Pamela Nightingale was a scholar of Newnham College, Cambridge, where, for her Ph.D., she worked on the history of the East India Company in the eighteenth century. Her thesis was published in 1970 as Trade and Empire in Western India, 1784-1806, by Cambridge University Press. While her three children were young she taught for the Open University and subsequently published further books on British India and Kashgar in Chinese Central Asia, before making the major change of subject involved in writing A Medieval Mercantile Community. This focused on the Grocers' Company of London and its part in the economic and political developments of the city and of the medieval English economy. In 1999 she was elected a member of Oxford University's History Faculty, and in 2010 she was awarded an Oxford D. Litt degree. She is also a fellow of the Royal Historical Society.