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About Me

I am Associate Professor of history at Texas Tech University. My research interests include the origins and consequences of England’s Financial Revolution, the development of the British transatlantic empire, ideas of political economy, labor and slavery in the early modern world, and the development of early modern political culture. My latest book project, The Financial Revolution and the Politics of Moral Crisis in Early Modern Britain is a political and cultural history of Britain’s Financial Revolution from below. It focuses on the long-term economic, political, and social changes in Britain and its empire that made a revolution in finance possible by the late seventeenth century, as well as the political and cultural consequences of these changes, particularly how people understood the significance of these transformations. This project has received financial support from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Summer Stipend Program (2017) and the Huntington Library UK Travel Grants (2017). For the 2023-2024 year, I will be in residence at the Huntington Library as an NEH Fellow.

Recent Publications

“Calico Madams and South Sea Cheats: Global Trade, Finance, and Popular Protest in Early Hanoverian England,” Journal of British Studies, forthcoming 2023.

“Security, Stability, and Credit: The Hanoverian Succession and the Politics of the Financial Revolution,” in The Hanoverian Succession in Great Britain and its Empire, Brent S. Sirota and Allan I. Macinnes, eds., Boydell and Brewer Press, 2019.

“The Bubble and the Bail-Out: the South Sea Company, Jacobitism, and Public Credit in Early Hanoverian Britain,” in Boom, Bust, and Beyond: New Perspectives on the 1720 Stock Bubble, Stefano Condorelli and Daniel Menning, eds., DeGruyter Publishers, 2019.

“Labor,” in Cultural History of Western Empires, Vol. 4, The Enlightenment, 1650-1800, Ian Coller, ed., Antoinette Burton, series ed., Bloomsbury Academic Publishers, 2018.

“Labor, Empire, and the State: The English Imperial Experience in the Seventeenth Century,” in The World of Colonial America: An Atlantic Handbook, Ignacio Gallup-Diaz, ed., Routledge   Publishers, 2017.

Competing Visions of Empire: Labor, Slavery, and the Origins of the British Atlantic Empire (Yale University Press, 2015) https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300187540/competing-visions-empire

Media Coverage

https://today.ttu.edu/posts/2023/04/Stories/Texas-Tech-History-Professor-Receives-Two-Fellowships

Social Media

@AbbySwingen

Country Focus

Britain

Expertise by Geography

Atlantic, British Isles, Caribbean, England, United Kingdom, Western Europe

Expertise by Chronology

17th century, 18th century, Early Modern

Expertise by Topic

Capitalism, Colonialism, Economic History, Labor, Politics, Rebellion & Revolution, Slavery