Student Internships

• Fiscal Multipliers
  Jason Lennard
  This paper develops a new method based on fiscal forecasts to estimate the tax multiplier for the UK since the 1870s. The project is joint work with Martin Ellison (Oxford), who will be visiting the Department in the WT.
• The Rise and Fall of China's Tea Trade with Britain
  Melanie Xue
  This project will investigate the rise and decline of China's tea exports to Britain and the changing policy environment around the trade. It will trace when Chinese tea became central to British consumption, how the volume and composition of imports changed, and why China lost market share to India and Ceylon. A second strand will examine British commercial and diplomatic policy toward China, including trade regulation and taxation, the East India Company's role, and the treaty-port system. The internship is preliminary research for a larger project and will focus on identifying useful primary sources, quantitative series, and archival collections.
• Unfree Labour in Medieval England
  Jordan Claridge
  This project seeks to quantify the scale of unfree labour used in medieval English agriculture. When most people think about working in the Middle Ages, coerced labour is probably what first comes to mind. Indeed, an image of serfs labouring in the fields is one of the most enduring tropes of the medieval world. While the rise and fall of other aspects of serfdom, such as unfree land tenure, rent levels and servile incidents (payments for permissions from the lord), has been actively researched, our understanding of labour coercion remains limited. Only a few rough estimates exist for the actual contribution of unfree labor to the late medieval economy. This is a glaring gap: labour obligations were the heaviest burden unfree tenants faced and probably the greatest economic benefit lords extracted from serfdom.
• AI and Archival Extraction: Economic, Demographic and Psychological History from the Full Texts of Wills
  Neil Cummins
  We are using AI to analyse millions of wills from England, 1258 to 1900. We want you to help us.
• Origins of Common Law: Indian Judicial Development 1860-1947
  Maanik Nath
  Scholarship suggests two ways in which the law affects long-run economic development. One highlights the strength of the rule of law as a core explanation for economic divergence among countries that were colonised in the past (Acemoglu et al., 2001; Acemoglu and Robinson, 2005). The other suggests that the distinction between civil and common law transplantations in the past explain the variation in judicial efficiency and transparency among developing countries today (Djankov et al., 2003; La Porta et al., 2008). Both sets of literature use country-level data and assume static legal development over centuries. They ignore often complex legal structures and processes of change within legal regimes (Austin, 2008; Klerman et al., 2011; Roy and Swamy, 2016; Bolt and Gardner, 2020).
  My project aims to better understand and measure the change in long-run institutional development through the study of the origins and evolution of common law in British India. I aim to use a wide variety of court records to explore changes in court bench compositions, the ideologies and beliefs of judges, applications of case law and case outcomes across Indian courts and over time. In order to do this, I would first need the court records digitised.
• Settlement claims on London Poor Law Parishes
  George Marten
  A systematic network approach to settlement dynamics which blends qualitative and quantitative analyses of Poor Law Parish settlement records and correspondences contained within the London Archives. This project is a pilot study of these records, to mainly gauge the breadth of their coverage in space and time, and garner some idea of their organisation (I have already viewed one set of these at the London Archives and they are quite jumbled together, varying from direct orders to contextual letters).
• Information Technology and the Globalisation of Financial Markets: Lessons from the Telegraph
  Olivier Accominotti and Youssef Ghallada
  Developments in information and communication technologies foster economic integration by reducing information frictions. In this project, we study how the deployment of the telegraph in the 19th century contributed to the spread and densification of global financial interlinkages.
  Using granular data on sterling bills of exchange from the first wave of globalisation, we show how the spread of the telegraph widened international borrowers’ access to the world’s leading money market, London. To do so, we leverage a unique archival source, the Ledgers of the Bank of England’s Discount Office, to construct a dataset documenting the geographical location of firms that borrowed in the London money market in 1866, 1878 and 1906. The dataset records the names and locations of money market borrowers, as well as the intermediaries involved in the origination and distribution of sterling bills of exchange. This allows us to explore how international connections to London’s global financial centre evolved in relation to the geographical spread of the telegraph.
