Dr Harry Smith (he/him)

I am a social and economic historian of the United Kingdom since the eighteenth century. I joined Exeter in January 2024 as a research fellow on the Leverhulme-funded project 'The Material Culture of Wills, England 1540-1790'. In this project, as in my previous work, I use large-scale historical data to investigate the economic and other forces which shaped individuals' lives.

I have previously worked on the history of the professions, mortality and morbidity, and entrepreneurship. I continue to research and publish on these areas. Most recently I have co-authored a volume on the history of professionals in nineteenth-century Britain (Brockliss and Smith, Male Professionals in Nineteenth Century Britain), examining the extent to which they were a distinct social class in Victorian and Edwardian Britan. I am also increasingly interested in the commercial, political and infrastructure factors which determine what historical records are digitised and how accessible they are.