Jo Guldi is the Hans Rothfels Assistant Professor of History at Brown University. She is the author of Roads to Power: Britain Invents the Infrastructure State (2012).

David Armitage is the Lloyd C. Blankfein Professor of History at Harvard University. Among his publications are The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (2000), Foundations of Modern International Thought (2013), Milton and Republicanism (co-edited, 1995), Bolingbroke: Political Writings (edited, 1997), British Political Thought in History, Literature and Theory, 1500-1800 (co-edited, 2006), and Shakespeare and Early Modern Political Thought (co-edited, 2009), all from Cambridge University Press.