• Proofreading
  Albrecht Ritschl
  A chapter book for OUP, final touches.
• A History of Public Administration in India.
  Tirthankar Roy
  This is one planned chapter in a book project called "Building a State in India", covering period 1765-1857, aiming to create an account of how the bulding blocks of one of the most powerful states was created in one of the poorest regions of the world in these times.
• Was Cotton Deskilling? Women's and Children's Labour Supply in Northwest England
  Louis Henderson
  Transformative technologies introduce sweeping productivity gains while simultaneously making particular workers' roles obsolete. For more than a century, this process has generally been skill-biased, favouring educated workers and widening the earnings gap, but novel forms of automation raise the prospect of deskilling technological shocks in the twenty-first century (Acemoglu 2002; Bloom et al. 2024). Facing a transition with few precedents, scholars have turned to the technologies of England's industrial revolution—and above all to the cotton districts of the northwest—for analogies and lessons about likely social outcomes (Acemoglu and Johnson 2024; Frey 2019; Schneider and Vipond 2023). Despite this, current evidence is not sufficient to decide whether these technologies were deskilling, because quantitative measures of women's and children's labour supply, crucial factors in pre-industrial unskilled labour markets, are not consistently available across the industrial transformation.
  While good historical wage data exist, relative wages are not sufficient evidence for technological bias. A falling skill premium is only unambiguous evidence for deskilling technological change if the relative supply of unskilled labour is unchanged or rising, while the 'unemployment' of women and children, who formed an important part of unskilled labour markets, will tend to mimic the wage effects of deskilling change, particularly as institutional, cultural, or household constraints limited their labour-supply response to wages. A longstanding debate turns on exactly this question (Clark 1919; Pinchbeck 1969; Cunningham 1990).
  Existing methods each fall short on at least one of consistency, coverage, or span: wage series rest on strong assumptions about household behaviour (Humphries and Weisdorf 2015); pre-census enumerations let occupational titles misrepresent irregular, informal work (Humphries and Sarasua 2012; Erickson 2008; Burnette 2025); autobiographies track the age children began work but are selected, more so in the eighteenth century (Humphries 2010); and working-class budgets begin only in the 1790s (Horrell and Humphries 1995). For the northwest the problem is acute, since the parliamentary statistics on which we most rely were gathered to political ends and capture only the strategic textile sector rather than the wider regional economy (Acemoglu and Johnson 2024; Schneider 2026; Muldrew 2012).
  This project recovers time use from coroner's inquests into children's accidental deaths in the northwest. Comparable methodologies use central criminal court records concentrated around London circa 1800 (Voth 1998; Sheng 2023), or address the early modern period separately (Whittle et al. 2025); none spans the pre-industrial and industrial periods with a consistent methodology. Moreover, the data-generating process for coroner’s inquests is simpler than for criminal courts. As inclusion depends on the fatal-accident hazard of an individual's activity, so the distribution of activities at death is a hazard-weighted image of how individuals spent their time.
  The proposed methodology examines odds-ratios across margins where relative hazards are plausibly equivalent. Changes in the distribution of work-activities across days of the week reflects labour supply’s intensive margin, as the hazard associated with work should not vary from one day to the next. Changes in the odds of accidental death under maternal versus non-maternal care may identify changes in maternal labour supply on the assumption that care does not become more hazardous from one year to the next.
• Origins of colonial laws: evidence from Kenya
  Leigh Gardner
  One key legacy of colonialism in Africa has been the transplantation of foreign laws and institutions. But we still know little about precisely which laws and institutions. While it is often assumed that transfers were from coloniser to colony, qualitative records from the colonies themselves suggest that colonial officials looked more to the laws and institutions of other colonies than from the coloniser itself. This project uses digitised Kenyan law reports from the colonial period to examine the development of common law there by focusing on the precedents and bodies of law consulted by colonial judges in making their rulings.

