Research Projects

This research project explores how workers influence their own futures during major energy transitions, and the role collective bargaining plays in shaping socially just and inclusive transition processes. It compares the historical transition from coal to natural gas in the Netherlands (1963–1980) with today’s shift toward renewable energy.

From the rise of atomic fission in the 1940s to the Chernobyl disaster of the 1980s, the future was nuclear. Scientists, politicians and policy makers predicted a transition to a new, virtually inexhaustible, cheap and “clean” energy source. But this first “energy transition” met with resistance in nations across the globe. In the Netherlands various groups united in the anti-nuclear energy movement (AKB).

The aim of this project is to promote gender equality in the ICT and cleaning sectors by establishing, supporting, expanding and researching women's networks. These networks (called Network Vs) will provide women with knowledge and skills so that they themselves can contribute to an attractive sector, better working conditions and a change in organisational culture. The project is a cooperation between FNV and IISH. Rosa Kösters is the principal investigator.

Digitising, Vectorising, and Modelling the Napoleonic Cadastral Maps and Tables for the Netherlands

The Netherlands Labour Authority was founded in 1890, when industry in the Netherlands was growing rapidly and workers became increasingly dependent on their employers. At that time, employers often wanted to keep costs down at the expense of the health and safety of their workers. In this environment, the Labour Authority was established to ensure that conditions in the workplace remained safe and humane.

The project "Innovating Around Resistance:  The Global Production Chain of Printed Textiles (1700-1900)" examines how workers' resistance to exploitation shaped the first capitalist global production chain of printed cotton textiles. 

Between 1630 and 1654 the Dutch West India Company (WIC) maintained a colony in northeastern Brazil in the captaincies of Pernambuco, Itamaraca, Rio Grande and Paraiba.

A global historical approach to enslavement across the Atlantic & Indian Ocean. This is the aim of the ERC Consolidator Project Voices of Resistance led by Matthias van Rossum. 

This NWO funded project will answer this question how credible the image of the tolerant Dutch cities really is and how this changed over time by examining migrants through the eyes of the courts in the highly urbanized coastal provinces of the Netherlands (Holland) between 1600 and 1900. It aims to reveal patterns of continuity and change in: 1. Treatment of migrants by criminal courts, and 2. Violence and conflicts between migrants and native born.

In this PhD project, Hanna te Velde studies the socio-economic position of women in the early modern Dutch empire. By using court cases from the newly digitized archives of the VOC and WIC, she will study the many, various ways in which women tried to improve their position – unfree as well as free women, with European and non-European backgrounds. The project focusses on four case studies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: Batavia, Cochin, Paramaribo and Willemstad.