Current research projects

The highly diverse society of Suriname provides an intriguing case for investigating the social dynamics of moviegoing. For example, for the Hindustani community, cinema – and ‘Bollywood’ in particular – could expose the sometimes complicated cultural bonds between diaspora and ‘homeland’. The goal of this project is to promote a research agenda to a new generation of historians, in collaboration with the Anton de Kom University of Suriname (AdK).

The support of the vulnerable in our society is a hot issue; not only today but also in the past. The main purpose of this study is to gain a better understanding of how care was provided to the vulnerable in the nineteenth/beginning of the twentieth century. Detailed data from the archives of Woerden, a small town in the centre of the Netherlands, are used to reconstruct life courses of individuals and their living conditions.

Who died from the contagious diseases roaming the city of Amsterdam between 1854 and 1926? To be able to answer this question, indices of the cause-of-death registers and civil registry of Amsterdam need to be matched. We propose to use the CLARIAH Infrastructure, specifically from the datalegend tool suite, to publish these certificates as Linked Data, and use BurgerLinker to link information on persons in these sources.

During the second half of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries, The Netherlands experienced remarkable growth in stature, which resulted in making the Dutch the tallest people on earth. This project searches for the causes of this development with a focus on the determinants of adult height such as heritability, epigenetic factors, early-life conditions, socioeconomic position and intrahousehold resource allocation asking: to what extent do young adult heights of men reflect (adverse or fortuitous) early life conditions?

This project answers the question: why was Dutch industry (nijverheid and trafieken) able to grow despite the overall decline of the Dutch economy after the 1670s? It answers this question by looking at the mostly neglected role of industry in the creation of value and at industry’s role in shaping economic policy.

During the second half of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century, The Netherlands experienced remarkable growth in stature, both in absolute and relative terms, which resulted in making the Dutch the tallest people on earth. We study the impact on young adult stature of heritability and early life conditions, and we look at the consequences of adult height and health on people’s later lives. Were taller people more successful on the marriage market, in their careers, and in reproduction?

This project will create a unique large-scale historical income panel. Using tax records, thus far rarely used in a systematic manner, income data at multiple points in time will be gathered for 200,000 individuals in the Netherlands between 1851 and 1922.

This project addresses one of the major questions in Dutch migration history: what happened to the descendants of the hundreds of thousands of Germans, Flemings and Scandinavians who migrated to the Dutch Republic in the early modern period?

By analyzing financial accounts of Guelders’ landed nobility in the eighteenth century, this research will reveal the daily involvement and responsibility of Dutch elite women and, more importantly, the dynamics behind it.

The project 'Legacies of bondage: towards a database of Surinamese life courses in a multigenerational perspective (1830-1950)' by prof dr. Jan Kok and dr. Coen van Galen is awarded a 5-year grant by the Platform Digital Infrastructure SSH. With this grant, the Radboud Group will be able to construct a consolidated database of the population of Suriname between 1830 and 1950.