David Armitage is the Lloyd C. Blankfein Professor of History at Harvard University, an Honorary Professor of History at the University of Sydney and an Honorary Fellow of St Catharine's College, Cambridge. He is the author or editor of sixteen books, among them Civil Wars: A History in Ideas (2017), The History Manifesto (co-author, 2014), Pacific Histories: Ocean, Land, People (co-editor, 2014), Foundations of Modern International Thought (Cambridge, 2013), The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800 (2nd edition, co-editor, 2009), The Declaration of Independence: A Global History (2007) and The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge, 2000).

Alison Bashford is Professor of History at the University of New South Wales, fellow of Jesus College and currently Trustee of Royal Museums Greenwich. Author and editor of many books on world history, environmental history and the history of science, her most recent are The New Worlds of Thomas Robert Malthus (2016) with Joyce E. Chaplin and Quarantine: Local and Global Histories (2016, editor).

Sujit Sivasundaram is Reader in World History at the University of Cambridge and researches both the Pacific and Indian Oceans, especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He is the author of Islanded: Britain, Sri Lanka and the bounds of an Indian Ocean colony (2013) and Nature and the godly empire: Science and evangelical mission in the Pacific, 1795–1850 (Cambridge, 2005). In 2012, he won a Philip Leverhulme Prize for History, awarded for outstanding contributions to research by early-career scholars in the UK. He is co-editor of The Historical Journal and Fellow and Councillor of the Royal Historical Society.