Winston Hill

Winston Hill received his B.A. from Harvard in 2012 and his Ph.D. from Yale in 2021. He currently teaches Historical and Political Thought in Directed Studies, as well as Women Who Ruled, a first-year seminar on queens regnant in world history. Previously, he taught on the American Revolution, the British empire, and early modern England in the History department at Yale. His research interests include transatlantic English thinking about political economy, power and consent in early modern England and its colonies, and the long-term causes of the American Revolution. He is currently at work on a monograph tentatively entitled “The General Increase of the People”: The Idea of Growth, Imperial Politics, and Britain’s American Colonies, 1676-1776. Hill argues that by 1760, unimpeded growth had become a bedrock assumption of colonial elites in North America, and that imperial authorities were neither willing nor able to constrain that growth. The crisis of the American Revolution therefore revolved around an outraged North American response to the imperial government’s new policy of restraining growth. The American Revolution’s interweaving of the valorization of growth with the bloody foundation of a new nation has remained crucial to American self-identification ever since.