Colin Heywood was born and educated in Hull and studied at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He taught at a number of American universities between 1965 and 1974; subsequently at SOAS, until his retirement in 1999. Since 2002 he has been an Honorary Research Fellow at the Maritime Historical Studies Centre, University of Hull, as well as serving as a Visiting Professor at Princeton (2000), the University of Chicago (2005, 2006) and the University of Cyprus (2006-7). In 2011-12 he played a major part in reactivating the Blaydes House Maritime History Seminar, which has met regularly since then. In addition to maintaining his original interests in Ottoman history in the Early Modern period, he also publishes on aspects of the history of English shipping in the Mediterranean in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Edmond Smith completed his doctorate at Cambridge in 2016. Formerly a capital markets research manager, he now specializes in the histories of capitalism and globalism and has conducted research in Africa, America, Asia and Europe, working on topics ranging from the emergence of transnational corporations to the archaeology of colonisation. In 2018 he joined the University of Manchester as a Presidential Fellow in Economic Cultures. His work has been published in numerous academic journals and books. His first book Merchants: The Community that Shaped England's Trade and Empire has recently been published by Yale University Press.