“My research focuses on how financial markets functioned where people had no access to modern banks.”

Dr. Christiaan van Bochove (1980) is associate professor of economic and social history and is specialized in the financial history of the (early) modern period. His research focuses on how financial markets functioned where people had no access to modern banks. Which arrangements did they use instead? Why exactly these? And how should we explain differences across time and space?

Christiaan studied history at Utrecht University and graduated cum laude in 2003. He then worked at the International Institute of Social History on his dissertation The economic consequences of the Dutch. Economic integration around the North Sea, 1500-1800 which he successfully defended in 2008. This dissertation studied the consequences the development of Holland’s economy had on its surrounding regions. During the period 2008-2012 Christiaan was a postdoc within the project The evolution of financial markets in pre-industrial Europe led by Oscar Gelderblom and Joost Jonker. In 2011 NWO awarded him a Veni-scholarship for his project Ferries and Finance: The Financial Infrastructure of the Dutch Republic. During the period 2013-2021 Christiaan was assistant professor at Radboud University in Nijmegen.

Christiaan published in journals like The Journal of Economic History, The Economic History Review and European Review of Economic History. Currently he works on papers about securities auctions, help banks (hulpbanken) and the development of the mortgage market. With Juliette Levy he works on an edited volume – to be published at Palgrave – on how credit markets functioned where and when banks were absent and with Jaco Zuijderduijn he edited a theme issue of The History of the Family on the interaction between life course and financial markets. Christiaan is co-editor-in chief of Research Data Journal for the Humanities and Social Sciences and editorial board member of the New Maritime History of the Netherlands (Nieuwe Maritieme Geschiedenis van Nederland). He was co-chair of the economic history network of the European Social Science History Association (ESSHC).