Dr Perry Gauci
Dr Perry Gauci
- V.H.H. Green Tutorial Fellow in History
- Dean of Degrees
- Fellow for Alumni Relations
Profile
I was born in Cardiff and educated in South Wales. My first experience of Oxford was as an undergraduate at Lincoln College, reading for a B. A. in Modern History. I then transferred to Brasenose College to take an M. Phil. and D. Phil., completing the latter in 1991. London then beckoned and I spent four years at the History of Parliament Trust, followed by three years at the Centre of Metropolitan History, a department within the University of London. In 1998 I returned to Lincoln, and live near Oxford with my wife Christina, daughter Ella and son Sam.
College teaching
At undergraduate level, I teach a wide range of courses, broadly within the period 1650-1850. I principally concentrate on political and social history, although I do cover economic and cultural topics as well. At Lincoln I currently teach our first-year undergraduates for Historiography (Gibbon), British History 1688-1848, and the Haiti and Louisiana paper. For second and third years, I teach Disciplines of History; European History 1680-1848, and a number of specialist options, including the further subjects on eighteenth-century London, and the special subjects on English Architecture 1660-1720 and Imperial Crisis and Reform, 1774-84. For several of these courses I give lectures or supervise classes at a university-wide level.
- Research
My research interests broadly rest with the political and social development of Britain from 1650 to 1830. My doctoral thesis concentrated on a leading provincial town, and allowed me to explore the relationship between politics at the centre and at the periphery. My work suggested that the very notion of 'politics' needs to be expanded to encompass the significance of social and economic influences in determining allegiance. In order to probe these issues further I undertook a study of the English merchant from 1660-1720, so that I could measure the responsiveness of state and society to contemporary commercial and political change. I then pursued these themes by focusing on the City of London and have since widened my interests to incorporate Britain's imperial experience. I am currently studying the social and cultural worlds of London’s private bankers, who represent another fascinating avenue for understanding eighteenth-century change. Historians, led by Lincoln's Paul Langford, have viewed Georgian Britain as a 'polite and commercial people', and I hope that my research will help us understand how that came about.
- Select publications
(ed. with Elaine Chalus), Revisiting the Polite and Commercial People (Oxford University Press, 2019)
William Beckford: First Prime Minister of the London Empire (Yale, 2013)
Emporium of the World: The Merchants of London (Hambledon Continuum, 2007)
The Politics of Trade: The Overseas Merchant in State and Society (Oxford University Press, 2001)
Politics and Society in Great Yarmouth 1660-1722 (Oxford University Press, 1996)