Profiting from the Wage Gap
Accounting, race, and extraction in the Northern Rhodesian Copperbelt, 1931–39.
Dr Andrew Primmer
Accounting historian
Research on financial reporting, disclosure, and political risk in British, Belgian, and Portuguese overseas enterprise, c. 1890–1940.
I am a Research Associate in Accounting History at the University of Bristol and a PhD candidate in Accounting at the University of Portsmouth, where my thesis, Accounting as Imperial Governance: Financial Reporting, Disclosure, and Legitimacy in British, Belgian, and Portuguese Overseas Enterprise, c. 1890–1940, is due for submission in August 2027.
My research interrogates how accounting technologies—reserve structures, narrative disclosure, and financial reporting—operated as instruments of governance in overseas enterprise. Drawing on archival material from Europe, Latin America, and sub-Saharan Africa, I examine accounting choice under political risk, the construction of legitimacy through disclosure, and the role of accounting in colonial extraction. I hold a PhD in History from the University of Bristol and was previously a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Reading, where I was mentored by Professor Mark Casson.
My work has appeared in Accounting History, Accounting History Review (R&R), Business History Review, The Economic History Review, Enterprise & Society, and Business History.
Selected work
Accounting for Political Risk
Reserve structures and capital portability in British railways in Colombia, 1904–1929.
Accounting for “Railway Imperialism”
The Beira Railway Act of 1914.
Union Minière du Haut-Katanga, 1933
Full bilingual transcription (French/English) of the 1933 Board of Directors’ report. Source for the Copperbelt paper.
FolioScribe
AI-assisted handwritten text recognition for historians, archivists, and genealogists.
Finding El Dorado
The rise and fall of the Jenks business group in Colombia, 1899–1929.