Life is a lot like history. It is seldom straightforward, and contingencies lurk around every corner. Growing up, it was certainly not written in the stars that I would end up researching the social lives of early modern people through their private credit networks. Surely, history was a constant presence in my upbringing. World War II stories dominated dinner conversations on the German side of my family. The spectacular, mythologized ways in which King Hassan II escaped the countless attacks on his life were recounted on every visit to Morocco. Obviously, each family member had their own version. History as a series of anecdotes, preferably with 'great men' as main characters, was also the way it was taught in high school. Colonial history, especially in its Belgian variant was – let us say – certainly not treated extensively.
It was my bachelor's degree at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) that showed me that history is not something you merely learn, but something you research, write and reconstruct through critical investigation. It also opened my eyes to the fact that history is to an important extent made 'from below', by ordinary people. Fittingly, a third element – colonial history – was introduced on my journey while studying in an old Imperial capital, pursuing the MSc Empires, Colonialism and Globalization at the London School of Economics (LSE).
During my PhD, I was lucky enough to be able to bring most of these interests together, investigating the rise of fiscal states in the early modern period – not in the least thanks to my supervisor Wouter Ryckbosch and the social historian of the law Klaas Van Gelder. Much like private credit networks, it is a topic that might sound very abstract and quantitative. I tried to argue this was not the case. As the economist Joseph Schumpeter had already written, the 'thunder of world history' can be heard in fiscal developments, if you are only willing to listen carefully enough. Indeed, I showed how much fiscal history reveals about ideological developments and especially about the social lives of people. By using 18th-century petitions and court cases about taxation as sources, I showed how inhabitants of early modern societies thought about fiscal justice in everyday life and organized themselves to realize those visions.
Within the project 'Economies of Trust' – conceived by Dries Lyna, Eva Marie Lehner and Wouter Ryckbosch and funded by the prestigious Gerda Henkel Stiftung – I will pursue many of the same objectives, while finally circling back to the topic of colonial history. Indeed, while credit has important economic dimensions, probably crucially contributing to economic growth in the Cape Colony, recent historiography has shown it is essential to understand its social dimensions as well. Credit must be understood as a social construct deeply embedded in relationships of reciprocity. But what did these relationships between individuals and various social groups look like in the highly complex and hierarchical 18th-century Cape Colony? Combining individual deeds of credit transactions with court records about credit disputes, I will contribute to the overarching goal of our project: to show how the urban lower classes in a highly diverse colonial society could establish trust and creditability, exploring the overlapping roles of kinship, religion, gender and economic position in structuring social networks from below.
Personally, I am extremely happy that I will not have to answer these fascinating but daunting questions alone. Like history itself, writing history is inevitably a social process and a collaborative endeavor, to which all members of the project will crucially contribute. As I begin this project, I very much look forward to working with postdoc Julia Schmidt who will elucidate how processes of inclusion and exclusion worked in everyday life, focusing on unmarried women of different legal statuses. Our colleague and Archival Time Traveler Paul van der Linde will without doubt give unique and fascinating insights into the courtroom, establishing not only how plaintiffs and defendants tried to establish their trustworthiness, but also using witness statements to generate a multidimensional social map of eighteenth-century Cape Town.
