Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History, Canterbury Christchurch University

David is a member of the SHS executive committee.

His research focuses on early modern vagrancy, poverty, and the English Atlantic world. He is currently working on his second book, tentatively titled ‘The Wheel of Poverty: The Origins of British Welfare Colonialism”, and on various other projects, including a British Academy grant on perceptions of urban space and the ‘Good City’, and a piece on dying homeless in early modern England. Together with Julia McClure he edited the Routledge History of Poverty, which came out in January 2021. He spent three years annually reviewing the early modern article literature for the Economic History Review.

Dave helps to convene the welfare, humanitarianism, and social action strand of the Society’s annual conference.

Key Publications

• Vagrancy in English Culture and Society, 1650-1750 (2016)
• with Julia McClure, The Routledge History of Poverty, c.1450-1800 (2021)
• '“Punishment is all the charity that the law affordeth them”: penal transportation, vagrancy, and the charitable impulse in the British Atlantic, c. 1600-1750', in New Global Studies, 12:2 (2018)
• "He is the Vagabond that Hath No Habitation in the Lord": The Representation of Quakerism as Vagrancy in Interregnum England, c. 1650–1660', in Cultural and Social History, 15:1 (2018)