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On 30 June 2023, various organisations will jointly organise the Symposium De Hanze: handel, communicatie en conflict ~ Koersen op rijkdom, laveren langs risico (transl.: The Hanseatic League: commerce, communication and conflict ~ setting course for wealth, navigating along risks).

The Hanseatic League appeals to one’s imagination beacuse of its combination of international cooperation and decisiveness, especially in the light of current-day international developments. However, a merchant’s life was not always prosperous and towns every now and again got involved in conflicts. So how did the Hanseatic League function exactly? During this symposium, a range of young researchers and experts, both domestic and from abroad, will share their latest insights on a wide range of topics, from standardized measurements in the beer trade to the surprising importance of transport by road. The keynote lecture on the origins of the Hanseatic League will be delivered by Dr Carsten Jahnke, Associate Professor for Medieval History, SAXO-Institute, University of Copenhagen.

In addition, on 29 June an additional excursion will be organised. This excursion consists of talks by visiting experts and site visits with the archeology team of the city of Zutphen.

Participation in both the symposium and the excursion is free of charge, but prior registration is required. For the full program and registration, use the button below. Please note the info on the organisers’ website is in Dutch only.

This workshop aims to bring together historians who apply a longue durée perspective in their research or are contemplating starting a longue durée project. It primarily focusses on the particularities of doing longue durée research and invites the participants to reflect on their methods and share their best practices. Some questions that are likely to be explored are: How to select a strong corpus of sources? How to recognise and study (dis)continuity? And how much contextualisation is enough?

The workshop is led by Annelien de Dijn, Professor of Modern Political History at Utrecht University and author of the longue durée history and award-winning book Freedom: An Unruly History (2020). She will give the participants a unique glimpse into the making of her book and share some concrete examples of how she has applied a longue durée perspective. The workshop is organised by Anne Por MSc BA and Edurne De Wilde MA (PhD candidates at Leiden University).

Participation is free, but prior registration and preparation is required. See the button below for full info. Please note that attendance is limited to a maximum of 15 participants.

FULL INFO AND REGISTRATION

On 28 February Marjoleine Kars, emerita Professor at MIT, will hold a lecture at the IISH. Professor Kars is composing a biography of two African men, Accara and Gousarie, who were caught up in Dutch slavery and colonialism during the Age of Revolution. Leaders in the 1763 Berbice slave rebellion, they next served as slave hunters, army drummers in the Dutch Republic, and Maroon fighters in Suriname. Defying easy characterization, the pair were victims, perpetrators, resisters, and collaborators – sequentially and, at times, simultaneously. This talk will detail Professor Kars’ research findings to date and raise questions about how to write the biographies of people forced to shape-shift across boundaries and allegiances and whose presence in the archives is equally slippery. Participation is free of charge and open to all interested, prior registration via e-mail however is required.

On 10 March 2023, the History Health and Healing network will organise a workshop where the networks meets with historical demography. Professor Jan Kok, Professor of Economic, Social and Demographic History will be the host of the event, the keynote lecture will be delivered by Dr Evelien Walhout, Assistant Professor in Economic and Social History at Leiden University, who has a particular interest in both historical demography and gender history.

The programme contains sessions covering a range of topics where medical historians and historical demographers can learn from each other. Confirmed speakers are Dr Leo van Bergen, Professor Gemma Blok, Dr Daniel Curtis, Professor Ralf Futselaar, emeritus Professor Johan Mackenbach, Dr Mayra Murkens, Dr Paul Puschmann, Björn Quanjer MA and Martijn van der Meer MSc.

Participation is open to all interested, prior registration via e-mail however is appreciated. Please also indicate your preferences for the parallel sessions: a or b and c or d; see the full info for the full programme via the button below.

On 20 April 2023, Posthumus alumnus Luc Bulten will publicly defend his dissertation titled ‘Reconsidering Colonial Registration. Social Histories of Lives, Land, and Labour in Eighteenth-Century Sri Lanka’. The ceremony will be held at the Auditorium of the Radboud University, but can also be followed via a livestream ().

