Academic Profile

Research Interests: History of economic growth and inequality, environmental history, technological change, public policy.

Bob Allen retired from Oxford University in 2013. He is now Global Distinguished Professor of Economic History at New York University, Abu Dhabi.

He has written extensively on English agricultural history, international competition in the steel industry, the extinction of whales, and the global history of wages and prices and their implications for pre-industrial living standards around the world. Currently, he is studying the economic and political structure of Arabia, as well as the origins of agriculture and the rise of the first states.

His articles have won the Cole Prize, the Redlich Prize, and the Explorations Prize. His books include Enclosure and the Yeoman: The Agricultural Development of the South Midlands, 1450-1850, and Farm to Factory: A Re-interpretation of the Soviet Industrial Revolution, both of which won the Ranki Prize of the Economic History Association. He has also written The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective, Global Economic History: A Very Short Introduction, and The Industrial Revolution: A Very Short Introduction. 

Professor Allen is a Fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Society of Canada.