Dr Hillary Taylor

I am a historian of Britain, c. 1500-1750. I have wide interests in the social, economic, and labour history of the early modern period.

As the John Bedford Fellow at LAHRI, I will be conducting research related to work and occupational culture in the furniture and building trades during the long eighteenth century. Alongside this project, I am finishing up a book on social relations and the class politics of language in early modern England and working on a new project about violence at work in early modern Britain and its overseas territories.

I received my PhD from Yale in 2016. Since then, I have been a Research Fellow at Jesus College, Cambridge, and a University Lecturer in Early Modern British Social and Economic History at the University of Cambridge. I became a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy in 2021.

Publications:

‘Paternalism and the Politics of “Toll Corn” in Early Modern England,’ Social History (forthcoming, 2023)

‘Labourers, Legal Aid, and the Limits of Popular Legalism in Star Chamber’, in Star Chamber

Matters: The Court and Its Records, ed. Krista Kesselring and Natalie Mears (University of London

Press, 2021), pp. 115-134

‘The Price of the Poor’s Words: Social Relations and the Economics of Deposing for One’s “Betters” in Early Modern England,’ Economic History Review 72:3 (2019), pp. 828-847

‘“Branded on the Tongue”: Rethinking Plebeian Inarticulacy in Early Modern England,’ Radical History Review 121 (2015), pp. 91-105