" and "Subservience" in the Tobacco Plantation South: Landlord and Tenant in Prince George's County, Maryland, 1769-1822', revised and published in the William and Mary Quarterly