This project is a result of collaboration between the Departments of Economics and History at the University of Sussex. It also involves working with the Economic and Social Research Council and The National Archives, as well as collaborations with academics across the globe. The main investigators are Ian Gazeley (Principal Investigatpr), Professor of Economic History and Andrew Newell (Co-Investigator), Professor of Economics.

Professor Ian Gazeley has based much of his research on the construction and analysis of micro-datasets from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His work is clustered around the themes of British pay inequality and living standards measurement. He has extracted and analysed the data relating to food consumption and nutrition from late nineteenth century and early twentieth century social surveys, including the survey carried out by the United States Commissioner of Labor 1890-91, which was the largest household survey of the nineteenth century (1,021 British households), as well as the more well-known surveys carried out by Charles Booth and Seebohm Rowntree. He is author of Poverty in Britain (2003), and many journal articles on British living standards.

Professor Andrew Newell is a labour economist who has investigated the causes of changes in the distributions of incomes, wages and employment in many countries and periods of history. His early research examined the causes of unemployment in the economically advanced countries in the 1930s and the 1980s. Later he contributed a sequence of widely-cited papers analysing the emerging distributions of earnings in Eastern European countries in transition from communism. He has also published research on labour and productivity issues with respect to small-scale agriculture in developing countries. Newell has acted as a consultant to the World Bank, the UN Development Programme, the International Labour Office and UNICEF. Gazeley and Newell have been working together on living standards, unemployment and wages for over ten years and are co-editors and contributors to Work and Pay in 20th Century Britain (Oxford: 2007).

Hector Gutierrez-Rufrancos was an Economics Research Fellow on this project (now Honorary Reserarch Fellow). His PhD research focuses on the role of unions in the Mexican labour market. Prior to joining our team he worked as a Research Fellow in Economics at the Equality Trust. His research interests are predominantly on labour markets, and the distribution of income and wages, as well as the analysis of large datasets. He is currently an Early Career Fellow in Economics, University of Stirling.

Dr Rose Holmes was a History Research Fellow on the project (now Honorary Research Fellow). After completing a BA at the University of Nottingham and an MA at the University of Sussex, she was awarded her PhD in History from the University of Sussex in March 2014. Her research focuses on humanitarianism in the interwar period and her thesis was entitled, 'A Moral Business: The work of British Quakers with Refugees from Fascism, 1933-1939'. As well as researching economic and social histories of inequality, she is particularly interested in histories of humanitarianism and voluntary intervention, everyday life, photography and gender.

Dr Kevin Reynolds was a History Research Fellow & Technical Director on this project (now Honorary Research Fellow) He was awarded an AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award to work at the University of Sussex and the Imperial War Museum. He was awarded his PhD in January 2012. The title of his dissertation was 'That Justice Be Seen: The American use of film at the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal, 1945-6'. His research entailed traveling to a number of countries including the United States and involved a considerable volume of digital photography in the archives. Since then he has developed his skills and interests in developing processes for capturing large datasets. He is currently a Lecturer at the University of Brighton.

Dr. Cecilia Lanata Briones was a History Research Fellow on the project (now Honorary Research Fellow). After completing her MSc and Ph.D  in Economic History at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), Cecilia joined the project team in 2016.  Her research focusses on Argentinian economic statistics during the twentieth century. Her thesis was entitled 'Constructing Public Statistics: The History of the Argentine Cost of Living Index, 1918-1943'. She is also interested in the study of the production and uses of statistics and the relationship between statistics and policy

Dr Natacha Chevalier was Data Management Officer, joining the project in 2016 (now Honorary Research Fellow). Prior to her Ph.D. completed at the University of Sussex in 2016 (UK), she was awarded an MA in Contemporary History at the University of Birmingham (UK). Using a socio-historical approach of her sources, she works on the social and cultural dimension of eating habits, with a special interest in questions related to food in time of crisis. She is also interested in other issues such as sustainable development and food security. Her thesis, primary based Mass Observation wartime diaries, tackles the impact of the Second World War food restrictions on the food practices of British civilians.