Aaron Graham
I am a Lecturer in Early Modern British Economic History, in the Department of History at University College London:
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/history/people/academic-staff/dr-aaron-graham
I joined the department in September 2021 from the University of Oxford, where I was a Research Associate on the ERC Horizon 2020 Project 'The European Fiscal-Military System, 1530-1870' . I worked on the history of London as a European financial and fiscal-military hub between 1660 and 1870, and remain involved with the project as an associated researcher:
https://fiscalmilitary.history.ox.ac.uk/aaron-graham
Before that I held a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at UCL (2016-19) and a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Oxford (2012-15), where I received my doctorate in 2012.
I work on the economic, social and political history of Britain and the British Empire between 1660 and 1850, with a focus on finance, politics, government, corruption, regulation and slavery. I've written two books and over thirty articles and chapters on these topics.
I'm currently finishing a book on slavery, security and the colonial state or 'tropical leviathan' in Jamaica between 1770 and 1840, and am in the process of writing another on London and the European fiscal-military system between 1560 and 1870, both under contract with the Oxford University Press. I'm also editing a new edition of 'A General History of the Pyrates' for the Oxford World's Classics series at the OUP, to be published in 2024 for the tercentenary of its original publication in 1724.
My long-term research project is a study of banking regulation, imperial power, colonial politics and settler capitalism across the British Empire between 1815 and 1850.
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/history/people/academic-staff/dr-aaron-graham
I joined the department in September 2021 from the University of Oxford, where I was a Research Associate on the ERC Horizon 2020 Project 'The European Fiscal-Military System, 1530-1870' . I worked on the history of London as a European financial and fiscal-military hub between 1660 and 1870, and remain involved with the project as an associated researcher:
https://fiscalmilitary.history.ox.ac.uk/aaron-graham
Before that I held a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at UCL (2016-19) and a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Oxford (2012-15), where I received my doctorate in 2012.
I work on the economic, social and political history of Britain and the British Empire between 1660 and 1850, with a focus on finance, politics, government, corruption, regulation and slavery. I've written two books and over thirty articles and chapters on these topics.
I'm currently finishing a book on slavery, security and the colonial state or 'tropical leviathan' in Jamaica between 1770 and 1840, and am in the process of writing another on London and the European fiscal-military system between 1560 and 1870, both under contract with the Oxford University Press. I'm also editing a new edition of 'A General History of the Pyrates' for the Oxford World's Classics series at the OUP, to be published in 2024 for the tercentenary of its original publication in 1724.
My long-term research project is a study of banking regulation, imperial power, colonial politics and settler capitalism across the British Empire between 1815 and 1850.
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Books by Aaron Graham
A Palgrave 'Pivot' volume of 50,000 words, appearing March 2021
This book brings together for the first time more than half a dozen proposals for an imperial paper currency in the mid-eighteenth century British Atlantic, to show how manage colonial currency and banking in the expanding empire. Existing studies have looked at the successes and failures of schemes in individual colonies. But some had grander ambitions, such as Benjamin Franklin, and offered proposals for ‘imperial’ or ‘continental’ paper currencies and monetary unions which would help knit together colonial territories throughout North America and even the Caribbean into a cohesive whole during a moment of imperial reform. This book brings together these proposals for the first time, including several never studied before, to show how thinkers and writers on empire, currency and finance drew on financial practices, precedents and principles from across the British Atlantic to present their own visions of monetary union and the future of empire. In doing so it makes an important and original contribution to the wider histories of monetary and financial thought and theory and the roots of American monetary policy, and the links between finance, empire, politics, reform and revolution. It will be of interest to academics working on the history of finance, banking and currency in the British Isles, North America and the Caribbean in the eighteenth century, as well as those working on the political economy of the British Empire, including mercantilism, trade, warfare and the politics of empire in the decades leading up to the American Revolution.
However, the process of building trust and supplying funds laid officials and agents open to accusations of embezzlement, fraud and financial misappropriation. In particular, although successive financial officials ran entrepreneurial private financial ventures that enabled the army overseas to avoid dangerous financial shortfalls, they found it necessary to cover the costs and risks by receiving illegal 'gratifications' from the regiments. Reconstructing these transactions in detail, this book demonstrates that these corrupt payments advanced the public service, and thus that 'corruption' was as much a dispute over ends as means.
Ultimately, this volume demonstrates that state formation in eighteenth-century Britain was a contested process of interest aggregation, in which common partisan aims helped to negotiate compromises between various irreconcilable public priorities and private interests, within the frameworks provided by formal institutions, and then collaboratively imposed through overlapping and intersecting networks of formal and informal agents.
Beginning with a historiographical introduction that places The Sinews of Power and subsequent work on the fiscal–military state within its wider contexts, and a commentary by John Brewer that responds to the questions raised by this work, the chapters in this volume explore topics as varied as finance and revenue, the interaction of the state with society, the relations between the military and its contractors, and even the utility of the concept of the fiscal-military state. It concludes with an afterword by Professor Stephen Conway, situating the essays in comparative contexts, and highlighting potential avenues for future research. Taken as a whole, this volume offers challenging and imaginative new perspectives on the fiscal-military structures that underpinned the development of modern European states from the eighteenth century onwards.
Journal Articles by Aaron Graham
https://doi.org/10.1111/ehr.12995
Britons and Americans seem to have agreed about most constitutional principles in 1776, apart from who was to be represented and how, and it has been argued that this formed the basis for conflict and revolution. Examining how representation was conceptualised in Jamaica during the same period suggests that these differences have been overdrawn. Concepts of direct and ‘virtual’ representation were inchoate and inconsistent in all three places, and were often used strategically rather than to express essential and irreconcilable differences. Consequently the debate over representation continued in all three places after 1776, and although compromises were struck in Britain and America through the rise of parliamentary sovereignty and republican constitutionalism respectively, in Jamaica the principles and practices of representation therefore continued to be contested. More broadly, this suggests that such tensions are immanent and unavoidable in any parliamentary system, and can only be balanced rather than fully reconciled.