Nicholas B. Miller

Nicholas B. Miller is a historian of political thought and governance in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, and of the formation of plantation regimes in the wider world. He holds a Ph.D. in History from Universität Potsdam (summa cum laude), an M.St. in History from Oxford University (with distinction), and a B.A. in History from Durham University (first-class honours).

His research on the European Enlightenment examines practices of historical and intercultural comparison. It focuses particularly on debates over the historicity of gender, marriage, and the family in the Scottish Enlightenment, as well as on cameralist discourse across the German-speaking and Iberian worlds.

A second strand of his scholarship investigates political reasoning about population, state-building, and liberal political economy in the making of nineteenth-century plantation regimes, centered on Hawai‘i as a primary case study. This research examines local political debates over immigration across changing regimes of sovereignty, from the Hawaiian Kingdom to the early U.S. territorial period.

Miller is the author of John Millar and the Scottish Enlightenment: Family Life and World History (Voltaire Foundation, 2017). His edited collections include Cameralism and the Enlightenment: Happiness, Governance, and Reform in Transnational Perspective (Routledge, 2020, with Ere Nokkala) and Plantation Knowledge: Agricultural Colonization, Exploitation, and Exchange since 1500 (State University of New York Press, 2025, with Ulrike Lindner). His research has also appeared in Labor, International History Review, and edited volumes published by Oxford, Edinburgh, Routledge, and Palgrave.

His research has been supported by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions, the European Research Council, and the Fritz Thyssen Foundation. He previously held research appointments at the Universities of Cologne, Göttingen, and Lisbon, and has been a visiting scholar at the Universities of Würzburg, Erfurt, and Hawai‘i and at the East-West Center.