Research Projects

The IISH conducts research in Project Clusters.

  • Global Labour Relations
  • Commodities, Environment and Labour
  • Social and Economic Inequality
  • Collective Action and Individual Strategies


This is an overview of the Research Projects within the four clusters.

IISH Research | Lippische Ziegler | Lippe Brickmakers | Photo in IISH-collection

Resisting Enslavement: A Global Historical Approach to Slavery in the Dutch Atlantic and Asian Empire (1620-1815)

7 November 2023 12:56

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.

Two views of Dutch East India Trading Posts

Land Grabbing Empire: State Strategy and Large Scale Land Transfers in Dutch Expansion (16th-18th century)

7 November 2023 11:56

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.

Hilde de Weerdt

The Lives and Afterlives of Imperial Material Infrastructure in Southeastern China

21 March 2022 18:09

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.

Strikes in Brussels, 27 December, 1960

HUB Global Labour Conflicts

28 February 2022 16:23

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.

La División Ascaso en las trincheras del Frente de Aragón

The Amsterdam boxes: Photographers Kati Horna and Margaret Michaelis in the Spanish Civil War

18 July 2019 11:27

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).

Schipbreuk VOC-schip Rooswijk

VOC-schip Rooswijk: vergaan maar niet vergeten

19 June 2019 14:25

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. 

Hollandse koopman met slaven in heuvellandschap, anoniem, 1700 - 1725

Exploring Slave Trade in Asia

14 May 2019 13:52

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 Potosí Mountain of Silver and the city of Potosí today

Potosí: producing silver for the world

14 May 2019 11:40

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.

IISH Collections | Projects | ANDB staff - Photo from IISH Collection

Diamond Workers Union project

9 May 2019 12:13

The IISH holds the complete archive of the Dutch Diamond Workers Union (Algemene Nederlandse Diamantbewerkersbond (ANDB)).

  • Projectleader: Karin Hofmeester
  • Start: 2018
  • Grant: Monderiaan Fonds
IISH Research | Iran Oil Industry | By Nevit Dilmen (talk) - Own work Family album, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=26133553

Labour in the Iranian Oil Industry

15 April 2019 15:04

The main objective of this project was to develop an empirical and qualitative understanding of labour as well as labour force in the Iranian oil industry.

Project-leader: Touraj Atabaki