Aashish Velkar

Biography

I joined the University of Manchester in January 2012, having completed my doctoral training at the London School of Economics in 2009. My dissertation was awarded the Thirsk-Feinstien PhD Dissertation Prize by the Economic History Society in 2010, as well as the 2010 Coleman Prize for the best PhD dissertation by the Association of Business Historians. In 2008-9 I was a Junior Research Fellow at the Institute of Historical Research, London, having won the Economic History Society’s Postan Post-Doctoral Research Fellowship for 2008-9 for that year. In 2014, was successful in securing the prestigious Fung Global Fellowship at Princeton University, USA, and was spent a year as a Visiting Research Fellow at the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies. My first monograph, Markets and Measurements in Nineteenth Century Britain, was published by Cambridge University Press in August 2012. I have also publsiehd in other reputed international journals such as Enterprise and Society and Business History. 

My primary research interests revolve around the social organisation of cognitive human activities such as ''measuring'' and ''standardising''. My research explores the historical processes through which such individual activities have become globally organised, how governments have used measurements to rule, govern and promote social activities in certain ways, how businesses and organisations have secured competitive advantage by measuring in particular ways, and how people have coped with the disjuncture of large-scale socio-technical and cultural changes by altering how they measure in everyday contexts.

I am also interested in historical and socio-cultural processes of commodification, how consumption and material objects have shaped capitalist organisation, how standards have shaped historical market-exchanges and how culture and customs have shaped institutions. 

I have supervised post-graduate research involving social and economic history of modern Britian on diverse topics such as consumption and retailing, work and identity, mercantilism and capitalism, and slavery. I am particularly interested in supervising dissertations on the history of Manchester: its institutions, communities and cultural-economy. 

Areas of expertise

• HC Economic History and Conditions
• D204 Modern History