Research Projects
British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship, 2017-2019 (pf160051)
Conversion out of Poverty? Exploring the Origins and Long-Term Consequences of Christian Missionary Activities in Africa
In recent years, there has been intense debate over the impact of Christian missionary activities in Africa during colonial rule (c. 1880-1960) on African long-term development. While the literature claims that the benefits of mission education were substantial and persist to the present-day, there is widespread disagreement about the mechanisms and the degree to which ordinary Africans were able to benefit from these developments under colonial rule and beyond. Using hitherto unexploited individual-level data from parish churches, hospitals, and colonial archives in seven British African colonies, this project explores two key questions in a comparative analytical framework: (i) What determined African Christianization in general and what influenced the spatial expansion of mission in particular? (ii) What was the gender-specific impact of missionary activities on African human capital, labour market participation, social mobility, and health? This project seeks to improve our understanding of the unique historical process and enduring significance of missionary expansion in Africa.
[Review]
Economic History Society Carnevali Small Research Grant, 2019
The Blessings of Medicine? A New Empirical Foundation for the Study of Missionary Medicine and African Long-Term Health
Sub-Saharan Africa's transition to rapid population growth began in the 1920s, largely due to declining mortality rates. The main source of western healthcare for most Africans during the colonial era was missionary medicine. The lack of reliable historical data on African health hampers long-term analyses of well-being and social development. This project aims to shed new light on the impact and experience of western biomedicine in colonial Africa by (i) transcribing 24,000 patient registers from Mengo Hospital in Uganda, one of Africa’s oldest and most famous mission hospitals, and (ii) creating a unique dataset, which permits (iii) long-run comparative analysis of African patients’ diseases and treatment by religion, education and sex. In particular, I will explore whether and how Christian conversion and mission education affected disease incidence and health behaviour, and consider how patterns of diagnoses reflected missionary medicine’s focus on hygiene and sexual morality. I also compare urban (Mengo) with rural disease development through previously transcribed Toro Hospital registers.
The Economic History of Christian Africa, 2015-2016
(with Jacob Weisdorf)
The main aim of this project is to develop a new empirical basis for a comparative study of long-term economic and social development across Africa. The vital registry of mission churches presents one of the earliest historical sources. We digitally preserve the earliest hand-written and hitherto unexplored Anglican marriage registers to be found in former mission stations of the Church Mission Society (CMS) in Eastern, Western and Southern Africa. Our goal is to collect and safeguard a large sample of demographic statistics recorded in the earliest parish registers from various African countries and to use those statistics to estimate long-term trends in labour market participation and human capital formation among male and female Christian Africans. The database will include information about marriage patterns (from age at marriage), educational and social status attainments (derived from occupational titles), literacy skills (from signatures), and numeracy skills (from age-heaping behaviour). Parishioners’ names are redacted for privacy protection. Using this micro-data we seek to develop a quantitative perspective on the short- and long-run influences of European missionary and coloniser activities on the economic development of Christian Africa(ns) since pre-colonial times.
