Research programme

My research sits at the intersection of accounting history, business history, and the history of imperialism. I examine how financial reporting, disclosure practice, and accounting choice operated as instruments of governance in overseas enterprise—enabling distant shareholders, lenders, and colonial administrators to exercise control over operations separated from them by thousands of miles and, often, by significant political risk. My doctoral thesis at Portsmouth develops this argument across British, Belgian, and Portuguese firms operating in Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, and their respective colonial hinterlands.

The programme proceeds along five interlocking research streams.

Accounting choice and political risk

How did firms operating in politically risky jurisdictions use accounting choice—particularly the construction of reserves and the timing of asset valuations—to insulate themselves from expropriation, exchange controls, and fiscal predation? My work on British railways in Colombia during the Quinquenio of Rafael Reyes (1904–1909) and the subsequent nationalist turn of 1907–1918 reconstructs the layered reserve structures that made capital portable across jurisdictions. The paper identifies a distinctive “capital portability” logic: reserves functioned not merely as prudential cushioning but as a governance technology that preserved shareholder claims against sovereign risk. This work is forthcoming in the Accounting Historians Journal.

Narrative disclosure and legitimacy

Beyond the quantitative balance sheet, annual reports are sites of narrative production where firms construct legitimacy for distant audiences. Drawing on governmentality frameworks and the critical accounting tradition (Miller and O’Leary; Annisette and Prasad), I read the discursive architecture of early British multinational annual reports as a form of “governance at a distance.” A working paper develops a two-dimensional typology of narrative disclosure organised along axes of authority and information asymmetry, with case material drawn from the Beira Railway Company, the Union Minière du Haut-Katanga, and the Rhokana Corporation. The stream rests in part on a corpus of Union Minière annual reports (1911–1939) transcribed from the HWWA archive in Hamburg, a selection of which is published here as primary sources.

Accounting, race, and colonial extraction

Accounting was not a neutral ledger of colonial operations. In the Northern Rhodesian Copperbelt, racialised wage structures were recorded, naturalised, and reproduced through cost accounting practices that treated African and European labour as analytically distinct categories subject to different managerial logics. My forthcoming article in Accounting History examines how the Roan Antelope Copper Mines and Rhokana Corporation recorded, justified, and profited from this wage gap between 1931 and 1939. A companion working paper, The Balance Sheet as Barrier, reads the Beira Railway Act of 1914 as a case in which the published accounts themselves became an instrument of exclusion.

Fiscal allocation and the limits of disclosure regulation

A newer stream asks what happens when accounting numbers must be divided between competing fiscal authorities, or when disclosure is curtailed by law rather than by managerial choice. Taxing an Indivisible Railway reconstructs the administrative allocation of Rhodesia Railways’ profits across five Southern African jurisdictions between 1926 and 1946, drawing on a 1933 Privy Council judgment to show how an economically indivisible enterprise was rendered fiscally divisible. A parallel paper examines the interwar American retreat from sales disclosure—including confidential treatment litigation predating the Securities Act—and a further project reads the disclosure logic of the United Fruit Company’s 1930 annual report.

Counterfactual financial modelling

The archival material underpinning this research generates quantitative datasets capable of supporting counterfactual analysis. I use panel methods and firm-level financial data from the Investor’s Monthly Manual and primary corporate records to model what Victorian and Edwardian investors actually priced when they purchased the debt and equity of overseas enterprise. Looking Through the Balance Sheet, written with Martin Persson (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign) and in review at The British Accounting Review, tests the value relevance of colonial railway accounts under dividend restriction between 1905 and 1926. A related paper in progress develops the operating ratio as a sufficient statistic for yield spreads in the Victorian railway sector, with broader implications for how markets priced information asymmetry in the absence of modern disclosure regimes.

Monograph

My monograph Gentlemanly Capitalism and Business Imperialism: Colombia’s Insertion into the British World Economy, 1810–1956 is under contract with Oxford University Press in the British Academy Monographs series. The book is mentored by Professor Geoffrey Jones at Harvard Business School and brings the accounting and financial history of British enterprise in Colombia into sustained dialogue with the Cain and Hopkins gentlemanly capitalism thesis and the Gallagher and Robinson account of informal empire.

Digital methods

I am building FolioScribe, an AI-assisted handwritten text recognition platform targeting historians, archivists, and genealogists. The tool transcribes archival manuscripts using a vision-language model and is a methodological contribution to the digital humanities. Transcriptions generated in the course of the monograph research are being made publicly available as primary sources.