Originally from Yackandandah in Australia, I have undergraduate degrees in Economics and History from the Australian National University in Canberra as well as a master’s degree from the Institut de hautes études internationales et du développement in Geneva. I also spent time at Boğaziçi University in İstanbul. I am now a Wong-Calthorpe Cambridge-Australia scholar at Sidney Sussex College.
I am primarily an economic historian of the developing world, with particular interest in Afrique occidentale française and Senegal; I have also published on economic development in Asia. My doctoral research, which is supervised by Professor Gareth Austin, focuses on the patterns and drivers of structural change in colonial and early independence Senegal.
I am also a researcher on an ongoing project on trade and structural change in the developing world in the high age of European imperialism with researchers at Cambridge, SOAS and Goldsmiths, University of London that was awarded a grant from the ESRC’s Rebuilding Macroeconomics initiative.
Work in progress:
Here are some projects I’m currently working on:
“Structural change in Senegal: evidence from occupational structures, c.1870-2002”
This is a paper to be presented at the Economic History Society’s annual meeting in Belfast.
“The human capital of human capital: slavery and skills premiums in 19th century urban Senegal”
I use price data from slave sales in 19th century Senegal to examine the returns to slave skills.
“Real incomes in French Africa: insights from real wages”
The pioneering work of Marlous van Waijenburg and Ewout Frankema has given us long series of urban real wages in colonial British Africa. In this work, I will expand our knowledge of the evolution of real wages by looking at French colonies, drawing on disparate published and unpublished archival sources. Some comparisons will be drawn to colonial Asia and the Belgian and Italian colonies in Africa.
“Part time growth: rural by-employment in Northern Nigeria during the Great Depression”
Using unique microdata from colonial tax records, I examine the determinants of industrial byemployment in one of the most interesting economies of West Africa: northern Nigeria.
Decompressing History 