Nicholas B. Miller

Nicholas B. Miller is a global historian whose regional specializations include Britain, Germany, Portugal, Hawai‘i, and Malaya in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. His research explores themes at the intersection of cultural, intellectual, and social history, including the intellectual impact of cross-cultural encounters in the European Enlightenment; discourses of population, immigration, and the family in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century polities; the history of education; comparative studies of plantations and bonded labor beyond the Atlantic World; and the conceptual history of colonialism.

His books include John Millar and the Scottish Enlightenment: Family Life and World History (Voltaire Foundation, 2017),  Cameralism and the Enlightenment: Happiness, Governance, and Reform in Transnational Perspective (Routledge, 2020 with Ere Nokkala), and the forthcoming Plantation Knowledge: Agricultural Colonization, Exploitation, and Exchange since 1500 (SUNY Press, with Ulrike Lindner).

During a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship (awarded by the European Commission) tendered at the University of Cologne between 2021 and 2023, Miller researched the global travels and networks of Wilhelm Hillebrand, a German medic, botanist, and immigration commissioner for the Kingdom of Hawai‘i. His current writing project develops an innovative approach to contextual biography, recounting Hillebrand’s life not according to its own chronology but rather those of the wider colonial transits of sugar, labor migration, and political economy to Hawai‘i in the mid-nineteenth century.