Dr Hunter Harris

I am Departmental Lecturer in Global and Imperial History and was previously a Postdoctoral Fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford.

Research Interests

My research interests lie at the intersection of imperial history, legal history, and economic history. I am pursuing those interests through two projects. First, a monograph that examines the interactions between merchants, the law, and the elaboration of empire in the eighteenth century British world. Second, a study of the City of London’s participation in Atlantic slavery.

My book manuscript, Trade’s Empire: Merchants and the Law in the Eighteenth-Century British World, is under contract with the Omohundro Institute and the University of North Carolina Press. The book shows how law and trade together made empire on a global scale possible in a commercializing world. Commercial law provided a framework for managing the challenges of trusting trading partners, which underlies all commercial transactions. The expansion of trade thus depended on the extension of law. The unifying forces of commerce and law supplemented each other in establishing economic, cultural, legal, and political ties that made the British Empire a functioning and coherent entity during the eighteenth century. This monograph thus provides a new interpretation of how trade and law jointly constituted the British Empire.

My second project studies the reciprocal relationship between the City of London and Atlantic slavery. The logics of mercantile and financial capitalism elaborated in London drove the intensification of the trade in enslaved people and the expansion of plantation economies. The project therefore examines the ways in which participation in the slave economy helped the City of London become a world financial centre and how the City of London drove the expansion of the plantation system in North America and the Caribbean. In doing so, I seek to tell the story of the rise of London as a financial hub through both its internal dynamics and events occurring in the Americas.

My work has appeared in the American Journal of Legal History, The Conversation, and other outlets.