Dr. Hatter’s research program embraces the comparative study of British and American Empire in the Revolutionary Atlantic World. More specifically, his research focuses on merchants as transnational agents of empire, exploring their ambivalent and often fraught relationship with imperial policymakers in the metropole and government officials on the ground. Hatter’s first book, Citizens of Convenience: The Imperial Origins of American Nationhood on the U.S.-Canadian Border (Charlottesville, 2017) won the 2016 Walker Cowen Memorial Prize for “an outstanding work of scholarship in eighteenth-century studies.” He is beginning a new project with the working title Negotiating Independence: American overseas merchant communities in the Age of Revolution
