Who am I?

My name is Frank Pennycook and I write about history. My earlier background was in science and mathematics, my first degree being in Maths. But I've always had interests in history and philosophy as well. More recently I took an MA in Philosophy. I'm now interested in the development of ideas through history, and the ways they spread and interact.

About this blog

The posts here are my notes on sources I am reading, with some of my rather impromptu commentary. They are here as much as anything to help me organise and keep track of references I have come across. In such a raw form, they may or may not be of interest to any other readers. At the moment, I'm reading mostly about the 17th and 18th centuries partly as background to my Substack series (below). But I've also put up a couple of posts connected with ancient mathematics and I hope to pursue some further topics in due course.

Diamond Pitt

My current series is [Diamond Pitt]{https://pennycook.substack.com). There I'm following the life story of one rather notorious merchant adventurer who made several fortunes in India and sensibly used the proceeds to launch his family to the top of British politics. The period of Thomas Pitt's life, roughly 1650 to 1730, brought rapid social and economic change to Europe as its contacts with the wider world continued to extend and deepen.