My past research has focused on London and Empire with an emphasis on the nexus between East London and India during the 18th and 19th centuries. My 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 I 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).More recently three long-term projects have been completed. 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, 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.I am now working on a monograph on the intellectual and social origins of imperial land reform in the eighteenth century,with Dr Peter Claus on a new edition of their textbook on historiography to be published by Routledge, and finally, in collaboration with Professor David Crouch at Hull, a two-volume Victoria Country History of Howdenshire in the East Riding.