University of York

Faculty Member, History

Lecturer in History

About

Mark Roodhouse is a lecturer in modern British history. His research and teaching interests include the histories of economic life, crime and criminal justice, everyday ethics, and history and social theory.

Mark is a director of the Centre for Historical Economics and Related Research, joint editor of the Borthwick Papers and a member of the History and Policy editorial team. He has also refereed articles and reviewed books for several academic journals.

Mark is currently working on his first book Black Market Morality: The Underground Economy of Austerity Britain, 1939-1953. The project developed out of his AHRC-funded PhD thesis on black market activity in Britain which won the 2004 Ellen McArthur Prize in Economic History for the best Cambridge thesis in economic history. The book will examine how contemporary notions of distributive justice limited the development of Britain’s black markets.

So far the black market project has produced a refereed article on British political corruption in the late 1940s, an essay on undercover policing in post-war London, an essay on the moral choices made by black market dealers and their customers, and two new entries for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

Some preliminary findings from the project have also been shared with wider audiences through Mark's contributions to BBC and ITV history documentaries and articles for History Today. The project was also the subject of the 'Work in Progress' column in the EducationGuardian.

Drawing on his work, Mark has contributed to ongoing debates about climate change, producing a policy paper evalualting carbon rationing proposals in the light of historical experience, writing an op-ed for the Financial Times and submitting written evidence to a parliamentary committee. These intereventions attracted national and international press coverage.

The black market project reflects Mark’s broader interest in personal and social attitudes, their impact on economic behaviour, and their evolution over the course of the twentieth century. Of particular interest to him, are the 1960s, a period of apparently rapid change in social mores. Mark investigated some of these changes within the Anglican Church in a recent refereed article on the Lady Chatterley trial.

Mark is also interested in integrating new sources and approaches into his research. At present he is working closely with his research students to explore the possibilities for historical research that moving images and historical GIS offer. He is also keen to apply insights from behavioural economics to the study of economic and social history.

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