Staff profile

I’m an economic historian of West Africa in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. My research focuses on African economic development in historical perspective, particularly taxation, labour, and living standards. I am currently working on my first monograph, based on my PhD, which examines the relationship between taxation and representation in colonies in West Africa. 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 History at King’s College London. I then moved to Cambridge where I received an MPhil in Economic and Social History in 2017 and a PhD in History in 2021. During 2019-20 I was the Jane Eliza Procter Fellow at Princeton University. 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

• 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 (98-118). Manchester University Press

Journal Article

• 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