Giada Pizzoni

I am a teaching Fellow in early modern history at the University of Warwick. I
specialise in seventeenth century British History and I look at trade and religion and
how they shaped national identity.

I obtained my PhD at the University of St Andrews in September 2015. Previously, I studied at the University of Nijmegen and Perugia where I graduated as an MPhil in History and Philosophy.

My next project, Mediterranean Nests, will be a cultural history of the Mediterranean; I will look at how British identity was influenced by the interaction with a Continental other in Catholic ports in the early modern centuries.

I am currently finalising my first monograph 'The Romanist’s Pass’: British Catholic
Merchants and their Trading Networks in the Commercial Age, 1670-1714, for which I have a contract from Boydell and Brewer for inclusion in its new Eighteenth Century Studies series.This book grows out of the extensive research that I undertook for my doctoral thesis at Arundel Castle Archive. It challenges existing interpretations of early modern British Catholicism, trade and British Protestant national identity by examining the ways in which British Catholic merchants moved beyond religious divisions and across national borders in order to sustain British trade. I argue that they secured social integration through economic inclusion thereby defying the stereotype of a prosecuted community. Furthermore, I challenge the widely accepted notion in modern historiography of a Protestant national identity constructed against a Catholic ‘other’. I argue that Catholics fostered networks of inter-faith trade within an emerging Protestant empire, fundamentally sustaining British commercial expansion.