Malmo, Skåne County, Sweden
I joined Lund University in 2020 as a PhD student in the Department of History and as part of the Swedish National Graduate School of Historical Studies. I am currently visiting the University of Manchester, where I teach seminar groups on the course Silk Roads between 1200 and 1800. In Manchester, I collaborate closely with Professor Edmond Smith and the ERC- and UKRI-funded INTRECCI project, which develops a global and comparative analysis of the multipolar and adaptive institutional origins of globalisation. My research focuses on global economic networks, European colonialism, and empire-building, with particular emphasis on the role of family firms in reshaping European and colonial trade and finance during the long eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. My thesis investigates the British–Dutch merchant and banking house Hope & Company, analysing what their bookkeeping, correspondence, and business strategies reveal about the integration of European and colonial trade and credit between roughly 1740 and 1830. I argue that firms like Hope & Company acted as “middle agents” who created, legitimised, and managed interdependent imperial systems—helping to transform looser colonial arrangements into more direct and institutionalised forms of imperial rule. I first developed an interest in Hope & Company during my master’s research on the credit crisis of 1772–73. Since then, I have contributed to projects on the slavery connections of Hope & Company and R. Mees & Zoonen at the International Institute of Social History; served as Book Reviews Editor for the International Journal of Maritime History; and worked as a project assistant on Linnaeus University’s Global Archives Online. At Lund, I have organised regular meetings for the Network for Early Modern History reading group and taught across the curriculum, including first-year survey courses (from prehistory to the 1850s) and a third-year global history course on the Great Divergence. I also supervise BA dissertations, and I particularly welcome students interested in colonialism and empire, business and state formation, globalisation, and the history of capitalism—though I am happy to supervise across early modern social and economic history more broadly. Beyond academia, I collaborate on public-history initiatives that engage with questions of economic and social sustainability, global inequality, and the enduring legacies of colonialism. I regularly present my research at international conferences and workshops, contributing to ongoing debates on global history, capitalism, and empire.