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The Organising committee of the two-day conference (Posthumus board member Professor Pepijn Brandon (VU Amsterdam/IISH), Dr Niklas Frykman, Professor Marcus Rediker (both University of Pittsburgh), and Professor and activist Nandita Sharma (University of Hawai‘i at Manoa)) invite paper proposals. Papers can cover any period between roughly 1500 and the present, any group of people challenging authority from below, and all the world’s river systems, seas, and oceans.

Ships and oceans, shorelines and harbors historically have been the theater of dramatic social struggles. The term “hydrarchy”, introduced a quarter century ago in The Many-Headed Hydra, tried to capture the double-edged nature of these struggles. The crucial place of the oceans in the development of a capitalist world market led states and ruling classes to launch determined struggles to own or control the waters, as well as the peoples who worked on and around them. At the same time, working classes of all hues and the seaborne populations they were part of devised new ways to exchange experiences, ideas, and forms of struggles, developing wide-ranging practices of solidarity in the process.

While there is a thriving literature on the many historic examples of solidarity at sea, and between people ashore and afloat, there is still a lack of research that investigates concretely how, under what conditions, and with what lasting effects such solidarity comes about. This conference aims to bring together papers that focus on concrete histories of maritime solidarity, whether on board early modern slave ships or twentieth-century supertankers, in traditional sailortowns or contemporary container ports, and everywhere in between. The organisers intend to publish a select number of papers in the form of an edited book or special journal issue.

Academic participants should send in proposals for papers consisting of an abstract of 150-250 words plus a short academic CV by 1 December 2022 by e-mail to the organisers.

The organisers also wish to make space for an active dialogue between people studying maritime solidarity in the past and practitioners of maritime solidarity in the present (including, for example, migrant rescue workers, maritime trade unionists, stop the boat campaigners, and more). For this reason, the intention is to include one or two round tables, open to a public audience, where activists involved in maritime solidarity today reflect on connections to maritime solidarity in the past, based on the presentations at the conference. People who would be interested in joining the conference on the basis of their involvement in present-day maritime solidarity are invited to write a short e-mail to the conference organizers explaining the nature of their work.

FULL INFO

On Thursday 24 November 2022, CLARIAH and Netwerk Digitaal Erfgoed (NDE) jointly organise their annual conference in Utrecht. This year’s theme will be ‘Heritage meets Digital Humanities’. The focus will be on the CLARIAH digital humanities infrastructure and its use by researchers and other professionals from the heritage field. The program includes lectures, debates, interactive presentations, workshops, poster sessions and networking opportunities.

The conference will be led by chairperson Kirsten Paulus, TV presenter, presentation coach and chairperson. The keynote lecture will be delivered by Dr Kathryn Eccles, Senior Research Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute and Pembroke College. She will talk about her work at the intersection of research and digital heritage.

Free registration for the event has opened on a first come, first served basis, up to a maximum of 150 participants.

FULL INFO AND REGISTRATION

Fondazione Istituto Internazionale di Storia Economica “F. Datini” and the European School for Training in Economic and Social Historical Research (ESTER) will organise their sixth jointly-organized Datini-ESTER Advanced Seminar for economic and social historians on 14-20 May 2023, in Prato (Italy) on the theme of “Economic Exchanges”

The organisers

ESTER, established in 1991, is an international postgraduate network incorporating more than 60 European Universities. ESTER organizes research training in the form of both the annual Research Design Course for starting PhD-students and a series of Advanced Seminars on special themes within economic and social history.

“F. Datini” International Institute of Economic History was founded in 1967 by Federigo Melis and Fernand Braudel. The aim of the Institute is the study of pre-industrial economic history (thirteenth-eighteenth centuries) and the creation on the topic of a space for historical culture, making comparison between different methodologies and schools of research easier and supporting young scholars during their formative years.

