Peter Crooks is Lecturer in Medieval History at Trinity College, Dublin. His primary research interest is in Ireland in the period 1171-1541 and, arising from that, in the wider 'English world' or 'Plantagenet empire' of which Ireland formed an important part. He is editor of Government, War and Society in Medieval Ireland (2008) and, with David Green and W. Mark Ormrod, The Plantagenet Empire, 1259-1453. He is also principal editor of 'Circle' (https://chancery.tcd.ie/), a reconstruction of the Irish chancery rolls destroyed in the 1922 fire at the Public Record Office, Dublin. His articles have appeared in Past and Present and the English Historical Review.

Timothy H. Parsons holds a joint appointment as a Professor of African History in the history department and the African and African-American Studies Program at Washington University, St Louis. His publications include The Second British Empire: In the Crucible of the Twentieth Century (2014), The Rule of Empires: Those Who Built Them, Those Who Endured Them, and Why They Always Fall (2010), Race, Resistance and the Boy Scout Movement in British Colonial Africa (2004), The 1964 Army Mutinies and the Making of Modern East Africa (2003) and The African Rank-and-File: Social Implications of Colonial Service in the King's African Rifles, 1902-1964 (1999).