Emiliano Travieso is a PhD student in economic history at King’s College, Cambridge. He works on the economic history of the River Plate in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, focusing on natural resources, agriculture and energy.
Tom Westland is a PhD student in economic history at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. His current work centres on the French colonial world, and in particular Senegal in the colonial and post-independence periods, with an emphasis on trade, structural change and industrialisation.
We owe the title of the blog to our supervisor Gareth Austin’s paper on the reversal of fortunes thesis; we owe these silly hats to Gareth himself: