Professor Christine MacLeod
Emeritus Professor in History
Email: c.macleod@bristol.ac.uk
Research interests
Specialises in the history of technology, in particular the history of inventions and patents in Britain, 17th to 19th centuries, with a comparative interest in France. She recently published a book on the changing status of inventors and its implications for nineteenth-century British culture, Heroes of Invention: technology, liberalism and British national identity 1750-1914 (Cambridge University Press, 2007).
She is a member of the Blackwell History Compass editorial board and active in the Society for the History of Technology.
Research supervision
Has supervised research in 18th-19th-century social and business history. Would be interested in supervising work on history of technology and industry, in particular topics which make use of the extensive papers of Isambard Kingdom Brunel (University of Bristol Library, Special Collections).
Selected publications
- Inventing the Industrial Revolution: the English Patent System, 1660-1800 (Cambridge University Press, 1988, xii + 302 pp.; paperback and electronic editions, 2002); winner of the Wadsworth Prize for business history, 1989.
- With A. Nuvolari, ‘The pitfalls of prosopography: inventors in the Dictionary of National Biography’, Technology and Culture, 47 (2006), 257-76
- ‘The nineteenth-century engineer as cultural hero’, in A. Kelly and M. Kelly (eds.), Brunel: in love with the impossible (Bristol: Bristol Cultural Development Partnership, 2006), 60-79
- ‘The European origins of British technological predominance’, in L. Prados de la Escosura (ed.), Exceptionalism and Industrialisation: Britainand its European Rivals, 1688-1815 (Cambridge University Press, 2004), 111-26
- with J. Tann, J. Stein, J. H. Andrew, ‘Evaluating inventive activity: the cost of nineteenth-century UK patents and the fallibility of renewal data’ , Economic History Review, 56 (2003), 537-62
- 'Industry and invention', in 'History Trail: Victorian Britain', BBC Online (2001).
- With J. Tann, J. Stein, J. H. Andrew, 'Making waves: the Royal Navy's management of invention and innovation in steam shipping, 1815-1832', History and Technology, 16 (2000), 307-33.
- 'Negotiating the rewards of invention: the shopfloor inventor in Victorian Britain', Business History, 41 (1999), 17-36; winner of the Frank Cass Prize, 1999.
- 'James Watt, heroic invention, and the idea of the industrial revolution', in M. Berg and K. Bruland (eds.), Technological Revolutions in Europe: Historical Perspectives (Edward Elgar, 1998), 96-115.
- 'Concepts of invention and the patent controversy in Victorian Britain', in Robert Fox (ed.), Technological Change (Harwood Press, 1996), 137-53.
- 'Strategies for innovation: the diffusion of new technology in nineteenth-century British industry', Economic History Review, 45 (1992), 285-307; reprinted in D.J. Jeremy (ed.), Technology Transfer and Business Enterprise (Edward Elgar, 1994).
Full Publications
Full list of Professor MacLeod's publications held in the University's IRIS publications database.
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