Dr Scanlan is an historian of Britain and its relationship to the wider world, with a particular focus on histories of slavery, capitalism and emancipation from the early seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries. His research centres on the practices and material history of the abolition of slavery and the slave trade, and the effects of abolition on the governance of Britain and the British empire. He is also broadly interested in the social and administrative histories of bureaucrats and bureaucracies, and in the history of everyday economic life.
Dr Scanlan earned a BA (Hons) in History from McGill University in 2008, and a PhD in History from Princeton University in 2013. Before joining the LSE, he was a postdoctoral Prize Fellow in the Program in Economics, History and Politics at Harvard University. He is also a Research Associate at the Joint Centre for History and Economics at the University of Cambridge.
Read more about Dr Padraic X. Scanlan in our Meet our Historians: Introducing... feature.
Dr Scanlan usually teaches the following courses:
At Undergraduate level:
HY326: Slavery, Capital and Empire in the British World, 1700-1900
At Masters level:
HY423: Empire, Colonialism and Globalisation (taught jointly with other faculty members)
Dr Scanlan’s current book project, MacCarthy’s Skull: Slavery and Empire in Sierra Leone, under contract with Yale University Press, is a history of the abolition of the British slave trade in Sierra Leone, the only British colony with an official anti-slavery mandate, in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. When the slave trade was abolished by Parliament in 1807, the small colony in West Africa became the judicial and military hub of British slave-trade interdiction. During the Napoleonic Wars, Sierra Leone experienced an economic boom, thriving on the proceeds of the sale of captured slave ships and the cheap labour of former slaves repatriated in the colony by the tens of thousands under the terms of the Slave Trade Act. The book explores in intimate detail the improvisations, miscommunications, military campaigns, utopian Christian missionary projects, moneymaking schemes and everyday violence that occurred in West Africa as the abstractions of abolitionist principle were translated into the practices of imperial expansion and colonial rule.
Dr Scanlan’s new research project examines efforts to define, detect and measure the development of ‘civilisation’ in Britain and Britain's colonies. Ideas about the meaning and management of mortality, literacy, religiosity, poverty and degrees of 'idleness' and employment developed in early-modern Britain, Ireland and North America circulated throughout the British empire in the eighteenth century. These diffuse and often vague concepts and practices were given new impetus by the expansion of the British empire in the eighteenth century, and particularly by the rise of anti-slavery and missionary movements in Britain and its colonies.
The first part of this project is an institutional, social and material history of 'special' or 'stipendiary' magistrates, a class of jurists appointed to the geographically and culturally remote parts of the British empire, from Catholic Ireland to rural post-emancipation Jamaica, with wide powers to interpret and enforce imperial laws, and to define in practice the meaning of 'civilised' life in the British world.
For a full list of publications, presentations and lectures, including links to selected works-in-progress and articles under review, please see Dr Scanlan’s curriculum vitae.