Research Projects

Current Projects

Race to the bottom? Family labour, household livelihood and consumption in the relocation of global cotton manufacturing

The project Race to the Bottom? Family labour, household livelihood and consumption in the relocation of global cotton manufacturing explores the macro-economic global relocation of textile production from a micro-level perspective: households’ labour and consumption decisions. It comprises a comparative study of changes in labour allocation and consumption at the household level, to...
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Past Projects

Industriousness in an imperial economy

Interactions of households' work patterns, time allocation and consumption in the Netherlands and the Netherlands-Indies, 1815-1940 Funding Agency: NWO (Dutch Science Foundation), Vidi-scholarship (2013-2017) This NWO-funded Vidi-project aims to explain changes in women’s and children’s work patterns and time allocation in the metropole and in the colony from the perspective...
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Selling Sex in World Cities, 1600-2000

This project attempts to achieve a comprehensive overview on prostitution from a global labour history perspective. It studies prostitution as a societal phenomenon as well as a form of labour, and focuses, therefore, on prostitutes' working/living conditions and work culture. The project follows a research model of earlier comparative projects...
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Towards a global history of domestic and care workers

This project constituted the organization of the 49th Annual meeting of the International Conference of Labour and Social History (ITH) in Linz, 12-15 September 2013, together with Dirk Hoerder and Silke Neunsinger.The history of domestic and caregiving workers in the household of others was discussed by an interdisciplinary group of...
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Giving in the Golden Age (Giga), 1500-1800

Funding Agency: NWO (Dutch Science Foundation), Small Research Programme (2008-2011) Dutch philanthropy was legendary in the Golden Age. From every country neighbouring the Dutch Republic, travellers came to admire the almshouses, orphanages, old people’s homes, and charitable institutions. Modern scholarship agrees with contemporary opinion: nowhere in Europe, and quite probably...
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A global history of textile workers, 1600-2000

This project was initiated by Lex Heerma van Voss, Els Hiemstra-Kuperus and myself at the International Institute of Social History (IISH, Amsterdam, The Netherlands) in the early 2000s. The aim was to take stock of the work done on textile workers worldwide and to compare their history in a systematically...
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Civil Services and Urban Community, the Netherlands, 1500-1795

Funding agency: NWO, Vidi-grant (applicant: M.P.C. van der Heijden). In 2007-2008, I worked at Leiden University as a postdoc researcher in Manon van der Heijden’s Vidi-project “Civil Services and Urban Community”. The project investigated the expansion of civil services in urban communities in the Low Countries between 1500 and 1800....
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PhD project: Women textile workers in the Dutch Republic, 1581-1810

The aim of this project was to explain (changes in) women’s participation in the preindustrial labour market and the gendered division of work by investigating developments in the textile industry of the Dutch Republic, most notably in spinning and weaving of wool and flax. In order to explore various possible...
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