Dr Leigh Shaw-Taylor

Senior Lecturer at Faculty of History, University of Cambridge

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Senior Lecturer, Faculty of History, University of Cambridge

Dr Leigh Shaw-Taylor is a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of History at the University of Cambridge. He is also the Director of the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, and an honorary Senior Research Associate in the Department of Geography. His research interests are in long-run social and economic developments in England between the mid sixteenth and late nineteenth centuries with a particular focus on the development of agrarian capitalism and the Industrial Revolution.

He is the director of an ongoing program of research: The occupational structure of Britain c.1379-1911. This has been awarded British Academy research project status and has been generously funded by the ESRC, The Leverhulme Trust, The British Academy and the Isaac Newton Trust. The project is a collaboration with Professor E.A. Wrigley and others, aimed at improving our understanding of the long run process of economic development, which culminated in the Industrial Revolution, through a quantitative reconstruction of the occupational structure of the economy over as long a period as the sources will allow. The project is based in the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure.

Prior to taking up his current post Dr Shaw-Taylor was an ESRC funded Senior Research Associate in the Department of Geography here at Cambridge, and he then became a University Lecturer in the Faculty of History. Before that he held positions at Jesus College, Cambridge; the Department of History, Queen Mary College, University of London; and the Department of History at the University of Oxford.

He has a PhD In History from the University of Cambridge, which examined the extent to which the loss of common rights at parliamentary enclosure (c.1750- c.1830) proletarianised the rural poor in England. He has an M.Sc in Economic and Social History from the University of Oxford and a B.A. from the Open University.