A detailed History of the IISH

This page contains a detailed history of the International Institute of Social History, from the early beginning until most recent times.

Although the IISH was officially founded on 25 November 1935, the history of the institute begins already in the decade before, in the person of Nicolaas Wilhelmus Posthumus (1880-1960). Posthumus was among the pioneers of modern economic history in the Netherlands. In 1913, he became the first professor of economic history. A year later, he founded the Netherlands Economic History Archive (NEHA), the first of the fifteen institutions that he initiated in his lifetime.

The NEHA concentrated on preserving the archives of companies and related organisations as well as collecting other sources relevant to economic history. In 1932, the proliferation of books and other printed materials at this archive led to the creation of the Economic History Library (EHB). Posthumus was a collector with a broad vision, which is why he also included material from individuals and organisations in the Dutch labour movement in the collection.

Early Years

In the early 1930s, two developments made the establishment of an independent and neutral scholarly institute for social history desirable. First, the social history collections accumulated by NEHA required a special approach. Second, during these years, the political situation in Central and Eastern Europe deteriorated. Hitler's seizure of power and developments in the Soviet Union threatened people of various persuasions within the labour movement, and with them their collections. Posthumus set out to save precisely this material. After all, one could be sure that if it fell into the wrong hands it would be destroyed or, at best, become unavailable for independent scientific research for a considerable time. During the period 1935-1940, therefore, all of the IISH’s attention was on saving materials from all over Europe.

It was precisely at this time that Posthumus was fortunate to come into contact with Nehemia de Lieme, director of De Centrale, an insurance bank linked to the social democratic movement. By statute, this company donated part of its profits to cultural purposes for the benefit of the labour movement. De Lieme became convinced of the importance of Posthumus’ initiative, and until 1940 De Centrale supported the new institution very generously.

The most important collection acquired over these years was the estate of Marx and Engels. The Institute's extremely active first librarian, Annie Adama van Scheltema, smuggled manuscripts of Bakunin (from the famous Nettlau Collection) out of Austria shortly after the Nazis marched into Vienna. The libraries and archives of Mensheviks and Social-Revolutionaries who had fled from Russia were also brought to Amsterdam. Finally, the archives of the Spanish trade union Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) and the Federación Anarquista Ibérica (FAI) should be mentioned here. Just weeks before Franco conquered the last Republican territories in northern Spain in May 1939, these archives were brought to safety via the Pyrenees.

How seriously the archives that were of interest to the IISH were at risk was also evident when the institute’s Paris branch was broken into in November 1936. In the process, documents belonging to Trotsky were stolen, in all likelihood by agents of Stalin's secret service. This theft led Trotsky to transfer his archive to the United States.

With foresight, Posthumus also established a branch of the Institute in England early on. He had the most precious archives brought here when it became clear to him that, despite the Munich Agreement, the threat of war was not over and would not even stop at the borders of neutral Holland. Indeed, just days after the occupation of the Netherlands in May 1940, German officials were on the IISH doorstep, and on July 15 the Institute was closed by order of the Sicherheitsdienst. The staff was sent home and the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg installed its own staff.

War and Recovery

Although much material had been moved to safety, the collection that fell into the hands of the occupying forces was still extensive by any standard. The library alone was estimated at about 300,000 titles. Also still present were (parts of) important Dutch archives, such as that of the SDAP. The German bureaucracy was divided over the destination of the collection. Gradually, parts of it were removed to Germany to be used for various purposes. In September 1944, the remainder was also shipped to the East, in twelve Rhine barges.

Literally everything was found to have been misappropriated when, after the liberation, the damage could be assessed; no catalogue, no furniture, not a cabinet or typewriter was left. As a result, determining exactly what part of the collection had been lost took a long time. Ultimately, the extent of the loss proved to be relatively small. In 1946, most of the material robbed by the Germans was recovered near Hannover, in the British zone of occupation, and brought back to Amsterdam. Other materials, located in Eastern Europe, came back more slowly, such as the SDAP archives, which were returned from Poland in 1956 and 1957. In 1991, after the failed coup in Moscow, still more IISH materials surfaced there, having been kept in a separate archival institution all these years.

In the 1950s, De Centrale could no longer subsidize on the same scale as before the war, making the Institute's financial situation difficult. But with help from the University of Amsterdam and the City of Amsterdam, and also thanks to money received under the Wiedergutmachung, the Institute began a slow recovery. All in all, putting the archive and library back in order took about ten years.

1960s to the present

In the 1960s and 1970s, the IISH benefited from the growing interest in the history of social movements and ideas. The Institute also resumed the old task of rescuing archives and libraries of persecuted individuals and organizations. In the 1970s, for example, material from Latin America in particular found a safe haven in Amsterdam. In the 1980s, actions were taken to provide safekeeping for collections of Turkish political parties, trade unions and individuals.

Since 1979, the IISH has been an institute of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW). For the growing collections and ever-increasing number of staff, in 1989 accommodation was found in a former cocoa warehouse on Cruquiusweg in Amsterdam. There a reunification with the NEHA took place, and the Press Museum moved in as an independent institution. In 2017, the Press Museum merged with the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision and moved to Hilversum. The Press Museum's collection remained at the IISH.

Since the 1990s, the institute has focused mainly on movements outside Europe, although the Netherlands of course remains a focal point. Large digital files have also been collected or created since then, such as the Historical Sample of the Netherlands. The collected material serves as one of the foundations for the IISH's research, which has 'global labour history' as its theme. This involves the global history of labour and labour relations, centred on the role of working people themselves. For this reason, the IISH collaborates with research institutions in all parts of the world.