2025–2026
Consultant
United Nations Development Programme, for South Sudan’s first Multidimensional Poverty Index report
About
Igor B. Martins
I am an economic historian studying the origins and persistence of inequality, with a primary focus on Africa. Much of my work follows slaveholding households in the Cape Colony through tax censuses, slave valuations, and compensation records. I show that they held enslaved people as capital and as collateral for credit. I follow them through emancipation in 1834 to see what the loss of that wealth meant for their farms, their families, and how long they lived, and what freedom meant for the people they had enslaved.
I am a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Management and Engineering at Linköping University and am also affiliated with the Department of Economic History at Lund University. I hold an MSc and PhD in Economic History from Lund University and have previously worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Lund and the University of Cambridge.
Roles and service
2023–2025
Conference manager
19th World Economic History Congress, Lund
2023–2024
Consultant
STINT, the Swedish Foundation for International Cooperation in Research and Higher Education
Since 2023
Peer reviewer
Studies in Comparative International Development, Studies in Higher Education, Technological Forecasting and Social Change, and other journals
2022–2023
Affiliated postdoctoral member
Clare Hall, University of Cambridge
Since 2021
Treasurer, then auditor
Swedish Economic History Association
Since 2017
Visiting researcher
Laboratory for the Economics of Africa’s Past, Stellenbosch University
Get in touch
Postal address
Department of Management and Engineering (IEI)
Economics (NEK)
Linköping University
SE-581 83 Linköping, Sweden
Visiting address
Campus Valla, A-huset
Entrance 19C, Room 219:207
Linköping, Sweden