Collection Guides

The Academy Library - formerly part of the now defunct Library KNAW - contains the library collections of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences that were collected during the nineteenth century. The collection contains ca. 200,000 volumes and is accessible by the catalogue.

The IISH is the most important worldwide repository of anarchist records and papers. Indeed, a vast anarchist collection was among the first acquired when the Institute was founded in 1935, when it received the books and papers of Max Nettlau, the "Herodotus of Anarchy".

IIn 2008 the IISH acquired an extensive collection of archival materials relating to the anti-apartheid and Southern Africa solidarity groups in The Netherlands.

What Asian collections does the IISH have? A first answer to that question is provided by: The Asian Collections at the International Institute of Social History, edited by Emile Schwidder & Eef Vermeij (NEW 4th ed., 2012). This guide contains brief descriptions of all collections with a substantial Asian interest.

The French collection is among the larger national collections at the IISH. Materials date back to the emergence of the revolutionary ideology in the second half of the eighteenth century.

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.

International organizations figure prominently in the collections at the IISH. The rise of early workers organizations was closely linked to labour migration both within Europe and among countries in Europe and other nation states. The workers movement tried to inspire international solidarity by furthering socialism and trade unionism.

With its historic revolutions and legendary revolutionary movements, Latin America was bound to become core business for the Institute. The first great revolution of the 20th century took place in Mexico in 1910, preceding those in Russia and China. Cuba (1959) and Nicaragua (1979) have been at the centre of international debate for a considerable time.

The history of migrants and their organizations and the history of labor migration have recently become a major research theme at the IISH. There is a lot of common ground with IISH's 'core business', Global Labour History.

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 former Czechoslovakia and Poland are especially well represented and the Balkans slightly less so. Interest in the Asian part of the former Soviet Union is more recent.

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. Its purpose to rehabilitate the victims of war and their descendants has brought individual histories of participants to the fore.

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 Institute as well.

For the 150th birthday of the poet and politician Pieter Jelles Troelstra (1860-1930) the IISH opened a digital documentation centre.

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.

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. At the IISH both archival sources and secondary literature are available for research on topics such as the Industrial Revolution, the Chartists, and the political, economic, and social context of the workers' movement.

In the archives and collections at the IISH, the anti-war movement occupies a large place. This massive presence of archives from the peace movement is obviously a result of traditional interconnections between leftist political parties, pressure groups, and the peace movement.

This Women at Work Collection Guide provides information about the history of working women worldwide. Women worked throughout history in various jobs, from bakers, typists, weavers, butchers, from industrialists to road-sweepers. In the last thirty years women's history has developed as a discipline in history. The projects about women and work are expanding.

The IISH has a unique and manifold collection of Yiddish material consisting of books, brochures, periodicals and pamphlets of the early Jewish socialist and anarchist movement in Eastern and Western Europe.