Professor O'Brien's research interests include world trade, technology and historiographical traditions; historiographical traditions in the construction of global economic history; the evolution of intercontinental trade from Roman Empire to 1846; macro inventions and macro inventors in English cotton textiles from Kay to Cartwright; the economics of European expansion overseas from the conquest of Ceuta to the Imperian Meridian; the formation and efficiency of fiscal states in Europe and Asia 1500-1914.

Current research project

Economic Outcomes Flowing from the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, 1793-1815

View Professor O'Brien's CV here [PDF]