Projects

Our researchers participate in various national and international interdiscipinary projects and research networks:

  • Politics of the English Grain Trade, 1314-1815

    The English Grain Trade project questions how both cultural and economic history are intertwined with this essential good by examining how grain became commodified in the 14th to the 19th centuries. By focusing on aspects such as milling, bread production, and the rise of grain-trading centres in the Baltic and North Sea regions, the project takes a broad scope in examining where, and how, people obtained their daily bread.

    Researchers: Mike Braddick, Jessica Dijkman (ESH), Matthias Berlandi (ESH), Mabel Winter
    Duration: 2022-2027
    Funding: AHRC

  • Race to the Bottom? Family labour, household livelihood and consumption in the relocation of textile production between ca. 1780 and 1990

    Using a mix of qualitative and quantitative research, Race to the Bottom attempts to map the geographic shift of textile production in the last 250 years on a “micro”-level by looking at the household. To what extent has the often gendered work of handicraft textile production driven labour division within households across time, and how has it affected global textile consumption and production patterns?  

    Researchers: Elise van Nederveen-Meerkerk, Corinne Boter, Sarah Carmichael, Aditi Dixit (PhD), Kate Frederick
    Duration: 2018-2023
    Funding: ERC Consolidator Grant

  • SCOOP: Sustainable Cooperation

    Our SCOOP-researchers examine how environmentally sustainable cooperation efforts act as a key element of resilient, future-proof institutions using an interdisciplinary joint research strategy. The project is focused on creating research-driven roadmaps for the improvement of social resilience; SCOOP provides policy advice for governments on this subjects of health care, work environments, and social integration.

    Project Leader: Rafael Wittek (University of Groningen), Bas van Bavel, Naomi Ellemers (Psychology), Martin van Hees (VU), Tanja van der Lippe (Sociology) and Russell Spears (University of Groningen). Participants ESH: Corinne Boter, Selin Dilli, Kate Frederick, Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk, Maanik Nath

    Duration: 2016 - ongoing
    Funding: Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science

  • Subprojects SCOOP

    We have several PhDs writing dissertations within the framework of the SCOOP programme. The overall theme is sustainable cooperation but within that the PhDs focus on very different topics: 

    Silke Baas: Gender occupational segmentation and stereotyping of medical specializations

    Claudia Hacke: Family firms and gender equality in the Netherlands

    Aaron Roberts: Cooperation, Cooperatives and Development 

    Chris Vlam: The Associative Order in the Netherlands

  • CLARIAH: Common Lab Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities.

    A repository of both data and tools to aid researchers in the (digital) humanities and social sciences, CLARIAH is a resource platform made to collect data for use by researchers and simplify research tasks by offering tools for large data analysis. CLARIAH has a wide range of data available across a variety of fields and integrates well with existing tools such as Delpher. Utrecht’s Social and Economic history department has assisted in making socio-economic data and tools for analysis available to the project.

    Associated ESH Researchers: Auke Rijpma
    Funding: NOW

  • CLIO-INFRA

    The Economic and Social History department at Utrecht has been one of the main partners of the  CLIO-INFRA database project, a repository of data concerning worldwide economic indicators across the last 200 years. CLIO-INFRA’s freely available datasets provide researchers with key insights into long-term developments in social inequality and economic progress, on levels ranging from the local to the (inter-)national.

    Associated ESH researchers: Jan van Luiten-van Zanden (project lead), Auke Rijpma, Rene van Weeren
    Funding: NWO

  • African Economic History Network

    Focused on the study of the long-term development of sub-Saharan Africa, from the pre-colonial era to the present-day, the AEHN initiative publishes both working papers and open-source articles and books on the subject. In addition, they have made several databases on sub-Saharan Africa available. A number of our ESH researchers, as well as other Utrecht academics, contribute to the network’s initiatives.

    Associated ESH researchers: Felix Meier zu Selhausen
    Funding: Sveriges Riksbank and ERC

  • The Cape of Good Hope Panel

    This project aims to transcribe and digitise the tax and population records of the 17th-19th century colonial administrations in the Cape Colony. By using this tax information and cross-collating it with other sources such as inventories, auction records, and genealogical records, the project aims to come to a more complete understanding of the economic and social network relations in the Cape Colony for not only the settler population, but for enslaved people and indigenous Africans as well.

    Associated ESH researchers: Auke Rijpma
    Funding: Sveriges Riksbank

  • The Missing Entrepreneurs

    The Diversity of Female Entrepreneurship in Europe, 1900-2020. This project asks which factors can explain the change in different forms of female entrepreneurship in Europe since 1900? To explain the change in female entrepreneurship, it combines a comparative analysis of 28 European countries and an in-depth case-study of the Netherlands, the UK, and France on female business-owners and innovators since 1900.

    ESH Researchers: Selin Dilli
    Funding: NWO Veni