Dr Tom Pye

tom.pye@chch.ox.ac.uk

I am a historian of modern Britain and its empire. Before joining Christ Church as Stipendiary Lecturer in British and European History, I was a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at UCL and, before that, a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Turin. I completed my undergraduate and graduate degrees at Cambridge.

My work operates and the interfaces between intellectual, legal, and economic history in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, and I have intersecting interests in the history of political thought. I’m currently finishing the MS of my first book, The Scottish Enlightenment and the Land Question, which reframes the political and economic thought of Enlightenment Scotland around the divisive question of how landownership should be related to economic ‘improvement’. 

Funded by the Economic History Society, I’m also developing a project on the role of land in the accumulation, distribution, and repatriation of capital in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain. By exploring underused archival land registers, the project aims to show how the concentration and distribution of land changed during industrialisation; provide new data on the scale and location of colonial wealth repatriation; and, for the first time, generate data on the extent to which landowners used legal devices like trust and entail to shield their ballooning capital from the market. In doing so, it hopes to elucidate the role of what I call ‘decommodification’ in the emergence of capitalism.