Authors

Padraic X. Scanlan is an historian of labour in Britain and the British empire. He is Associate Professor in the Centre for Industrial Relations and the Centre for Diaspora & Transnational Studies at the University of Toronto, and the author of Freedom’s Debtors: British Antislavery in Sierra Leone in the Age of Revolution (Yale, 2017), Slave Empire: How Slavery Built Modern Britain (Robinson, 2020), and Rot: An Imperial History of the Irish Famine (Robinson/Basic, 2025). He is writing a social and cultural history of work and everyday life in the era of the industrial revolution, to be published by Profile (UK) and Basic (USA). He lives in Toronto with his family.