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About
I am an LSE Fellow in the Department of Economic History.
I am a historian of movement, encounters, and identity – the “messy” things in our past. My research hopes to advance global economic history through transimperial perspectives and interdisciplinary approaches.
My PhD thesis at the University of Edinburgh, funded by an ESRC studentship through the Scottish Graduate School of Social Science, investigates census-making by Shanghai’s international and multilayered authorities from the 1840s to 1949. It offers a case study of primarily British and French imperial governance beyond formal empire and within multilateral institutional settings. From a top-down perspective, negotiations around census procedures reflect the socioeconomic and political dynamics that tested and shaped transimperial governance and nation-building efforts. From a bottom-up perspective, census practices and results not only influenced societal initiatives for socioeconomic change and political reform, but they also shaped local and national identities among Chinese and foreign communities.
As an interdisciplinary project on social data production in nineteenth- and twentieth-century China, the thesis also seeks to enable further economic and social history work drawing on these sources. My latest publication on migration history demonstrates one such exploration.
- Greener on the other side? The motivations for Chinese migration to the Shanghai International Settlement, 1853-1943, Revista de Historia Industrial – Industrial History Review,Vol. 35 No. 96 (2026): New Perspectives in Global Economic History (II) -https://doi.org/10.1344/rhi-ihr.48095
My ongoing projects build upon my work in transimperial history, migration studies, and the history of foreign presence in China. They continue to explore experiences that have been historically and historiographically marginalised.