Matthew Wormer
Assistant Professor of History
OFFICE HOURS
BACKGROUND
Matthew Wormer is a historian of Britain and the British Empire, with a particular focus on the British presence in Asia during the long nineteenth century. His research and teaching interests include histories of capitalism, race, and labor, commodities and consumption, and liberal economic and political thought.
His current book project examines the production and sale of opium in British India to offer a new explanation for the outbreak of the First Opium War in 1839. At once a powerful medical analgesic, an addictive recreational narcotic, and an immensely profitable article of trade, opium raised fundamental questions about the relationship between use value and exchange value at the heart of capitalist exchange. Transforming the plant known as papaver somniferum into the commodity “opium” entwined ideological debates over political economy with the material properties of the poppy, making its production a site of moral contestation over economic value involving peasant cultivators, private traders, and colonial officials. His research has been supported by grants and fellowships from the Social Science Research Council, the Stanford Humanities Center, and the Mabelle McLeod Lewis Foundation, among others.
He received a BA in History from Fordham University in 2011 and an MA in European Studies from Yale in 2014. He completed his PhD at Stanford University in 2022.