Research Projects

Consisting of approximately twenty-five million pages, the UNESCO Memory of the World-listed archives of the Dutch East India Company (Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, VOC) offer a unique view on interactions between European and non-European actors in Asia in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Currently, however, doing research on this vast collection of handwritten documents is extremely challenging. The GLOBALISE project creates an online research infrastructure that unlocks the key series of VOC documents and reports for advanced new research methods. The infrastructure will engage the wider public with this many-sided and increasingly hotly-debated period of Dutch overseas history.

State and Slavery details how the Dutch state and its predecessors were involved in colonial slavery. It describes how different stakeholders, such as enslaved people, administrators, and entrepreneurs in the Dutch Republic and in colonized societies responded to slavery. The project has the dual aim to explore current research into the Dutch colonial slavery past and the latter’s impact on contemporary societies through the publication of State and Slavery and, additionally, to draft an agenda for future research into Dutch slavery practices.

This project questions how resistance by enslaved impacted slavery and modes of enslavement in societies connected to the global Dutch colonial empire. By studying slave resistance from a global micro-historical perspective, the Resisting Enslavement project questions how different modes of enslavement impacted i) patterns of slave trade, ii) the labelling and treatment of enslaved, iii) and the social and resistance strategies of enslaved in the early modern Dutch Atlantic, Indian Ocean and Indonesian archipelago worlds.

Land grabbing, defined as the forced transfer of land from peasant producers to commercial investors, deeply affects the organization of global agriculture. Although the roots of this phenomenon go back centuries, its dynamics are still poorly understood. The reason is that land grabbing is usually analysed as a form of violent, rent-seeking behaviour, counterpoised to the institutional underpinnings of advanced market economies.

This project (InfraLives) offers a critical analysis of how large-scale infrastructures such as roads, city walls, and bridges have contributed to regional and empire-wide integration, but equally why and how processes of integration regularly broke down, and how large-scale infrastructure projects contributed to countervailing trends including local tension, local autonomy, and cross-border regional formations.

In 2015, the International Institute of Social History Launched the HUB Global Labour Conflicts project. The goal of the HUB is to develop a new data collaboration which collects information about labour conflicts through time and space. By doing this, the HUB hopes to enable researchers to conduct comparative analyses and link information about labour conflicts. The project was set up by Sjaak van der Velden who collected data from various sources on strikes and work stoppages. During his time at the IISH Sjaak worked together with colleagues from the field to publish 56 different datasets on the IISH Dataverse. Today the project is overseen by Rosa Kösters.

Establishing how many people inhabited a particular area is not just an academic exercise. It is the cornerstone of historical, economic, and social scientific research.

Research on two Jewish antifascist women photographers from Central Europe: the Hungarian Kati Horna and the Austrian Margaret Michaelis. After leaving Nazi Berlin in 1933 they both ended up in Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War, committed to the anti-fascist and revolutionary struggle carried out by the anarchists of the CNT (National Confederation of Labor) and the FAI (Iberian Anarchist Federation).

Op 10 januari 1740 verging het VOC-schip Rooswijk in een zware winterstorm voor de kust van Engeland. Anno 2018 staat het schip volop in de schijnwerpers. Afgelopen zomer werd de opgraving van het schip voor het 2017 afgerond. Britse en Nederlandse archeologen, professionele duikers, amateur archeologen en tientallen studenten, hebben duizenden vondsten naar boven gehaald. De Rijksdienst voor het Cultureel Erfgoed, die dit project leidt, werkt samen met Historic England aan het vervolg van het project in 2017 en 2018. 

How did Dutch colonial institutions govern diversity in North America, the Caribbean, Western Africa and Asia? How can we explain these institutions’ resilience and their lasting impact on modern systems of governance of diversity?

• Project lead: Ulbe Bosma, Matthias van Rossum
• Grant: € 749,840 (€ 316,920 IISH) by NWO
• Start: 2017
• Partner: Leiden University

Exploring Slave Trade in Asia - Towards an Indian Ocean and Maritime Asia Slave Trade Database

Database

This project builds a database that reconstructs the historic slave trade in the Indian Ocean and Maritime Asia region in collaboration with an emerging network of scholars committed to develop a coherent field of Asian slave trade and slavery studies, including East, Southeast and South Asia as well as South and East Africa.

The silver trade powered global connections for more than three centuries, and from 1450 to 1800, 85% of the world’s silver originated from the Americas.