Exploring Legal & Business History
I am currently a professor at Wilfrid Laurier University in the Department of History where I research the history of law, moral economy and business.
New Research and Presentations
Paper: Corruption and the Civic Imagination
How has corruption shaped our ideas about civic community and polarization? This paper compares two important periods when ideas about corruption were particularly influential: leading up to the English civil war in 1642 and the American Revolution in 1776 @the Chase Center, Ohio State University
High Tariffs = Smuggling = the Offshore World
I recently wrote for ProMarket about how early modern smuggling stimulated a network of tax evasion through offshore havens. For some modern parallels have a read of A Tale of Tariffs and the Making of the Modern Offshore Market.
Paper: Reimagining the Mid-Century American Corporation: Spirituality, Business Ethics and the Campaign of the Federal Council of Churches
The same year as the founding of the Mont Pelerin Society in 1947, the Federal Council of Churches met in Pittsburgh to imagine the future of business very differently and with it, the field of business ethics. Find out more at the Harvard Business School, Business History Seminar
Paper: The Corruption Imaginary: Reconstructing ‘the Swamp’ in Early Modern England
Learn more about political polarization and how people in the past imagined corruption and conspiracy in political life at the North American Conference on British Studies, Montreal Canada, November 13-16, 2025
The Intellectual History of Milton Friedman's Criticism of Corporate Social Responsibility
My article on the intellectual origins of Milton Friedman's famous criticism of corporate social responsibility and monopoly is now available at Modern Intellectual History
Smuggling Database
Explore the early modern smugglers' world and visit my new database on smuggling prosecutions