Work in progress
A labour of freedom: ‘free wombs’ and slave emancipation in postcolonial Uruguay [paper presented at the 2023 Economic History Association Meeting]
The workings of the transitions from slavery to freedom shaped development paths in the Americas. I rely on a new dataset based on manuscript population listings to offer the first quantitative analysis of selective slave emancipation in postcolonial Uruguay, where by 1836 a third of people of African descent were free. Freedom came primarily through their own labour—both in the sense of working and giving birth—in an institutional context which was at best indifferent to their destiny, as only 5% of them directly benefited from the ‘free wombs’ reform. Reflecting racial status hierarchies, people born in Africa and those of darker complexion were more likely to remain enslaved. Using a probit model to control for the effects of age, origin, gender, and other covariates, I show that Black people were more likely to be free in smallholder rural areas, especially less fertile ones. Such results suggest that the lack of any policy towards freedpeople led to an embedding of racial inequality onto de facto resource allocation before the de jure abolition of slavery in 1852.
Ghost pastures in Uruguay: land embodied in beef and wool exports, 1870-1930 (with Ignacio Narbondo) [paper presented at Agricliometrics V (Montevideo, December 2023)]
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.
The country that counted cattle but not people: using birth records to reconstruct Uruguay’s social history, 1880-1960 (with Cecilia Lara)
Between 1880 and 1960 the Uruguayan state counted cattle and sheep herds ten times and population only once. The priorities guiding census-taking were emblematic of the perceived hierarchy between natural and human resources, and in particular of governments’ idea of where the wealth of the nation lay. They have also greatly limited the work of historians and social scientists who attempt to reconstruct Uruguay’s social history in the late-19th and early-20th centuries. In 1879 the national state took over vital registration from the Church: births, marriages, and deaths had to be recorded with the newly created Registro de Estado Civil (Civil Registry) before any religious sacraments took place. Birth registration was mandatory within twenty days (ten days in urban areas), free of charge, and issued by Justices of the Peace in each court district. A copy of the certificate was sent to each provincial capital and to the national record office in Montevideo, where they remain to this day. We extracted from this record office a random representative sample of tens of thousands of birth records to reconstruct key data on Uruguay’s population (migration, marriage, occupations, fertility, literacy, etc.) which are entirely missing from historiography due to the lack of censuses. This new, patiently mined dataset provides new answers for traditional historiographical debates and suggests many new questions.
Colonialism and inequality (joint with Michiel de Haas; chapter for Handbook of the Economic History of Colonialism edited by Tirthankar Roy and Ewout Frankema (Routledge, forthcoming 2025))
This chapter evaluates how colonialism has shaped economic inequality across empires, with a focus on Africa, Asia and Latin America since 1500. We are interested in way in which colonial rule created, prevented, sustained, decreased and increased levels of income and wealth inequality, and how it shaped the nature of ‘inequality regimes’ in terms of the specific spatial, racial and other cleavages it created. To develop our argument we draw from theoretical insights and empirical findings from a wide economic history literature, but also develop our own framework. In some cases, drivers of inequality, such as technological change, structural change, shifting skill premiums, and economic expansion more generally, coincided with colonial rule, but their effects on inequality cannot be attributed directly to colonialism. In other cases, colonialism drove and shaped processes that affected inequality, such as tropical cash crop cultivation or the mining of precious metals, but the occurrence of such processes did not fully hinge on the existence of colonial rule. In a third category of cases, colonialism was the unmistakable driver of inequality. Some key mechanisms that we have currently identified include land expropriation by settlers, a wide range of forms of labor coercion (e.g. mita in Spanish America and corvée in French Africa), (regressive) taxation, pricing and trade policies (e.g. hut taxes, import duties, concessionary monopolies, and marketing boards) and racial segregation of labor markets (from importing African slaves in colonial Latin America to bringing in “middlemen minorities”, such as Indians and Chinese in East Africa and Southeast Asia). In some cases, institutional inequalities were simply enforced by violence and military might, but in many other cases they were backed up with intricate legal categories that defined and separated different groups of people and their rights.
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.