Staff profile

I’m an economic historian of West Africa in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and my research broadly focuses on African economic development in historical perspective, particularly taxation, taxpayers, and colonial institutions. I am currently working on a project, based on my PhD research, that examines the behaviour, experiences and perspectives of colonial taxpayers in West Africa, especially Sierra Leone. The project includes articles on urban local government and institutional transfers between metropole and colonies, the contribution of labour taxes to colonial revenues, and the ways in which taxpayer behaviour shaped colonial tax policy. My other research focuses on household income, labour, and wages in West African port cities and on the role of Africa and Africans in the development of humanitarian organisations. In all my work, I am especially interested in combining qualitative source material with newly digitised and previously under-utilised quantitative sources from both British and African archives.

I grew up in south London and studied for my BA at King’s College London. I then moved to Cambridge where I received an MPhil in Economic and Social History in 2017 and stayed for my PhD, which I received in 2021. During 2019-20 I spent a year at Princeton University as the Jane Eliza Procter Fellow. Before joining Durham, I was the Economic History Society Anniversary Fellow at the Institute of Historical Research and a Visiting Fellow in the Department of Economic History at the LSE, where I taught African and Economic History.

Chapter in book

• Internal Inequalities: Taxpayers, Taxation and Expenditure in a Composite Colonial State
  
  Channing, L. (2022). Internal Inequalities: Taxpayers, Taxation and Expenditure in a Composite Colonial State. In G. K. Bhambra & J. McClure (Eds.), Imperial Inequalities: The Politics of Economic Governance across European Empires (pp. 98-118). Manchester University Press.

Journal Article

• Taxing Chiefs: The Design and Introduction of Direct Taxation in the Sierra Leone Protectorate, 1896–1914
  
  Channing, L. (2020). Taxing Chiefs: The Design and Introduction of Direct Taxation in the Sierra Leone Protectorate, 1896–1914. The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 48(3). https://doi.org/10.1080/03086534.2019.1706789