I graduated from William & Mary with a B.A. in economics in 1971 and received my Ph.D. in economics from the University of Illinois in 1976. Larry Neal supervised my doctoral dissertation on the eighteenth century London coal trade. I have taught at William & Mary since 1981 and currently am Chancellor Professor of Economics. I was Secretary-Treasurer of the Business History Conference, 1988-1999, founding editor of Enterprise & Society: The International Journal of Business History, 2000-2004, and at present am editor of Business and Economic History On-Line. I have authored or co-authored articles and book chapters on the history of the electric utility industry, business history methodology, and the British coal industry. My presidential address to the Business History Conference is forthcoming in Enterprise and Society. Recent publications include: “Entrepreneurship in the United States,” in Youssef Cassis and Ionanna Minoglou, eds. Country Studies in Entrepreneurship, Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006, pp. 25-49 ; “Webs of Influence and Control: Personal and Financial Networks in the Formative Years of the US Electric Power Industry,” Annales historiques de l’électricité, 2 (June 2004): 53-67;  “Business History in the United States at the End of the Twentieth Century,” in Franco Amatori and Geoffrey Jones, eds., Business History Around the World, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003, pp. 81-110; “The Market for Capital and the Origins of State Regulation of Electric Utilities in the United States,” Journal of Economic History, 62 (December 2002): 1050-73  (with John Neufeld). My just published (April 2008) book is titled Global Electrification: Multinational Enterprise and International Finance in the History of Light and Power, 1878-2007 (with Mira Wilkins and Peter Hertner).

Below is the cover for my book with Mira Wilkins and Peter Hertner. (For a description and table of contents click on the title above.):