current research projects (as PI)

Migrant labour in colonial Africa: markets and violence (funded by the Ramón Areces Foundation, 2026-2029)

In the long history of African migration, the circular routes from interior regions to cash-crop areas ushered in a new era of economic mobility during the late colonial period (c. 1920–1960). Initially seasonal and mostly male, these migratory flows became increasingly permanent over time, expanding to encompass women and children amid rapid population growth. Above all, they were emblematic of the capacity of many local economies in tropical Africa—both rural and urban—to absorb hundreds of thousands of migrants annually. These workers were crucial to produce, process, and transport the crops of cocoa, coffee, tea, peanuts, cotton, and palm oil drove major cycles of regional growth while supplying European economies with calories and raw materials. Although host societies generally welcomed the immigrants' contribution to production and exports, episodes of violence and expulsion also occurred. This project will transcribe archival sources from colonial French Africa to examine mass migration from the interior regions to cash-crop areas and coastal towns of Senegal and Côte d’Ivoire during the last decades of colonial rule. These migrants contributed decisively to the economic development of receiving societies and supplied European economies with key foodstuffs and raw materials, but in some cases they faced episodes of anti-immigrant violence. We seek to understand how these migrant labour markets functioned, and the conditions under which violence emerged.

Slavery and the origins of racial inequality in Uruguay (c.1800-1900) (funded by the Spanish Research Agency through a ‘Ramón y Cajal’ Grant, 2025-2030)

Over the last two decades, economists have emphasised the importance of institutions inherited from the colonial past to explain countries’ development paths and their difficulties to reduce poverty and inequality. Historians have criticised some of this work, pointing out that many development economists tend to ‘compress history’, drawing correlations between the present and some more or less distant point in the past, without explaining historical processes or making explicit the social and political mechanisms that underpin persistence. To overcome these limitations, we need to understand exactly in which way the institutional legacies of the colonial past persist far beyond the contexts in which they emerged. Slavery is one of the most crucial institutions in economic historiography and in the history of the Americas. Despite the vast scholarship on the history of slavery in the Americas, we know far less (especially in quantitative terms) about the processes of transition to freedom, which included in all cases a period of selective emancipation before abolition, and that decisively shaped the long-term impacts of slavery. This project takes this through the study of slave emancipation in rural Uruguay. This will contribute to fill a substantial gap in the scholarship, because Uruguayan economic historiography has been written ignoring almost entirely Africans and their descendants. Besides having been comparatively overlooked, the case of Uruguay can be particularly revealing because it fell under Brazilian control after achieving independence from Spain, and so experienced colonial rule by the two powers which upheld slavery for the longest time in the Americas. Twentieth-century Uruguay would become the most egalitarian country in Latin America, but by global standards its levels of income inequality have remained very high, which arguably contributed to its poor growth performance in the long-run. As elsewhere in the Americas, recent research reveals that people with African ancestry (about 10% of Uruguay’s population today) face systematic disadvantages in terms of education, wages, unemployment, poverty, and wealth. Yet, we do not have any quantitative studies about how these inequalities emerged historically or how they evolved during the nineteenth century.