Dr Rebecca Simson

I am a Research Associate in the Faculty of History and a member of the Oxford Centre for Economic and Social History. My research examines the economic history and development of postcolonial Africa, with a particular focus on how economic conditions and power structures have evolved across the continent since the main wave of decolonisation in the 1960s. Where much recent African economic history has sought to illuminate the deep historical roots of present-day outcomes, my work takes the reverse perspective: identifying how and why African societies are changing and modernising, and mapping structural shifts across an era that has yet to receive sustained attention from economic historians.

I previously held the David Richards Junior Research Fellowship in Economic History at Wadham College, Oxford, and postdoctoral positions at the London School of Economics and the Institute for Historical Studies. I am a Visiting Fellow at the International Inequalities Institute at LSE and an editor of Frontiers in African Economic History. I also write for broader audiences through my newsletter, Small Ideas in Economic History, and my personal website.

Research Interests

• 20th century economic history of Africa
• Inequality, social mobility and elite formation
• Public finance and macroeconomic management
• Economic crises

My current research programme, Africa's Long Depression, 1974–2000, is supported by a New Investigator's Grant from the ESRC. The project examines why the global growth slowdown of the late twentieth century affected Sub-Saharan Africa so much more severely, and for considerably longer, than other developing regions. Taking a broad, comparative perspective on this period of economic decline, it aims to produce both original research and teaching resources that allow this era to be treated as a coherent historical episode. A book of the same title is under contract with Princeton University Press.

My previous research has examined social stratification, inequality, social mobility and elite formation in postcolonial Africa, a set of themes that preoccupied social scientists in the 1960s and 1970s before receiving little scholarly attention for several decades. I have investigated the role of the state and higher education system in shaping Africa's post-independence elite, and argued that East Africa has seen a marked shift away from state employment as the primary source of high-status professions since the structural adjustment era (published in African Affairs and Journal of International Development). Two recent articles on Kenya (Explorations in Economic History; Socio-Economic Review) return to debates about wealth accumulation since independence, mapping the changing characteristics of wealth-holders over time and documenting how and why women are increasingly becoming owners of formal wealth as collectivist property rights structures have gradually weakened. Other work has studied social mobility in a postcolonial setting, using the case of Sierra Leone to examine the legacies of Chieftaincy and settler communities on contemporary elites, by identifying names associated with these groups and tracking their degree of elite over-representation across time and elite types (Journal of Development Economics).

A related strand of my research concerns ethnic inequalities within African countries. Drawing on case studies from East Africa, I have argued that politically motivated ethnic favouritism in the distribution of public sector employment and educational opportunity is considerably less salient than recent literature has suggested, and that long-run structural inequalities, many originating in the colonial era, far outweigh the effects of overt political interference. My article on educational ethnic favouritism in the Journal of Modern African Studies, co-authored with Professor Elliott Green (LSE), received the Kimble Prize for the best article published in 2020.