Dr L.J. Bulten (Luc)

Dr. Luc Bulten is a social historian studying the early modern encounters between European-colonial and Southern Asian actors, societies, institutions, and environments. He is especially interested in how these encounters reciprocially helped shape the world we live in today, especially in the form of legal, bureaucratic, and financial practices, larger socio-economic structures, and our relationship to the rest of planetary system.

Luc has recently finished a book that will be published with Brill in 2026. In it, he explores how the "Thombos" (a rather unique collection of eighteenth-century land and population registers) detail the lives lived, lands held, and labour provided by tens of thousands of people inhabiting the coastal regions of eighteenth-century Dutch-colonial Sri Lanka. More information can be found here: https://brill.com/display/title/74001.

Additionally, Luc is a postdoctoral fellow in Sri Lankan history at the University of Cambridge, and is associated to Queens' college as a Rokos Postdoctoral Research Associate. As a member of the COLOMBO-project (see: https://colombohistories.org/) Luc studies the environmental and infrastructural transformations Colombo went through in the early modern period (more information can be found below).

Furthermore, Luc teaches several courses in social, economic, and early modern history both at Radboud University and at the University of Cambridge, and supervises thesis projects, student assistants and interns. He is currently one of the supervisors of Brecht Nijman's PhD-project on intra-Asian trade.

For any inquiries about either research or potential supervision, feel free to contact him.

Research Topics (also for BA and MA theses):
• Global, imperial and colonial history
• History of registration
• Environmental and planetary histories
• Everyday aspects of, and interactions in, colonial societies
• Indian Ocean World
• Trans-imperial trade networks and firms