Research Projects

This project offers a critical analysis of how large-scale infrastructures such as roads, city walls, and bridges have contributed to regional and empire-wide integration, but equally why and how processes of integration regularly broke down, and how large-scale infrastructure projects contributed to countervailing trends including local tension, local autonomy, and cross-border regional formations.

In 2015, the International Institute of Social History Launched the HUB Global Labour Conflicts project. The goal of the HUB is to develop a new data collaboration which collects information about labour conflicts through time and space. By doing this, the HUB hopes to enable researchers to conduct comparative analyses and link information about labour conflicts. The project was set up by Sjaak van der Velden who collected data from various sources on strikes and work stoppages. During his time at the IISH Sjaak worked together with colleagues from the field to publish 56 different datasets on the IISH Dataverse. Today the project is overseen by Rosa Kösters.

Between solidarity and fragmentation. An analysis of the consequences of and reactions to changing labour relations by the shop-floor and trade union movement in the Netherlands, 1970-2020

PhD Researcher: Rosa Kösters MA 
Thesis advisor and project leader: Dr Matthias van Rossum
Thesis advisor: Prof. Dr Leo Lucassen

In the project Between solidarity and fragmentation the consequences are examined of the transformation of work in the Netherlands for shop-floor relations and its effects on how workers organize.

• Project lead: Rombert Stapel
• Grant: € 149.884 by NWO (Replication Studies, 3rd round)
• Start: September 2020 (runtime: two years)

Para la versión en castellano, link al final de este texto.

Project leader: Almudena Rubio
Project: Research, Photobook and International Exhibition

Margaret Michaelis (Dziedzice, 1902 - Melbourne, 1985) and Kati Horna (Budapest, 1912 - Mexico, 2000) were two Jewish immigrant photographers who put their cameras at the service of the social revolution launched by the anarchists and anarcho-syndicalists of the CNT-FAI during the Spanish Civil War. Despite what has been understood in the past, their photographs from the war did not fall into the hands of Franco´s regime, disappear into the ruins or perish during the bombings. They were where they belonged, in the files of the offices where the photographers worked: the Foreign Propaganda Office of the CNT-FAI.

Op 10 januari 1740 verging het VOC-schip Rooswijk in een zware winterstorm voor de kust van Engeland. Anno 2018 staat het schip volop in de schijnwerpers. Afgelopen zomer werd de opgraving van het schip voor het 2017 afgerond. Britse en Nederlandse archeologen, professionele duikers, amateur archeologen en tientallen studenten, hebben duizenden vondsten naar boven gehaald. De Rijksdienst voor het Cultureel Erfgoed, die dit project leidt, werkt samen met Historic England aan het vervolg van het project in 2017 en 2018. 

How did Dutch colonial institutions govern diversity in North America, the Caribbean, Western Africa and Asia? How can we explain these institutions’ resilience and their lasting impact on modern systems of governance of diversity?

• Project lead: Ulbe Bosma, Matthias van Rossum
• Grant: € 749,840 (€ 316,920 IISH) by NWO
• Start: 2017
• Partner: Leiden University

Exploring Slave Trade in Asia - Towards an Indian Ocean and Maritime Asia Slave Trade Database

Database
This project builds a database that reconstructs the historic slave trade in the Indian Ocean and Maritime Asia region in collaboration with an emerging network of scholars committed to develop a coherent field of Asian slave trade and slavery studies, including East, Southeast and South Asia as well as South and East Africa.

The IISH holds the complete archive of the Dutch Diamond Workers Union (Algemene Nederlandse Diamantbewerkersbond (ANDB)).

• Projectleader: Karin Hofmeester
• Start: 2018
• Grant: Monderiaan Fonds

The main objective of this project is to develop an empirical and qualitative understanding of labour as well as labour force in the Iranian oil industry.

Project-leader: Touraj Atabaki

Tegen de stroom in: de sociale mobiliteit van joodse Nederlanders (1880-1940)

• Project leader: Karin Hofmeester and Leo Lucassen
  Grant: € 500,000 by KNAW Research Fund
  Partner: Huygens ING