I am an environmental and urban historian of Britain, Canada, and the British World during the long nineteenth century. I use digital methods including historical GIS, text mining and augmented reality, to explore industrialization in Greater London and the global commodities. I am interested in the intersections between environmental, social and political history. My book, West Ham and the River Lea: A Social and Environmental History of London’s Industrialized Marshland, 1839–1914 focuses on the history of rapid growth in suburban London, while my new research explores the environmental consequences of long-distance industrial supply chains.

Current projects:

• Collaboration with Atif Ghani of Heritage 5G to develop augmented reality content to explore the history of London, global commodities and Canadian landscapes
• Collaborative research project: Commerce impérial et transformations environnementales: la formation des hectares fantômes dans la vallée laurentienne, 1763-1918 (SSHRC Insight Grant with  Stéphane Castonguay, UQTR, Michèle Dagenais, Université de Montreal, and Colin Coates, York University)
• Book project: London's Ghost Acres, 1772-1918
• Public History Project: ActiveHistory.ca
• COVID 19 Community Archive: https://covid19archive.usask.ca/ 

Past projects:

• SSHRC Insight Development Grant: London’s Ghost Acres 1850-1919 with Colin Coates, York University, Andrew Watson, U of S and Jon Bath, U of S. 2014-2016
• Digging Into Data Grant: Trading Consequences with Colin Coates, York University and colleagues in Scotland. 2012-2014

• Jim Clifford and Stéphane Castonguay, “British Ghost Acres and Environmental Changes in the Laurentian Forest during the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of Historical Geography, Published Online August 2022, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2022.05.002.
• Stéphane Castonguay and Jim Clifford, “Les Hectares Fantômes de l’industrialisation Britannique et La Forêt Laurentienne, 1793-1900,” in Écrire l’histoire Environnementale Au Xxie Siècle : Sources, Méthodes, Pratiques, ed. Renaud Bécot and Stéphane Frioux, Histoire (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2022), 237–56, http://books.openedition.org/pur/164763.
• Jim Clifford, “London’s Rapid Growth,” in A Mighty Capital Under Threat: The Environmental History of London, 1800-2000, ed. Bill Luckin and Peter Thorsheim (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020).
• Jim Clifford, “London’s Soap Industry and the Development of Global Ghost Acres in the Nineteenth Century,” Environment and History Fast Tracked in 2019  and will be published in 2021, https://doi.org/10.3197/096734019X15463432086982.
• Jim Clifford, West Ham and the River Lea: A Social and Environmental History of London's Industrialized Marshland, 1839-1914, Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2017.
• Jim Clifford, Beatrice Alex, Colin Coates, Andrew Watson and Ewan Klein, "Geoparsing History: Locating Commodities in Ten Million Pages of Nineteenth-Century Sources," Historical Methods, 49 3 (2016): 115-131, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01615440.2015.1116419.
• Thomas Peace, Jim Clifford and Judy Burns, “Maitland’s Moment: Turning Nova Scotian Forests into Ships for the Global Commodity Trade,” Environments of Mobility in Canadian History, B. Bradley, C. Coates, and J. Young eds., (University of Calgary Press,  2016): 27-54.
• Uta Hinrichs, Beatrice Alex, Jim Clifford, Andrew Watson, Aaron Quigley, Ewan Klein, Colin M. Coates, “Trading Consequences: A Case Study of Combining Text Mining and Visualization to Facilitate Document Exploration,” Digital Scholarship in the Humanities. 30 suppl 1 (2015): i50-i75. doi: 10.1093/llc/fqv046
• Colleen Beard, Daniel Macfarlane, Jim Clifford, "Mapping the Welland Canals and the St. Lawrence Seaway with Google Earth," Historical GIS research in Canada, B. Jennifer, & M. Fortin, eds., (University of Calgary Press,  2014): 27-42.
• Ewan Klein, Beatrice Alex, Jim Clifford, "Bootstrapping a historical commodities lexicon with SKOS and DBpedia,"Proceedings of the EACL LaTeCH Workshop, (2014): 13-21.
• Jim Clifford, "What is Active History?," Left History, 15 1, (2010) : 12-19.

Active History British History British World Canadian History Cities Commodities Digital Humanities Digital Methods Environmental History Forest History GIS HGIS History of Public Health London Nineteenth Century Public History Spatial History Timber Trade Urban Urban History

• London’s Ghost Acres, 1850-1919 (2014-1016)
• Trading Consequences (2012-1014)

I completed my Ph.D. at York University in 2011.