Postdoctoral Research Fellow (Jardine Matheson)

Role Description

Department

The School for Business and Society at the University of York brings together business history, management, and social and public policy in a School committed to research that serves the public good. 

This post sits within RISK-LABS: Risk Societies: The Global Firm as a Laboratory of Risk Management, 1280–2030, a five-year European Research Council Advanced Grant led by Professor Teresa da Silva Lopes. RISK-LABS reconceives the firm as a historical laboratory of risk governance, tracing across seven centuries how firms identified, distributed and managed risk under conditions of uncertainty. It does so through four British global firms: the Merchants of the Staple, the English East India Company, Jardine Matheson and BAE Systems

Role

You will lead Work Package 4 on Jardine Matheson, the family-controlled conglomerate founded in 1832, and examine how it navigated war, embargoes, volatile markets and the transition from imperial to national governance. Your research will centre on the Jardine Matheson Archive at Cambridge University Library, with records at The National Archives, and you will conduct oral history interviews with family members and executives. You will trace how the firm redefined its risk portfolio, from opium and tea to shipping, insurance and regional finance, and how partnerships, family networks and political alignment underpinned its resilience. You will build and manage historical datasets, publish in leading journals, present at international conferences, help organise project events, and work closely with the Principal Investigator, the team and the project's research assistants in Hong Kong.

Skills, Experience & Qualification needed

• A PhD, awarded or submitted, in business history, economic history, or a cognate discipline.

• Advanced knowledge of the literatures on commercial and political risk, on the multinational enterprise and the family firm, and on capitalism, imperialism and decolonisation in Asia, and the judgement to work responsibly with these histories.

• Ability to read and interpret nineteenth and twentieth-century business records in manuscript and typescript, including correspondence, ledgers, staff registers and minutes.

• Ability and willingness to conduct oral history interviews, including securing ethical approval, informed consent and data protection.

• A record of independent archival research in corporate or governmental collections, and a publication record commensurate with career stage.

• Ability to build and manage structured historical datasets, including quantitative material from ledgers and shipping records; familiarity with prosopographical or network methods and with AI transcription techniques.

• Excellent written and spoken English, and the ability to communicate research to specialist and non-specialist audiences; reading knowledge of Chinese is welcome but not required.

• Ability to work independently and collaboratively in an international team across countries and time zones, and willingness to travel for extended archival research.

Interview date: To be agreed. For further information please contact Professor Teresa da Silva Lopes at teresa.lopes@york.ac.uk 

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