Eric de Ruijter

Senior Researcher for Africa

PhD Researcher

British social history writing spans about seven centuries, from the medieval farmers' protests and enclosure movement to the 1984 miners' strike and the peace movement today. 

Since it was begun in 1987, the Turkish Desk has developed into one of the most important research centers worldwide on the history of modern Turkey.

Traditionally, acquisitions related to the Netherlands have included socialism and the labor movement in the 19th and 20th centuries. Since the 1970s, the social movement has expanded to include environmental issues, human rights, squatters, and similar subjects. The legacy of these new social movements can be found at the IISH as well.

The Law of Historical Memory of Spain (Ley de la Memoria Histórica de España) (October 2007) has greatly enhanced research on the Spanish Civil War. 

In the Russian and Eastern Europe collections at the IISH, Russia and the former USSR are dominant. Additional collection development efforts cover most countries in Eastern Europe that became communist after 1945.

The IISH collections on Germany and German speaking countries in Central Europe cover the period beginning with the democratic revolutionary movements and early workers' organizations around 1840 to the protest movements in the FRG during the '60s and '70s, and the civic movement in the GDR during the '80s.

The IISH is the most important worldwide repository of anarchist records and papers.

At first sight, Raymond Craib’s The Cry of the Renegade, Politics and Poetry in Interwar Chile, is a biography of the anarchist poet José Domingo Gómez Rojas (1896-1920). 

Elisée Reclus (1830-1905) was far ahead of his time in many fields: he was the first practitioner of the field of social geography, counts as one of the founders of naturism and vegetarianism, led the way at the Paris Commune (1870) and propagated the world language Esperanto.

Missratene Söhne. Anarchismus und Sprachkritik im Fin de Siècle by Carolin Kosuch is a triple-biography of three befriended Jewish 'rebels' around the turn of the century, Gustav Landauer, Erich Mühsam and Fritz Mauthner.

Gustav Landauer (1870-1919) is known in a small circle as anarchist theorist, writer and translator of Shakespeare. He was also minister of propaganda in the short-lived Bavarian Council Republic of 1919.