To what extent did the Netherlands grow rich from the Transatlantic slave trade? In his dissertation 'Walcherse Ketens', Gerhard de Kok looks at Vlissingen and Middelburg, the most important slave trade cities in the Netherlands during the second half of the 18th century. It turns out that, although…

When many people think of slavery, they think of the translatlantic trade that took place between Africa, the Americas and the Caribbean.

What did it mean to be enslaved in in the Indian Ocean world in the 18th and 19th centuries? Over the last decades, historians have mined French, British, Portuguese and Dutch records for quantitative data on the European slave trade. This project focuses on the experience of being a slave and seeks…

For hundreds of years, the island of Sri Lanka was a crucial stopover for people and goods in the Indian Ocean. For the Dutch East India Company, it was also a crossroads in the Indian Ocean slave trade. Slavery was present in multiple forms in Sri Lanka—then Ceylon—when the British conquered the island…

Being a Slave brings together scholars and writers who try to come to terms with the histories and legacies of European slavery in the Indian Ocean.

Forgotten Lineages explores the paths through which generations of formally enslaved and their descendants gradually forgot their past of enslavement under Dutch and British imperial rule and became local subjects in Sri Lanka and South Africa. It explores why and how forgetting rather than memory became…

This project applies a social-historical approach to examine and contrast various groups of African-American slave refugees who sought freedom within North America between 1800 and 1860. It innovatively distinguishes between different “spaces of freedom” for runaway slaves, namely sites of formal, semi-formal,…

How did the slave peculium function in the socio-legal context of the Roman Empire?

The idea that prejudices about the (Middle)-East came to be during the colonisation of North-Africa in the 19th century is false. Mounir el-Badri wrote a cum laude bachelor thesis about orientalist judgments with which 18th century slaves in Morocco much earlier characterised their captors with.

‘In recent publications about the slave trade the same rhetorical weapons are used as two centuries ago in the battle for the abolition of the British slave trade. It is a topic fraught with emotions, but that should not prevent historians from being as careful and impartial as possible in their research,’…

In Slaving Zones: Cultural Identities, Ideologies, and Institutions in the Evolution of Global Slavery, fourteen authors—including both world-leading and emerging historians of slavery—engage with the ‘Slaving Zones’ theory.

How did slaves in the eighteenth century manage to empower themselves and their kin, and why did this become all the more difficult in the nineteenth century?

Article 10 (2) opening words and (b) of the Trade Mark Directive entitles a trade mark owner to object to infringements of his trade mark by a mark that is 'identical with or similar to the trade mark and used in relation to goods or services which are identical with or similar to those for which the…

The Pioneer Years of the National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden, 1818-1840

SLAVES TO THE SYSTEM: Locating Responsibility for Forced Expatriate Labour Practices by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK)

Research on this theme concerns Europe’s position in global markets, its response to the emergence of new international trade and financial actors that challenge institutions where Europe has long had considerable influence.

MIDDELBURG/GENEVA – The president of the United Nations Human Rights Council has invited the Zeeland Archives from the Netherlands, to Geneva on March 20th in order to present its project about the historical slave voyage aboard The Unity (1761-1763).

Creating a framework to assess the sustainability of fish farms which will set sustainability standards and give consumers information about the the sustainability and safety of their seafood.

The relationship between States and foreign corporations are regulated by international economic law and international investment law in particular. Any disputes between States and foreign corporations must therefore also be solved by reference to this body of public international law, for example when…

In the series 'PhD in the Picture', our PhD students tell us all about their research: what are their findings? How did they do it, and how does their research touch upon hot topics in our society today?

This book published by Oxford University Press discusses religion and trade in world history.

This book explores the links between maritime trading networks around Europe, from the Mediterranean and the Atlantic to the North and Baltic Seas.

Citizens’s attitudes towards trade are not only about the (perceived) economic effect. Commerce also has a variety of security implications. Employing an original experiment, political scientists Matthew DiGiuseppe (Leiden University) and Katja Kleinberg (Binghamton University) demonstrate that security…

In the absence of stringent and coordinated international action, States might seek alternatives to promote environmental protection unilaterally.

