Data websites

The Global Collaboratory on the History of Labour Relations is a collaborative effort to study labour relations in a global perspective. The project has two main goals.

First, to provide statistical insights into the global distribution of all types of labour relations (systematically including women's and child labour) in five historical cross-sections: 1500, 1650, 1800, 1900, [Africa: 1950], and 2000.

Second, to explain the signalled shifts in labour relations worldwide. 

Clio Infra has set up a number of interconnected databases containing worldwide data on social, economic, and institutional indicators for the past five centuries, with special attention to the past 200 years. These indicators allow research into long-term development of worldwide economic growth and inequality.

Labour conflicts are an important phenomenon in the history of capitalism, but also in other societies in which unequal labour relations exist. Through labour conflicts, social, economic, political and legal relations have been greatly altered. Therefore, data on labour conflicts are among the most important sources of information in historical research.

The Historical Sample of the Netherlands (HSN) strives to construct life histories as completely as possible for a representative portion of the nineteenth and twentieth century population in The Netherlands. Ultimately, the HSN database will include information on an individual level from 77,000 persons on subjects like age at marriage, religious affiliation, the number of children born, occupation, birth place, literacy, social network and migration history. The HSN-database containing individual life-courses is a unique tool for research in Dutch history and demography.

This website includes datasets on coin production in the Southern and Northern Low Countries (present-day Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg) that were compiled by various historians over the past few decades.

Data on prices and wages are among the most important sources of information in social- and economic-historical research, especially for the pre-statistical period. The project's long term goal is to enhance the exchange and (re-)use of these data in order to write truly international-comparative histories of the development of markets and their institutional settings. 

Comparative research on the history of work is severely hampered by confusion regarding occupational terminology across time and space. This is regrettable as occupations form a key variable in many fields of history, ranging from research into stratification and mobility, through demography, to studies of labour markets and production.Within these fields, it is often desirable to make comparisons between regions and periods. The History of Work is a collaborative research project for tools to overcome these issues, such as HISCO, HISCLASS and HISCAM.

The Electronic Repository for Russian Historical Statistics brings together data extracted from various published and unpublished sources in one place. Its principal focus is Russian economic and social history of the last three centuries (18th-21st). The repository provides regional level data for the territory of the current Russian Federation over the last two centuries (1800-2000), standardised to facilitate access and to enable comparative research over time and across space.

Dutch Spanish Civil War Combatants, "Spanjestrijders",  contains basic data and concise biographies of men and women who have come to Spain to take part in the civil war on the side of the Republican government: socialists, anarchists, communists and fighters against fascism, soldiers, nurses and drivers.

In the 19th century, up to 40% of all male workers left Lippe every spring. By fall they were working in the north of Germany, in the Netherlands, in Scandinavia and Eastern Europe on brickworks. Nowhere else in the world can you find so much and dense information on seasonal workers with their backgrounds for the past three centuries. For the history of migrations, work and family, they are invaluable, but also for genealogists with ancestors from Lippe.  

Via the careful administration of the unions of diamond workers, this project unveils the careers, family memberships and social mobility of diamond workers in Amsterdam. Moreover, for the first time it provides data to test 'well known facts' such as the sex-segregation among diamond workers as well as the importance of racial background for social mobility.

This project takes Dutch census data as its starting point to build a semantic data-web of historical information. With such a web, it will be possible to answer questions such as: What kind of patterns can be identified and interpreted as expressions of regional identity? How can patterns of changes in skills and labour be related to technological progress and patterns of geographical migration? and How can changes of local and national policies in the structure of communities and individual lives be traced?

Labor migration is a vast, global, and highly fluid phenomenon in the 21st century, capturing public attention and driving political controversy. There are more labor migrants working in areas beyond their birth country or region than ever before. By studying labour migration in the past, we achieve a sense of the commonality of contemporary migration rates as well as insight in mechanisms influencing labor migration.

This website includes datasets on coin production in the Southern and Northern Low Countries (present-day Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg) that were compiled by various historians over the past few decades. They are based on the accounts of the annual production that were made up by personnel of the minting houses in the Low Countries since the Middle Ages. Such data provide insight in the quantity of coins in circulation, their quality, and the denominations coined in mint houses.

In the nineteenth century there were more than 800 municipalities in the Netherlands, where today only about 450 remain. The NLGIS (Netherlands Geographic Information System) project is an effort to plot data for these municipalities on historically accurate municipality boundaries for the period 1812 - 1997. The project's aim is twofold: to allow non-GIS experts to easily plot data on historical maps and to disseminate information on the maps and the underlying data from the Historical Database of Dutch Municipalities (HDNG). 

The Historical Database of Dutch Municipalites (HDNG) is a database on characterisitics on Dutch municipalities, such as population size, elections, industrialization, migration and car ownership. The time series vary greatly in times period covered, some as early as 1812.