Pim de Zwart wins dissertation prize economic and social history

On Saturday 2 April Dr Pim de Zwart was awarded the Thirsk-Feinstein PhD dissertation prize for best thesis in economic and social history. In 2015 De Zwart graduated cum laude at Utrecht University on his thesis Globalization and the Colonial Origins of the Great Divergence. Intercontinental Trade and Living Standards in the Dutch East India Company’s Commercial Empire, c. 1600-1800. The prize, consisting of £1,000, was awarded at the annual meeting of the Economic History Society, held at Cambridge University, UK.

The Thirsk-Feinstein dissertation prize is considered to be one of the most important prizes for young economic historians. In his dissertation De Zwart skilfully intertwines the historical debates on early-modern globalization and the roots of the yawning global economic divide. He based his empirical analyses on an impressive dataset of primary historical sources and combined international trade theory and institutional approaches to show how the VOC affected long term welfare growth in different parts of Asia.

De Zwart’s PhD project has been supevised by Prof. Jan Luiten van Zanden and Prof. Lex Heerma van Voss (Utrecht University) and co-supervised by Dr Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk (Wageningen UR). De Zwart currently works as a lecturer in Rural and Environmental History at Wageningen UR.