Our People

Prof John Marriott

Fellow, Visiting Fellow

Historian

PhD (Cantab), BA (Hons) (OU), BSc (Surrey)

John Marriott’s past research has focused on London and Empire with a particular emphasis on the nexus between East London and India during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

His first book, The Culture of Labourism: the East End between the Wars (Edinburgh University Press, 1991) explored the rise to a position of seemingly unchallengeable power by the Labour Party, and its location within popular political culture. This was followed by The Other Empire: Metropolis, India and Progress in the Colonial Imagination (Manchester University Press, 2003) which sought to reveal homologies in the construction of India and East London as objects of knowledge in the nineteenth century.

In the meantime, he edited or co-edited three, six volume collections of primary materials related to his research, namely, The Metropolitan Poor: Semi-factual Accounts, 1795-1910 (Pickering and Chatto, 1999), Unknown London: Early Modernist Visions of the Metropolis, 1815-45 (Pickering and Chatto, 2000), and Britain in India, 1765-1905 (Pickering and Chatto, 2006).

In the last decade his work has diversified. Beyond the Tower: a History of East London (Yale University Press, 2011) is a widely acclaimed history of the East End written with a wider reading public in mind. History: an Introduction to Method, Theory and Practice (Pearson, 2012), co-authored with Dr Peter Claus, is an attempt to write an accessible introduction to historiography, the third edition of which was published in 2023, and The Ashgate Research Companion to Modern Imperial Histories (Ashgate, 2012), co-edited with Professor Philippa Levine, is an ambitious collection which surveys recent scholarship in global imperial history.

John has recently completed Land, Law and Empire: The Origins of British Territorial Power in India which is to be published by Cambridge University Press later this year, and editing Routledge Online Resources: Empire, an extensive digital resources programme to be launched early in 2025 at the latest. Finally, he is near to finishing Howdenshire: An English Agrarian History, which as a history of a rural settlement is something of a departure.