Professor Martin Daunton

Master of Trinity Hall

Trinity Hall Cambridge CB2 1TJ Tel: (+44) (0)1223 332540 mjd42@cam.ac.uk

Master and Professor of Economic History previously taught at the University of Durham and University College London, before moving to Cambridge in 1997. He was chairman of the Faculty of History and of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences before he was elected to the Mastership of Trinity Hall in 2004. Since 2003, he has been President of the Royal Historical Society which has involved him in debates over the role of history in education. He is also a Trustee of the National Maritime Museum where he has been active in discussion of how to interpret events in British history such as Trafalgar and the end of the slave trade. He continues to teach, write and research in modern economic history.

Research Interests

Martin Daunton's general area of research interest is economic and social policy in Britain and its empire and in the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His most recent work has concentrated on fiscal policy since the end of the eighteenth century, which raises major questions about the nature of the state, its functions, the boundaries with the market and other forms of provision, the construction of economic and social knowledge, and the relationships of the state with its citizens. He is now working on two projects: the taxation of the British Empire in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; and the changing relationship between domestic and international economic policies since 1945.

Teaching Interests

Lectures in British economic and social history since 1700 in Part I of the history tripos; in MPhil in economic and social history, teaches comparative economic and social policy, and uses of economic and social knowledge, in Britain and the United States since 1850.

Areas of Research Supervision

Martin Daunton has supervised both in London and in Cambridge in most areas of British economic and social history since the early ninteenth century. Recent successful PhD candidates have worked on the cultural responses to new technologies in Britain and Germany, 1890-1930; the finance of London hospitals, 1850-1914; arts policy in Britain 1939-53; Labour and citizenship 1930-64; phrenology; and new towns policy in the 1950s; patent law and telecommuniations in Britain and the USA. Current students are working on attitudes to migration; the use of the new world economies in policy debates; the development of higher education since 1945.

Chief Publications

• House and Home: Working-class housing in the Victorian city, 1850-1914 (London, 1983)
• Royal Mail: The Post Office since 1840 (London,1985)
• Progress and poverty: an economic and social history of Britain, 1700-1850 (Oxford, 1995)
• Trusting Leviathan: the politics of taxation in Britain, 1799-1914 (Cambridge, 2001)
• edited, Cambridge Urban History of Britain, 1840-1950 (Cambridge, 2000)
• Just Taxes: the politics of taxation in Britain, 1914-1979 (Cambridge, 2002)
• Wealth and Welfare: An Economic and Social History of Britain, 1851-1951 (Oxford, 2007)