Stephen Tuffnell

Steve Tuffnell

Stephen Tuffnell
Senior Fellow
Associate Professor of Modern U.S. History
stephen.tuffnell@history.ox.ac.uk

I am a historian of the transnational histories of US imperialism, foreign relations, and migration across the nineteenth century.

My first book, Made in Britain: Nation and Emigration in Nineteenth-Century America tells the untold story of American migration to Britain in the nineteenth century. From Liverpool and London, American emigrants produced Atlantic capitalism and managed transfers of goods, culture, and capital that were integral to US nation-building. The volume demonstrates that the United States’ struggle toward independent nationhood was entangled at every step with the world’s most powerful empire. I am also co-editor with Benjamin Mountford (Australian Catholic University, Melbourne), of A Global History of Gold Rushes (University of California Press, 2018).

I am currently writing Imperial Odyssey: The USS Ticonderoga and the Search for U.S. Empire. The book takes readers off the traditional imperial map of the United States via the globe-spanning cruise of the USS Ticonderoga between 1879 and 1881. From unfamiliar vantages in Atlantic Africa, the Western Indian Ocean, the Middle East, and East Asia the book examines the immense imperial archive created by the cruise, exposing the tenacious workings of empire and the insatiable appetite for new knowledge of the world that drove the endeavor of creating a global steam empire.

Select Publications

  • Made in Britain: Emigration and Nation in Nineteenth-Century America (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2020).
  • A Global History of Gold Rushes co-editor with Benjamin Mountford (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2018).
  • ‘Crossing the Rift: American Steel and Colonial Labor in Britain’s East Africa Protectorate,’ for Kristin Hoganson and Jay Sexton, eds., Crossing Empires: Taking U.S. History into Transimperial Terrain (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020).
  • ‘Expatriate Foreign Relations: Britain’s American Community and Transnational Approaches to the U.S. Civil War’, Diplomatic History 40, no. 4 (September, 2016): 635-663.
  • ‘Engineering inter-imperialism: American miners and the transformation of global mining, 1871-1910’, Journal of Global History 10, no.1 (March 2015): 53-76.

 

Faculty page: https://www.history.ox.ac.uk/people/dr-stephen-tuffnell#/