Ben Dew

Ben Dew completed a BA in English and Philosophy at the University of East Anglia, and an MA and PhD in eighteenth-century studies at Queen Mary, University of London.

Ben’s research is principally concerned with early-modern and Enlightenment ideas about history. His monograph, Commerce, Finance and Statecraft: Histories of England, 1600-1780, was published by Manchester University Press in 2018. The book charts the development of new forms of historical writing concerning economic affairs in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and examines their importance for the intellectual history of the period. Ben is also the co-editor (with Fiona Price) of Historical Writing in Britain, 1688-1830 (Palgrave, 2014), an interdisciplinary collection of essays concerning historical literature. The book arose from ‘Visions of History’, a conference Ben organised in 2010 at the University of Portsmouth. He has published on a number of Enlightenment-era writers, among them Bernard Mandeville, Paul de Rapin-Thoyras and David Hume, in a range of journals including Modern Intellectual History, Intellectual History Review, and the Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies. In addition, Ben is the editor of The Politics of Tea (Pickering and Chatto, 2010), a scholarly edition of pamphlets concerning tea and the politics of empire in the eighteenth century. 

Ben’s current research is concerned with ideas of Europe in eighteenth-century historical writing. In 2018, he received a Lewis Walpole Fellowship from the University of Yale to complete work in relation to this project.