Principal Publications

Making Tobacco Bright: Creating an American Commodity, 1617-1937.
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011 and 2018.

How did Bright Flue-Cured Tobacco come to dominate the global industry? Making Tobacco Bright argues that tobacco's varietal types are products not of nature but of economic relations and market regulation. Technology (especially cultivation and curing), not genetics, made Bright Tobacco replicable, exportable, and dominant. Available at amazon.co.uk

The Cotton Kings: Capitalism and Corruption in Turn-of-the-Century New York and New Orleans (co-authored with Bruce E. Baker).
Oxford University Press, 2016.

Corruption on the New York Cotton Exchange drove cotton prices down through the 1890s, impoverishing millions of farmers. The Cotton Kings traces how New Orleans brokers fought back — cornering the world cotton market in 1903 and raising prices for a decade — and how the structural failures they exposed led to the Cotton Futures Act of 1914, the first federal regulation of a financial derivative. Available at amazon.co.uk

Plantation Kingdom: The American South and Its Global Commodities (with Richard Follett, Sven Beckert, and Peter Coclanis).
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016.

In 1850, America's plantation economy reigned supreme — cotton, rice, sugarcane and tobacco produced by four million enslaved people for world markets. Plantation Kingdom traces its rise and fall: how an international capitalist system built on slave labor and mass agricultural production collapsed under emancipation, free trade, and global competition. Poverty and forced labor haunted the region well into the twentieth century. Available on amazon.co.uk

Technology in the Industrial Revolution.
Cambridge University Press, 2020.

The Industrial Revolution was about more than inventions. Technology in the Industrial Revolution argues that making machinery operational required systems and networks — of labor and power, markets and finance, consumer tastes and global geopolitics. The relationship between changing machines and their changing contexts is what this book investigates. Available at amazon.co.uk

Moving Crops and the Scales of History. (co-authored with Francesca Bray, John Bosco Lourdusamy, and Tiago Saraiva).
Yale University Press, 2023.

Crops have been on the move for millennia, shaping history as they travelled. Moving Crops and the Scales of History introduces the "cropscape" — the assemblage of people, places, creatures, technologies and ideas that form around a crop — as a bold new method for historical inquiry, reconnecting the global with the local across millennia and continents. Winner of the 🏆 Sidney M. Edelstein Prize from the Society for the History of Technology and the 🏆 Jerry H. Bentley Prize from the World History Association. Available at amazon.co.uk