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Biography
My research career began with a study of the economic, social and cultural history of debt and credit relations in the early modern period. I have published articles on the role of spinsters in the provision of credit in England in the seventeenth century, and edited the business and household accounts of Joyce Jeffreys, a spinster who was extensively involved in moneylending in the West Midlands in the mid-seventeenth century. In addition I have interests in women's work and medicine in early modern England.
For the last eighteen years I have also been interested in the ownership of people. I began with a Nuffield Fellowship that allowed me to examine enslavement for debt on the west coast of Africa during the transatlantic slave trade, and I have published a number of articles on this subject. I am now revisiting the longer history of this phenomenon, in order to understand why the ownership of people came to be sanctioned for such a long period of time, before coming under attack.