Matthew Wormer

Matthew Wormer is a historian of modern Britain and the British Empire. His dissertation is a study of the British opium trade in South and East Asia from the late eighteenth century to the outbreak of the First Opium War in 1839. It traces how shifting conceptions of economic value reshaped struggles between state officials, private traders, and agrarian laborers over the control and distribution of profits from the emerging global traffic in narcotic drugs. This project has received support from Stanford's Europe Center, the Center for South Asia, and the Business History Conference, among others. In 2018-19 Matthew conducted archival research across India and the United Kingdom with the support of a Mellon International Dissertation Research Fellowship from the Social Science Research Council. For the academic year 2020-21 he will hold a Dissertation Prize Fellowship at the Stanford Humanities Center.