On 21 February 2019, Ruben Zandvliet defended his thesis 'Trade, Investment and Labour: Interactions in International Law'. The doctoral research was supervised by Prof. dr. N.J. Schrijver.

Painstaking research in Dutch and Portuguese archive materials, so far poorly assessed on the topic of social relations, reveals intense and intricate associations between different European individuals both in terms of ethnicity and social strata.

Unlike most city histories, this book focuses exclusively on the city’s connections with colonialism and slavery.

Lecture, Histories Connected: Special Guest Lecture

This edited volume offers a critical discussion of the trade-offs between transparency and secrecy in the actual political practice of democratic states in Europe. As such, it answers to a growing need to systematically analyse the problem of secrecy in governance in this political and geographical…

Lecture, Histories Connected: Masterclass

This thesis focuses on important life history traits and their trade-offs using two hexapod models. Particularly, the trade-off between immune defense and embryonic developmental speed is a central theme of this study.

This research project addresses an unexplored dimension of historical conflict resolution: the dynamics of strategic choices made by traders engaged in foreign trade in the city of Danzig (Gdansk) c. 1450-1580, a Hanseatic city under the Polish Crown.

The Dutch and English East India Companies were formidable organizations that were gifted with expansive powers that allowed them to conduct diplomacy, wage war and seize territorial possessions. But they did not move into an empty arena in which they were free to deploy these powers without resista…

Dr. Gruni published an article on the impact on sustainable development in the EU Common Commercial Policy of recent Opinion 2/15 CJEU on the Global Trade and Customs Journal.

Since the Middle Passage is in the North Atlantic, and the North Atlantic has a relationship with the arctic, what relationship does the Arctic have with the Middle Passage? How can this relationship be used to provide a space of healing by uncovering Afro/diasporic counter narratives?

The role of transnational, non-institutional networks in the opening up of British transatlantic trade at the end of the 17th/beginning of the 18th century

Afro-American slaves in the 19th century did not always flee to the north of the United States, according to historical research. Most of the slaves who fled remained in the southern states and posed as free coloured people. This is the conclusion that Professor Damian Pargas from Leiden University…

Individual traders should be at the forefront of the study of early modern world trade rather than institutions such as states and companies, argues Professor of Global Economic Networks Cátia Antunes. Inaugural lecture on 9 June.

The Power and Pains of Polysemy: Maritime Trade, Averages, and Institutional Development in the Low Countries (15th–16th Centuries) investigates the development of General Average and other so-called Averages in the Low Countries on the eve of the early modern period, showing how the various varieties…

Which traits and/or trade-offs determine benefits of being deciduous or evergreen?

An interesting Ottoman History podcast that deals with the slave trade and the African Diaspora in Ottoman Izmir.

The transatlantic slave trade between the 15th and 19th centuries represents one of the most traumatic chapters in history and is now widely recognised as a crime against humanity. EUROTAST is a new European-funded research network that will bring together an unprecedented range of researchers to examine…

On 19 January (15:30-16:30), the Nicholas Brunmayr (Bruxelles) will give a talk on medieval butter trade at the Amsterdam Centre for Urban History.

What do the cloth trade and slavery have to do with each other? Quite a lot, as it turns out, as by history student Sjoerd Ramackers demonstrated in his bachelor’s thesis. He reveals that cloth merchant Daniel van Eijs was closely associated with four plantations in Berbice, a former Dutch colony on…

After Wallonia’s veto on CETA, a group of 60 academics has come out to defend the European decision-making process in trade policy.

Very few treaties that are negotiated by the EU, have triggered such resistance as the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). From chlorinated chicken to a lack of democracy and transparency: emotions on TTIP run high. For that reason, the conference “TTIP: an EU perspective on global…

Julie Svalastog is one of the four PhDs in Cátia Antunes’ ERC Research Project 'Fighting Monopolies'.