The internship programme did not run in 2025-26

• Taxation in the Holy Roman Empire
  Oliver Volckart
  This project investigates the factors that determined to which extent the members of the Holy Roman Empire were meeting their obligation to pay the 'Turkish Aids' that the Imperial Diet granted to the Emperor. Did this depend on, for example, their distance to the Ottoman frontier, on their religious outlook or dynastic allegiance, on their political status, or on some other factor?
• Chamberlain's Court
  Patrick Wallis
  The Chamberlain’s Court was one of the last bastions of coercive labour relations in nineteenth century England, able to imprison unruly youths for misbehaviour at work even though adult employment disputes had been decriminalised. This project explores the way in which masters used the Court to discipline apprentices, the ways apprentices defended themselves, and sometimes turned the tables on their employers. It informs an edition of the Court’s records that is based on research by our second year undergraduate students.
• Determinants and Consequences of Elite Wealth: evidence from 700 years of Baltic history
  Tom Raster
  The prject aims to trace wealth inequality across centures, focussing in particular on how wealthy elites in the Baltics managed to weather various shocks, eg. plagues, invasion, expropriation.
• The Political Economy of Monetary Policy between the World Wars
  Pamfili Antipa
  We are interested in why the UK to decided to resume the Gold Standard in 1925. This decision entailed major consequences, as it prolonged and aggravated the Great Depression. Using newly hand-collected data, we seek to understand the economic motivations and political constraints of instutions, such as the Bank of England, and members of government
• Recovering from the UK Great Depression
  Jason Lennard
  This project investigates the causes of the recovery from the UK Great Depression focussing on expectations and monetary policy
• The Last Will and Sentiment
  Neil Cummins
  For the past millennium, the "last Will and Testament" guided the transmission of wealth at death, in England and in many other places. There exist many millions of these handwritten documents, which typically listed descriptively in about 1,000 of their own words an individual’s assets and inheritors. These wills represent our best record of individual lives and the economic, family, social and religious influences which mattered most to them as they contemplated their death.
• State Capacity and State Failures in China
  Kent Deng
  This project investigates government taxation, government spending, government welfare provision (health, education, famine relief, and so forth), and economic development (industrialisation, urbanisation, and HDI) since 1949.
• Who Governed Colonial Africa? Taxation and representation in the British Empire
  Leigh Gardner
  Who held power in colonial Africa? Colonial governments made policies which have had lasting impacts on the continent's development. But they were constrained in many ways - by the lack of staff and resources, and by their lack of legitimacy with those they ruled. Recent research in political science has shown that the survival of autocratic regimes often depends on elaborate strategies of power sharing and aptronage. Similarly, British colonial governments used systems of power sharing and resource distribution at various administrative levels to maintain stability during the colonial period. This project gathers new data on the composition and activities of colonial legislative councils to show how these methods varied between and within colonies, reflecting local economic and political circumstances.
• The Labour Share of Income in Medieval England
  Jordan Claridge
  The Black Death is seen as a watershed moment in long-run economic history. Very generally, the story is that the plague's drastically negative demo- graphic consequences triggered labor scarcity, resulting in a stark increase in wages, which paved the way for higher consumption and the proliferation of markets. Nonetheless, recent work has raised questions about both the extent and nature of these changes. (Humphries & Weisdorf, 2019; Claridge, Delabastita, & Gibbs, 2024).
  This project adopts a novel perspective to explore the structural market changes following the Black Death by quantifying the revenue share of medieval agricultural labour(ers). We do so by quantifying the expenses paid by lords to both casual and annual labor. We demonstrate that, under a plausible set of assumptions, the labor share of revenues is able to inform us on potential structural changes in agricultural production following the Black Death, as well as its consequences in terms of changing power dynamics in medieval labor markets.
• Birth Registers of the Queen Charlotte Hospital
  Eric Schneider
  The Queen Charlotte Birth Registers record information about the health of children born in this hospital in the early twentieth century. I am currently using this information to study the effects of pollution on health and will use it in the future to analyse the determinants of children's health at birth.
• The Political Economy of Imperial China
  Melanie Xue
  This is an umbrella term covering various projects, including the study of reformed Confucian thought and policy reforms to the imperial examination system.

• Manuscript preparation
  Tirthankar Roy
• Mughal Empire fact/data checking
  Safya Morshed
• The Chamberlain's Court (expansion of an EH237 project)
  Patrick Wallis
• The diffusion of folklore in 19th century Germany
  Melanie Xue
• Mapping mental asylums in 19th century England
  Melanie Xue
• Regional growth/inequality in the Habsburg Empire, c.1820-1913
  Max Schulze
• China's long-term demographic data-processing from the Han to the Qing periods
  Kent Deng
• (Real) wages in the Middle Ages
  Jordan Claridge

• Extraction and structuring of published data on 16th century taxpayers
  Patrick Wallis
• Checking of Chamberlain's Court transcriptions (EH237 only)
  Patrick Wallis
• Digitisation of 19th century rye prices and conversion in gram silver
  Oliver Volckart
• Creation of literature review on social construction of identities
  Max Schulze
• Digitising/coding data on the constitutional structures of British colonies over the 19th and 20th centuries
  Leigh Gardner
• Data collection of living standards in 20th century China
  Kent Deng
• Transcription of Government bond yields
  Jason Lennard
• Creation of database of French-Canadian parish records
  Chris Minns

• Welfare ratios and real wags
  Sara Horrell
• Lock Asylum Project
  Patrick Wallis
• Transcription of marriage records after 1980 and coding of occupations to a status schema
  Neil Cummins
• Women in 19th century England
  Melanie Xue
• Folklore/oral traditions in Europe
  Melanie Xue
• Chinese economic and political history project
  Melanie Xue
• Regional inequality and market access
  Max Schulze
• Africa's monetary geography since 1800
  Leigh Gardner
• Transcription of records in LSE Library to create a dataset for China's farming sector
  Kent Deng
• Digitisation and preliminary analysis of 13th and 14th century tax documents
  Jordan Claridge
• The US motion picture industry since 1945
  Gerben Bakker
• Child stunting project
  Eric Schneider
• Anglo-Asian trade in the Pacific west coast and foreign exchange markets in London 1800s-1830s
  Alejandra Irigoin

• Lock Asylum project
  Patrick Wallis
• Creation of bibliography for project on state formation in Europe (1500-1870)
• Mapping Medieval manors
  Jordan Claridge
• Transcription of medical records from Queen Charlotte Hospital
  Eric Schneider
• Photographing documents at Kew
  Anne Ruderman