Luc’s dissertation considers roughly a century and a half of Sri Lanka’s history, with special attention for the second half of the eighteenth century. During this time, a significant segment of the population of this South Asian island found themselves governed by the self-appointed reign of the Dutch East India Company. In their reign, the Company in practice had to count on the activities of a true army of clerks, servants and bureaucrats who, on their behalf, registered thousands of indigenous families and their lands. This process of registration was aimed at exploiting the caste-related labour duties that these families had to perform, and the agricultural products (such as rice) that traditionally had to be supplied to the state. However, this thesis shows that such registration processes, and bureaucratisation in general, were anything but unidirectional developments. Local actors, customs, and categories each had a significant impact on the way people’s lives, land, and labour were documented. Moreover, the documents resulting from this process of bureaucratisation – such as the ‘thombo’ land and population registers – were used by local agents to secure their social status, their possessions, and their estates, especially when utilised as evidence in legal conflicts. This case stands to show the extent to which Lankan communities could take advantage of, or even appropriate, colonial institutions like the thombo registers, the rural courts, and the offices of VOC officials in an effort to make the colonial system work for them.

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The research group Historical Database of Suriname and Curacao (HDSC) at Radboud University Nijmegen published the first releases of the Surinamese and the Curacao slave registers, in which the individual enslaved persons are linked between different series and owners.

To celebrate this milestone, the HDSC organises a one-day research symposium in Nijmegen on 16 March 2023 to explore the research possibilities of these newly released datasets. The aims of the symposium are to intensify the research on lives of enslaved individuals from a cultural, social, legal, and demographic history perspective and to facilitate partnerships and future comparative work on the history of slavery in tropical societies in the decades before emancipation in 1863.

Participants can join this symposium either on campus or online. Prior registration however is required.

For questions please contact Dr Matthias Rosenbaum-Feldbrügge.

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The Centre for Urban History at the University of Antwerpin collaboration with the N.W. Posthumus Institute is hosting the masterclass ‘A place in the city. Migrant police, policy & housing in the 19th and 20th centuries’, delivered by Dr. Céline Regnard (Aix-Marseille Université) on 10 May 2023 at Antwerp University.

About the speaker

Céline Regnard is a lecturer in modern history at the Aix-Marseille Université, and director of the Maison méditerranéenne des sciences de l’homme at l’UMR TELEMMe. She has written extensively on the history of migration, crime and labor in the modern period, with most recently a book on transnational history of Syrian transit migration, En Transit. Les Syriens à Beyrouth, Marseilles, Le Havre, New York (1880-1914) (Anamosa, 2022).

Aims of the masterclass

The aim of the masterclass is to discuss (post-)doctoral research on the place of migrants in the 19th and 20th century city through 3 interlinked perspectives: police, policy and housing. During the masterclass a maximum of 5 participants can present their work through a short presentation (c. 10 minutes). The presentation should include the basic premises of the research, as well as some points of discussion (both difficulties and possible opportunities).

How to participate

Early Career Researchers working on migration in the nineteenth and twentieth century are invited to apply by sending an abstract (c. 300 words) before 24 March 2023 to organiser Jasper Segerink.

Selected candidates will be notified by 31 March 2023. The presentations should be submitted no later than a week before the masterclass (3 May 2023).

Mail organiser

Work is central to human wellbeing, but job quality has received comparatively little attention in economic history and historical wellbeing studies. The inclusion of ‘decent work’ in the Sustainable Development Goals and the recent profusion of present-day job quality metrics provide an opportunity for historical social science to contribute to discussions about the development of job-related wellbeing and the determinants of good work. The Work and Wellbeing in History FRESH Meeting (8–9 June 2023) will bring together research on labor and quality of life in the past. The meeting will welcome economic and social historians, work researchers, and wellbeing scholars to share papers on work in the past, historical wellbeing, and the relationship between the two. We are delighted to welcome Professor Leandro Prados de la Escosura (Universidad Carlos III de Madrid) and Professor Amy Erickson (University of Cambridge), who are world-leading experts in the study of historical wellbeing and labor, to deliver keynote lectures.

<p.Researchers interested in presenting should send an abstract of 250–300 words and a brief (1–2 page) CV to by e-mail by 10 March 2023. Early career scholars and researchers from backgrounds traditionally underrepresented in the academy are especially encouraged to apply.

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Various departments of the Anton de Kom University of Suriname and the Directorate of Culture (Ministry of Education, Science and Culture), organisers of the third conference on the Legacy of Slavery and Indentured Labour welcome proposals for this Global Conference on Slavery, Indentured Labour and their impact on present societies. The aim of the conference is to connect historical specificities of slavery, indentured labour and migration to contemporary issues of globalization, Diaspora, identity formation, interculturalism, nationalism and transnationalism. At the same time the organisers want to promote new perspectives and approaches in the study of forced and free migration and their impact on the society. By bringing scholars together from various parts of the world – senior scholars as well as new promising talents – they hope to stimulate exchange of ideas, set up new networks and strengthen existing ones.

A registration fee applies for participants.