Theme

The topic of the seminar is closely related to the theme of the congress organized yearly by the “F. Datini” International Institute of Economic History, which in 2023 is devoted to ‘Alternative Currencies. Commodities and Services as Exchange Currencies in the Monetarized Economies of the 13th to 18th Centuries’. The 2023 Datini-Ester seminar will deal with Economic Exchanges. The organisers particularly welcome papers on the exchange of goods and services, on the role of markets, monies, trade, transaction costs and institutional contexts, which might foster market integration or, alternatively, constrain economic performance. Purpose is to clarify the role of the economic exchange and market in past economies. Papers can cover any relevant aspect and any period from Antiquity until today.

More info

Abstracts for the 2023 edition are due by 15 November 2022 (extended deadline). If accepted for participation, the final paper will be due on 15 March 2023. For info on the seminar in general, you may contact Dr Jaco Zuijderduijn (Lund University).

The full call can be found as pdf via this link.

APPLICATION FORM

On 26 May 2023, Professor Hilde Bras, Professor of Economic and Social History, with special attention to Global Demography and Health at the History Department of the University of Groningen, will deliver her inaugural lecture.

More details will follow in due time, but do already save the date!

PERSONAL WEBSITE

On 6 December 2022, the day before Professor Kapil Raj’s masterclass at the Institute for History at Leiden University, Professor Raj will deliver the Annual Terra Incognita Lecture, entitled ‘Circulation as Relational History’. This lecture will be open to all interested.

About the keynote speaker

Professor Kapil Raj, Research Professor at École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, is an historian who writes on intercultural interactions and the making of scientific knowledge and the global dimensions of local knowledge production. His publications include Relocating modern science: circulation and the construction of knowledge in South Asia and Europe, 1650-1900 (2007), “Mapping knowledge go-betweens in Calcutta, 1770-1820” (2009), and “Thinking Without the Scientific Revolution: Global Interactions and the Construction of Knowledge” (2017).

About the lecture

Ever since its institutionalisation as a university discipline in the course of the 19th century, history — along with the vast majority of social sciences — have been entrapped in “methodological nationalism”, the assumption that nations are the natural units for study, thus equating society with the nation-state, and conflating national interests with the purposes of the social sciences. Questions thus very often get reduced to explanations limited to national parameters without taking account of broader dynamics. In the context of nations that gained independence from European colonialist in the post-WW II era, Postcolonial Studies have sought to engage with this nationalist straightjacket by attempting to situate their histories, especially during the colonial period, as a process of resistance to European imperial domination and imposition of the latter’s outlook and values. However, a number of questions and issues are thus blindsided in this systematically agonistic perspective, or for that matter in its opposite, a free-flowing diffusionist model based on a simple-minded Whiggish model of progress. In light of the fact that human societies, past and present, are constantly interacting with each other together with the phenomenon of human migrations, a number of new historiographical approaches that attempt to engage with these “relational” processes have emerged in the last decades.

This talk will start with a presentation of some of the most prominent amongst such propositions – comparative history, histoire carrefour, histoire croisée, connected history, circulatory history… – before developing the last one, including its areas of applicability, in some detail. As an illustration of the workings of this approach, the talk will focus on a case-study in the context of the European encounter with South Asia – the making of the monumental Hortus Indicus Malabaricus commissioned in the 1670s by the military commander of the then Dutch colony of Kochi, and its iterations in subsequent Indo-European interactions.

Download abstract as pdf

A day before Professor Beat Kümin’s Masterclass at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Professor Kümin will deliver a public lecture there, entitled ‘”To dear posterity”: Managing Memory through Tower Ball Deposits in the German Lands’.

About the lecture

Since the late Middle Ages, urban and rural communities of different confessions have marked the completion of prominent buildings by placing chronicles and objects into golden spheres located on top of towers. In this liminal position between earth and heaven, the archives remain inaccessible and sometimes forgotten until the next major repairs, when new items are often added by successive generations. How can we make sense of this peculiar, ‘bottom-up’ and regionally circumscribed custom and what can it tell us about local memory cultures more generally? A public lecture, just ahead of an important day of remembrance in Belgium and many other countries, investigates.

