James Hargrave

James Hargrave has a PhD in Economic History from the University of Durham and a Diploma in Archive Administration from the University of Wales (Aberystwyth). He specialised for 25 years in cataloguing large collections of papers accumulated by dukes, prime ministers, businesses, etc., but his historical interests stretch from antiquity to railway finance and equipment, Central and Eastern Europe, and the British Empire-Commonwealth, including comparisons between colonisations and empires ancient and modern. The diversity of his work is such that he has appeared as three unconnected people in the same library catalogue. As the archive world moved away from serious scholarship towards unreflective technophilia, he moved into editing (encouraged by the editing meted out to one of his own catalogues, and freed from the daily grind by an inheritance). He has collaborated with one or both of the other co-editors many times. He has been involved in the Black Sea Congress since 1997.