Dr Richard Thomas Bell

• PhD History, Stanford University (2017)
• MA Early Modern History, King’s College London (2010)
• BA (Hons) History & English, Goldsmiths, University of London (2009)

After studying at Goldsmiths and King’s College London, I undertook a PhD at Stanford University, returning to London in my final year as a Scouloudi Doctoral Fellow at the Institute of Historical Research. On completing my PhD in 2017, I came to Birmingham as a Research Associate on the AHRC-funded project ‘Manuscript Pamphleteering in Early Stuart England’. In 2018, I was appointed as the CMRS Career Development Fellow in Renaissance History at Keble College Oxford. I returned to Birmingham as a Teaching Fellow in 2023.

I teach on a range of early modern modules including The Making of the Modern World and State and Empire in the Early Modern World. I also teach on core early modern modules for the MA in History and offer dissertation supervision for undergraduates and taught postgraduates.

My first book, Imprisonment in Early Modern England: Politics and Debt in a Carceral Society, 1550-1700, will offer new insight into both the nature of early modern society and the origins of modern carceral practices. It reveals that from the mid-sixteenth century, England was an increasingly carceral society; the threat of imprisonment for debt loomed over social relations defined by personal credit as economic change led to rising social instability and civil litigation. Anxiety over financial ruin, public shame and loss of liberty became the stuff of everyday life. Exploring the significance of this phenomenon, I will uncover the prison’s internal social structures, its place within wider society and its role in political conflict.

In addition, this book will provide a much-needed early modern perspective to histories of imprisonment. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century developments solidified a new logic of imprisonment as a vital tool of social order, much of which persisted even as prisons were reformed into the principal mode of criminal punishment. Thus, I reveal how straining credit networks, swelling inmate populations and political upheaval reshaped early modern prisons and their social worlds, and the resonances this had within and beyond the prison walls. I am also developing new research into the proliferation and adaptation of debt imprisonment throughout England’s Atlantic colonies.

My next project, ‘Paying for the State: Fees and Authority in Early Modern England and Wales’, uncovers the significance of fees to state formation and everyday experiences of authority. It will explore the implications of widespread payment of fees to officeholders for our understandings of state finance and formation, as well as how men and women across the social spectrum explicitly described encounters with the early modern state in the years leading up to English Revolution. By asking how people engaged with, thought about and sometimes pushed back against the tendrils of the decentralised state, I will test the extent, limits and ambiguities of personal participation and negotiation with institutional authority. As with my work on prisoners, I will explore how conceptions of political authority, exposed in everyday interactions with the state, intersected with political debates about rights, authority and governance that dominated seventeenth-century England.