Work in progress

Free souls, poor soils: the nature of slave emancipation in postcolonial Uruguay

The long-term legacies of slavery in Latin America cannot be fully explained without understanding how the process of emancipation unfolded. Where slavery had been more prevalent, emancipation was an uneven process rather than an event. I examine new data from manuscript population listings to offer the first quantitative analysis of slave emancipation in Uruguay, where by 1836 less than a third of people of African descent were free. Though traditional historiography has lauded the ‘free birth law’, only 5% of Black people in the sample had drawn any direct benefit from it. Freedom rather came through their own efforts in an institutional context which was at best indifferent to their destiny. Reflecting racial status hierarchies, people born in Africa and those of darker complexion were more likely to remain enslaved also after independence. Crucially, I find that Africans as well as their descendants were more likely to be free in the least fertile smallholder areas, suggesting an embedding of de jure racial inequality onto de facto resource allocation before the formal abolition of slavery in 1852.

Ghost pastures in Uruguay: land embodied in beef and wool exports, 1870-1930 (with Ignacio Narbondo)

When a country imports an agricultural product it is effectively using foreign land resources embodied in that commodity. South America has long been a provider of ‘ghost acres’ for industrialising economies through crop and livestock exports, leading to wide-ranging environmental degradation in the region. And yet we know almost nothing about the extent of ghost pastures grazed by livestock to supply foreign markets, because the literature measures only the cropland embodied in trade. We examine the case of Uruguay, the country with the most cattle per person in the world, during the First Globalization, when it exported c.10% of globally traded beef and wool. This paper offers the first estimates for pastureland embodied in Uruguayan exports, considering changes in breed, diet, and age of animals between 1870-1930. We find that p1astures embodied in exports expanded by 0.85% each year to occupy 40% of Uruguay’s total land. The efficiency gains produced by biological innovation (each animal needed less land) resulted in more land being used in total: a pastoral variation on Jevons’ paradox.

Data visualization and the historian’s craft (joint with Tom Westland)

Social science historians devote much of their time to finding primary sources and mining them for data. We then spend at least as long tending to our evidence, as we clean it, arrange it, structure it, and make it legible to our methods. However, and regardless of our methodological toolset—whether quantitative, qualitative, or somewhere in between—, we tend not to spend a comparable amount of time thinking about how to visually (re)present the treasures we hauled from the archive. But well-crafted visualization is not just icing on the methodological cake: it is essential to effective data description and analysis. This essay surveys, assesses, and reflects on social science historians’ data visualizations over the last decade and proposes ways to push open our methodological creativity for visual design.