It recently emerged that a Swiss firm secretly owned by the CIA and the West German intelligence service BND had been selling manipulated coding equipment to numerous governments, including allies, to spy on them through a Swiss cover firm for years.

From 1717 onwards, many Dutch textile workers emigrated to Spain, recruited in the Netherlands through Spanish intermediary agents and diplomatic staff. Bourbon Spain wanted to strengthen its economy by founding royal factories and was in desperate need for skilled foreign labour. This example of labour…

Investigating the contribution of interpreters, informants, hunters and guides in the making of colonial scientific knowledge.

How was the future United Nations Organization promoted to global publics during WW II?

This work analyzes ritual practices and knowledge related to the Mesoamerican calendar with the aim of contributing to the understanding of the use and conceptualization of this calendar system in the contemporary K’iche’ community of Momostenango, in the Highlands of Guatemala.

Subproject of the ERC project 'Challenging the Liberal World Order from Within: The Invisible History of the United Nations and the Global South'.

The aim of this project is to foster a historiography that does justice both to the realization that scientific knowledge is constructed by local, contingent, and contextual processes, and the claims of science to objective validity.

In educational settings such as museums, universities and schools, white, male, able-bodied and rational subjects still dominate. Although there has been a lot of theoretical work on processes of in- and exclusion through racialization, sexualization, and disabilization, we still know very little about…

This subproject of 'From Homo Economicus to Political Animal' analyzes Greek economic thinking of the Hellenistic period.

In Poland the commemoration of acts of resistance is being misused to distort the history of the Holocaust. That is what Cleveringa Professor Jan Grabowski said in his inaugural lecture on 26 November. In her lecture, the second Cleveringa Professor, Barbara Engelking, pointed to the often indifferent…

So-called

Playing the piano with your forearm, plucking the strings, sawing through the piano: pianist Luk Vaes's doctoral dissertation covers all the techniques of play for which a piano is NOT designed. His defence ceremony will consist of three concerts and a public defence. 'Musicians were using the interior…

How do old and new Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) relate to new social and political movements in Central Africa? What does this tell us about Africa and the Information Age?

Managing Diversity: Supervising Functions in Managing Colonial Workplaces

On 10 November Guanmian Xu successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated.

This special issue of Media History (22-3/4, 2016), co-edited with Helmer Helmers (University of Amsterdam), develops a new perspective on the early modern communication revolution. It discusses news as a specific kind of information – by its nature continuous, unreliable, and diffuse – which needed…

Today, globalization makes us all aware of how closely we are connected to, and often dependent upon, the actions of people who are distant from us. Human migration and economic liberalization have confronted local communities with changes happening on a global level. How can we devise ways to share…

Eschatology played a central role in both politics and society throughout the early modern period. It inspired people to strive for social and political change, including sometimes by violent means, and prompted in return strong reactions against their religious activism.

Who is Economic Man? Every economic paradigm presupposes an anthropology, a theory of human nature. This project explores the anthropologies presupposed and produced by ancient Greek economic texts, and the specific knowledge forms that shape these anthropologies.

This book examines the history of The Netherlands in a way that connects global processes to local developments.

This subproject of 'From Homo Economicus to Political Animal' will be on ancient analogues for modern-day “ersatz economics”, the economics of the “man in the street”.

This COIn Grant 2025 awarded project allows Leiden University researchers and students to do research on the world’s largest corpus of digitized Ottoman language periodicals and books.

In an age before GoogleDocs and LinkedIn, 19th-century scholars relied on letter-writing for collaboration, peer-feedback and the building and sustaining of academic networks. Letters were a quick, efficient way to share insights, data and discoveries. Scholarly correspondence thus allows a vital behind-the-scenes…

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.

Ruling Overseas: Connected Practices of Governance of Law

Regulating Relations: Controlling Sex and Marriage