IISH Annual Report 2022
The 2022 IISH annual report
The entire report is interactive with short videos and can be read here.
In 2022, after a brief lockdown in January, the institute slowly returned to normal, which came as a great relief, especially for the collection department. Limited opening hours, and a considerable reduction in the number of visitors for the reading room became a thing of the past. Various activities aimed at the wider society became possible again and a number of successful public gatherings were organized on timely themes, such as the societal and political dealings with the slavery past of the Netherlands, the war of Russia against the Ukraine and the increasing strike activity by Dutch unions.
Moreover, in the spring the institute was successful in securing a huge grant of 5 million euro for the coming nine years from the Ministry of Education and Science, meant for enriching the collections and making these more accessible for both researchers and the broader public. This most welcome financial injection enables us to offer access to our collections and data at a much deeper and more diverse level and to intensify and broaden the digitization programme.
Along these developments in the research department senior researcher Matthias van Rossum acquired a prestigious NWO-Vidi grant ‘Resisting Enslavement: A Global Historical Approach to Slavery in the Dutch Atlantic and Asian Empires’. This project will also enable him and his team to further develop the ongoing global comparative collaboration on slave voyages and transports in Asia, as a complement to the fundamental work that already has been done on the Atlantic. Furthermore the research department remained very active in acquiring external research projects on the involvement of financial institutions in slavery related activities, like ABN-AMRO and Nationale Nederlanden.
After two years of Covid restrictions, the acquisition department was able to pick up their contacts and projects again in 2022. Especially the complete series of the Moscow Times (1992-2008), a unique source to understand the social, economic and political developments in post-Soviet Russia, catches the eye. But also new archives and the digitization of sources from the Middle East, Africa and Asia enriched our collections and offered access to people at destination. Finally, the department Data & Augmentation, created in 2020, was fully staffed and supports researchers who systematically collect data and enables the sustainable storage and searchability of research data as collections.