Dr. Craig Muldrew

Biography

Craig Muldrew’s research focuses on the economic and social role of trust in the development of market economy in England from 1500 to 1700. He concentrates on the centrality of reputation and financial credit, alongside the insecurity of wealth in a world of innumerable debts. His work examines the relationship between actual working economic contracts and obligations with the development of natural law theory in commercial society. His study of the living standards and work of agricultural laborers in the early modern English economy culminated in the publication of his monograph, 'Food, Energy and the Industrious Revolution: Work and Material Culture in Agrarian England, 1550–1780' (CUP, 2011), which engages with important topics in the growing literature concerning the notion of the industrious revolution posited by Jan de Vries, suggesting that increasing consumption patterns in the seventeenth century led to longer working hours. Muldrew has also written articles exploring legal history, debt litigation, the relationship between the nature of community, and the cultural nature of money and wages during the early modern period. He is particularly interested in the significance of industrial growth in the early modern English economy and is engaged in a long-term project examining the development of the concept of self-control and its effects on community structures, including the creation of savings and trusted local paper credit in eighteenth-century England. He supervises research in British social and economic history from 1500 to 1800 and lectures on British economic and social history as part of the history tripos, in the MPhil in economic and social history, and teaches on the history of economic thought and economic culture sociology.

Research Interests