Global Labour Relations

How and to what extent did mostly unfree Asian and African labour contributed to build and sustain the Portuguese Asian empire during the 16th and 17th centuries? This is the main question addressed by EMPIRELAB.  The project explores case study of the Estado da Índia, the Portuguese early modern empire in Asia, between 1510 and 1663. It aims to understand whether this early modern empire was able to develop and sustain itself (even in times of decline) due to a highly intensive extraction and allocation of non-European labour, especially when compared with other European counterparts in the Indian Ocean, namely the Dutch and the English. 

ERC Synergy project to investigate the role of the slave trade in the development of Europe

The Zaan region can be regarded as the cradle of Dutch industry. Beginning in the seventeenth century, this area became the center of Dutch shipbuilding and various other manufacturing sectors. 

A coalition of Amsterdam based Archives, Museums and Historical institutes* with the generous support of the Insinger Foundation has taken the initiative for a five-year programme that offers two-month long fellowships per year for curators, archivists and historians in the field of slavery history, starting in the Fall of 2024. 

How important was Atlantic slavery for the Dutch economy in the eighteenth century?

The research will center around three main regions that are pivotal to improving our understanding of slavery and slave trade east of the Cape of Good Hope, namely the trade from and to South and Eastern Africa, the South China Sea, and the Indonesian archipelago.

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.

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.

• Project-leader: Karin Hofmeester
• Start: 2013
• Grant: € 218,500 by Gerda Henkel Stiftung