About the speaker

Beat Kümin is Professor of Early Modern European History at the University of Warwick and author of e.g. Drinking Matters: Public Houses and Social Exchange in Early Modern Central Europe and The Communal Age in Western Europe c. 1100-1800 , as well as ‘Nachrichten für die Nachwelt. Turmkugelarchive in der Erinnerungskultur des deutschsprachigen Europa’. He serves as an academic lead of Warwick’s interdisciplinary Global Research Priority on Food and coordinates the Warwick Network for Parish Research.

How to participate

This public lecture is open to all and free of charge. No prior reservation is required.

FULL INFO

~ because of scope only in Dutch ~

Op zaterdag 29 oktober a.s. om 15.00 uur in Boekhandel Blokker, Binnenweg 138, 2101 JP Heemstede, vindt de presentatie plaats van het boek Oorlog en Ongelijkheid. Een inclusieve geschiedenis van de Gouden Eeuw, verschenen bij Uitgeverij Boom Amsterdam van Posthumus fellow emerita professor Marjolein ’t Hart. Roelof van Gelder, historicus en vroeger redacteur Boeken van de NRC, zal een vraaggesprek met haar houden.

Over de publicatie

Alle oorlogen in de zestiende en zeventiende eeuw leidden tot economische neergang, behalve de Tachtigjarige Oorlog. Deze leidde juist tot een periode van enorme bloei – zonder Tachtigjarige Oorlog geen Gouden Eeuw. Die grote rijkdom bereikte echter niet iedereen. In de wingewesten overzee werden mensen op grote schaal uitgebuit, en ook binnen de Republiek zelf groeide de ongelijkheid. Katholieken, plattelanders, vissers, de lagere en de middenklasse in de steden: allemaal gingen ze er tijdens de Gouden Eeuw op achteruit.

Met het leger en de vloot was de overheid de grootste werkgever en de grootste consument. Door een efficiënte troepenmacht, een breed gedragen staatskrediet en een vergaande commercialisatie in de logistiek van oorlogvoering werd de Gouden Eeuw vooral een Hollandse Gouden Eeuw. Nog steeds profiteert de Nederlandse economie van de vermogens die toen zijn vergaard. Niet eerder is verklaard waarom vooral de Hollandse economie van de oorlog heeft geprofiteerd. Oorlog en ongelijkheid doet dat wel. Door systematisch te laten zien dat de glorie vele schaduwzijden kende, presenteert Marjolein ’t Hart de eerste inclusieve geschiedenis van de Gouden Eeuw.

Meer info

The VUB research group Historical Research into Urban Transformation Processes (HOST) in collaboration with the N.W. Posthumus Institute and the Fernandes Fellowship scheme of the University of Warwick is hosting the masterclass ‘Remembering From Below: New Directions in Memory Studies’ delivered by Professor Beat Kümin (University of Warwick, UK) on 11 November 2022.

About the speaker

Beat Kümin is Professor of Early Modern European History at the University of Warwick and author of e.g. Drinking Matters: Public Houses and Social Exchange in Early Modern Central Europe and The Communal Age in Western Europe c. 1100-1800 , as well as ‘Nachrichten für die Nachwelt. Turmkugelarchive in der Erinnerungskultur des deutschsprachigen Europa’. He serves as an academic lead of Warwick’s interdisciplinary Global Research Priority on Food and coordinates the Warwick Network for Parish Research.

How to participate

Applicants should send an abstract (c. 300 words) with a brief biographical note to both Host and Dr Marjolein Schepers by 14 October 2022. All candidates will be notified of the outcome by 20 October. A full working paper should then be submitted no later than 4 November.

FULL CALL (PDF)