E-Mail: jms2533@columbia.edu
Post-Doctoral Project: Most Favoured Nation: The Making of a Global Trading System, 1750-1950
Since 08/2022 | Assistant Professor at the Department of History, Columbia University, New York, USA |
10/2017 - |
Post-doctoral Researcher in the Research Training Group "World Politics", Bielefeld University |
since 10/2015 | Co-editor, Renewal: A Journal of Social Democracy, www.renewal.org.uk |
10/2016 - 10/2017 | Stipendiary Lecturer in Modern History, St. Hugh's College, Oxford University, UK |
10/2012 - 10/2016 | Ph.D. History, Emmanuel College, Cambridge University, UK. Dissertation title: 'Political Economy and the Reform of Empire in Ireland, 1778-1845' |
10/2011 - 07/2012 | M.Phil. Political Thought and Intellectual History, Emmanuel College, Cambridge University, UK |
06/2010 - 10/2012 | Parliamentary Assistant to Gregg McClymont MP, Scottish Labour, Shadow Minister for Pensions |
10/2007 - 06/2010 | B.A. Modern History, St. Hugh's College, Oxford University, UK |
I am conducting a major (5-year) research project focusing on the role of commercial treaties in the construction, organisation and reproduction of a world-political economy from c. 1750-1950. The aim is to produce a general history of the 'commercial treaty' as a crucial component within an emergent 'world politics'.
My particular approach combines intellectual, legal, economic and international history. I examine the classification, number, distribution and content of commercial treaties, as registers of interaction between the European balance of power, European colonial empires, and the world economy. I aim to reconstruct how a nexus of political and economic relationships between states and peoples (including relationships of subordination and hierarchy) were formalised through the institution of treaties. These, in turn, both reflected and shaped emergent conceptions of a 'world economy/market' and 'international law'.
Stafford, J. (with S. Hecke) (2021). ‘“Unequal Treaties”: A Challenge for World Politics in the 1920s?’. Paper presented at the RTG Workshop ‘Global Challenges in World Politics: Discourses, Actors and Outcomes’, 14 December, Bielefeld University, online.