Dr Ed Legon

Profile

Roles:

• Programme Director for MA Heritage Management
• Member of the Department of Business and Society

Biography:

Ed is Programme Director of the Heritage Management MA, a teaching collaboration between Queen Mary and Historic Royal Palaces.

Ed’s research and teaching interests straddle two broad areas. The first concerns the history of production, trade, and work, and specifically the political culture of textile workers in early modern England. He is currently researching and writing a book and articles on this subject.

Ed’s second research area corresponds with his role as Programme Director of the MA Heritage Management. He is interested in ecclesiastical and industrial heritage in contemporary London, as well as the history of heritage discourse.

Teaching

Undergraduate:

• Organiser of BUS262 Business and History
• Coordinator, Undergraduate Dissertations, SBM

Postgraduate:

• BUSM162: Heritage: History, Theory and Practice
• BUSM167: Leadership Seminar
• BUSM168: Dissertation in Heritage Management

Ed is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

Research

Research Interests:

My research covers the history of business and politics, heritage, and memory. I am currently working on a book project on the politics and political culture of the textile industries of England and Wales in the seventeenth century, which will centre clothmakers and traders as active participants in economic, political, and religious change. The book will explore the intricate regulation of the textile industry, the organisation and mobilisation of its employers and workforces to effect change, the conflicts that arose across the protracted supply chain in which wool was converted into fabrics for domestic sale and export, and the intersection of each of these issues with the wider political crises and moments of ideological escalation throughout this revolutionary era of British history. Under contract with Manchester University Press, the book’s working title is 'Fabric of the Commonwealth: The Politics of Clothmakers in Seventeenth-Century England and Wales'.

I am also contributing to a co-authored volume about the Board of Trade (under contract with Palgrave), an important office of state with oversight of domestic, international, and colonial commerce that spanned four centuries. My contribution looks at the Board’s predecessors in the form of the commissions, committees, and councils that sat between 1622 and 1696, focusing in particular on petitions to the bodies from clothmakers.

I have written about the historical development of ‘heritage’ with a particular focus on dominant and popular conceptions of the built environment amid the 'Long Reformation' and the rise of capitalism. This research sits within a wider interest in labour, industrial, and ecclesiastical heritage. It also dovetails with my existing research into popular memory after the British Civil Wars, which was published in articles and a 2019 monograph 'Revolution Remembered: Seditious Memories after the British Civil Wars' (Manchester University Press).

I am Co-Director of Queen Mary’s Centre on Labour, Sustainability, and Global Production (CLaSP), a member of the Editorial Board of The London Journal, and a convener of the Institute of Historical Research’s British History in the Seventeenth-Century seminar.

Centre and Group Membership:

• Member of the Centre on Labour and Global Production (CLGP)

Publications

• Legon, E., ‘Conspiracy, Congregation, Company, and Commerce in England, 1680–1688: The Narratives of Edward Massey of Braintree’, History, 109 (Sept., 2024), 226-252
• Legon, E., ‘The Wings of Daedalus: The Business and Politics of the Linen Trade in Late Seventeenth-Century England’, Business History, 66:6 (2024), 1373-1393
• Legon, E., ‘The Lord Mayor’s Show and the Politics of London’s Clothworkers’ Company in the Mid-Seventeenth Century’, The London Journal, 47:3 (Nov. 2022), 241-259
• Legon, E., ‘Heritage before Modernity: The Afterlife of a Dissolved Priory’, International Journal of Heritage Studies, 28:4 (2021), 427-443
• Legon, E., 'Sadler Saddled: Reconciliation and Recrimination in a Restoration Parish' publication to include publication information: English Historical Review, 36:582 (Oct., 2021), 1164-1192 
• Legon, E., ‘“If ever the Devil is abroad, he is abroad now”: Loyalty, Disloyalty, and the Coronation of 1661’, in M. Ward (ed.), Loyalty and Disloyalty in Medieval and Early Modern England (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) 
• Legon, E., Co-editor, ‘Ruling Sexualities: Sexuality, Gender, and the Crown’ special edition, Royal Studies Journal 6:2 (2019) 
• Legon, E., Review article, ‘Radical Possibilities: Gary S. De Krey’s Following the Levellers’, Parliamentary History, 38:3 (2019), 431-435 
• Legon, E., Remembering Revolution: Seditious Memories after the British Civil Wars (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019) 
• Legon, E., ‘Remembering the “good old cause”’, in E. Vallance (ed.), Remembering Early Modern Revolutions (London: Routledge, 2018) 
• Legon, E., ‘Bound up with meaning: the politics and memory of ribbon wearing in Restoration England and Scotland’, Journal of British Studies, 56:1 (Jan., 2017), pp. 27-50

Supervision

Ed is interested in supervising PhDs in early modern histories of capitalism, production and trade, heritage studies, and memory studies.

Others include:

• Tom Chivers (co-supervisor), 'In the Flow of Things: Encounters with the Mudlarks of the Thames Foreshore'
• Olusanmi Amujo (second supervisor), 'The Development of Commercial and Diplomatic Relationships between the English Crown/State, the City of London and the Crown/States in British West Africa, 1470 to 1970'
• Waseem Ahmed (UCL, second supervisor), 'Everyday Politics in Revolutionary England, 1649-1660'