Nicholas B. Miller

Nicholas B. Miller is an intellectual and social historian whose research spans the European Enlightenment, eighteenth-century political economy, and the history of plantation societies in global perspective. 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 thought across the German-speaking and Iberian worlds. A second strand of his scholarship examines debates over depopulation and immigration in the nineteenth-century Kingdom of Hawai‘i and their relationship to the rise of a plantation economy. 

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.