Dr Stephen Tuffnell

01865 278889

stephen.tuffnell@history.ox.ac.uk

I am a scholar of the United States’ relationship to the world. I am interested in the histories of American emigration, the history of commodities such as gold and ice, and in rethinking the geography of American Empire in the late-nineteenth century.

I am currently writing Imperial Odyssey: The USS Ticonderoga and the Search for U.S. Empire. The book takes readers off the traditional imperial map of the United States via the globe-spanning cruise of the USS Ticonderoga between 1879 and 1881. From unfamiliar vantages in Atlantic Africa, the Western Indian Ocean, the Middle East, and East Asia the book examines the immense imperial archive created by the cruise, exposing the tenacious workings of empire and the insatiable appetite for new knowledge of the world that drove the endeavour of creating a global steam empire.

My first book, Made in Britain: Nation and Emigration in Nineteenth-Century America tells the untold story of American migration to Britain in the nineteenth century. From Liverpool and London, American emigrants produced Atlantic capitalism and managed transfers of goods, culture, and capital that were integral to US nation-building. The volume demonstrates that the United States’ struggle toward independent nationhood was entangled at every step with the world’s most powerful empire.