Research Projects

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

Between solidarity and fragmentation. An analysis of the consequences of and reactions to changing labour relations by the shop-floor and trade union movement in the Netherlands, 1970-2020

PhD Researcher: Rosa Kösters MA 

Thesis advisor and project leader: Dr Matthias van Rossum

Thesis advisor: Prof. Dr Leo Lucassen

In the project Between solidarity and fragmentation the consequences are examined of the transformation of work in the Netherlands for shop-floor relations and its effects on how workers organize.

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 Global Production Chain of Printed Textiles (1700-1900) 

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.

The project “Slavery Insured: A study into the Amsterdam Assurantie Compagnie 1771 and its involvement in slavery, 1771-1873” focuses on the history of one Amsterdam insurance company and its involvement in slavery. So far, the role of insurance companies in both the slave trade and the trade in slave-produced commodities has remained under-researched.

This project will look anew at this assumption of tolerant co-existence between migrants and locals, by studying the institutional treatment of migrants as well as their interpersonal interactions with their neighbours, as documented in the archives of the urban judicial system. By looking at how heavily place of origin affected the treatment of migrants in the Dutch Republic, we can add a more nuanced layer of analysis to the characterization of the early modern Dutch Republic as ‘tolerant’, beyond an analysis of confessional co-existence, or of long-term social mobility trends