Blog
Voice to Nature – and the historian
History is about people. Not only do they make history, people’s well-being is also the measure by which we measure historical change – usually ...
Teaching Tips
Terms started for Dutch universities on the 5th of September but many British universities only go back this week. For some universities this is the ...
A silly debate? Leandro Prados de la Escosura’s contribution to the ‘beyond GDP’ debate
Review of Leandro Prados de la Escosura, Human Development and the Path to Freedom. 1870 to the Present. Cambridge UP, 2022. The notion that GDP is an ...
How to measure the impact of slavery on the early modern economy?
Written by Jan Luiten van Zanden NWO, the National Science Foundation of the Netherlands, has a usually rather boring glossy in which it presents the ...
Books do not die: the price of information, Human Capital and the Black Death in the long fourteenth century
In this blog I will explain why I am busy working on trends in the prices of medieval hand-written books between circa 1250 and 1500. It may seem as ...
Netherlands blocking EU emergency fund for COVID-19
The plan for today was that I would give you an update of the garden (still in deep crisis) and then tell a bit about the new kid on the block, the robin, ...
Made in Holland(?): Hoogovens IJmuiden/Tata Steel
Students of The Great Challenges specialisation ventured on a field trip to Tata Steel this week. The Dutch word for it, ‘schoolreisje’, makes ...
Podcast with Wolfgang Streeck: The Return of Capitalism
The podcast can be found both on iTunes and Soundcloud. The interview has been recorded as part of the bachelor course ‘Thinking about Capitalism: From ...
From households to factories: Who makes our clothes?
An interesting concept in social science is “alienation”. We are unaware of how the products around us came into being and so we ...
Happy New Year!
All the best wishes for 2018! On the 8th of December The Great Challenges specialisation package went on an excursion to the Hague. We visited the ...
Inequality: Natural or not?
In a recently published piece in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science Bas van Bavel (with co-authors from the Environmental Sciences ...
Is there a future for entrepreneurship in the current market economy?
On the 3rd of October 2017 our very own Bas van Bavel gave the King Willem 1 lecture. This was for a gathering of senior figures from the corporate world, ...
Ecological Armageddon?! What can historians do to help?
By Thomas van Goethem The Guardian raised some eyebrows with headlines such as ‘Warning of ‘ecological Armageddon’ after dramatic plunge in ...
Dangerous misuse of historical data
UPDATE (01/12/2017): the article can now been accessed in a ‘ahead of print’ online version on the following URL ...
History by Numbers?
I spent the first semester of this academic year teaching a course called Growth and Inequality in a history master’s programme where we tackle quite ...
Filming…
Today I was in front of a green screen for the first time ever. I have only once been filmed professionally before, for the Antiques Roadshow (the BBC ...
SCOOP
Deadline for applications for the SCOOP programme. 10 PhD positions, within the context of the SCOOP programme – Sustainable Cooperation – Roadmaps ...
The importance of History (and broad university degrees)
As mentioned in the previous post I spent Friday and Saturday working at the open days of the History and PPE programmes. One of the things prospective ...
Open days
Today I presented at the information sessions for two different degree programmes, the English language History BA we offer in Utrecht, and the new ...
Position of women 3: Venus and the disappearing goddesses
Yesterday the BBC broadcast a documentary called Venus Uncovered. In an article linked to the documentary Bettany Hughes sketches the evolution of the ...
The Dutch Knowledge and Information Society
On the 21st of March next year the Netherlands will have a referendum on something that is generally referred to as the ‘sleepwet’. This bill proposes that ...
Who owns England?
An interesting resource and project I came across – Who owns England? and the related project website. For those interested in property rights and ...
Position of women 2: Child Marriage American style
I came across this fascinating article on child marriage in the United States today – Married Young: The Fight over Child Marriage in America. (for ...
Book tips – Biodiversity and Bees
I was recently asked to write a book suggestion for the History bachelors newsletter. I found it very hard to limit myself to one book, so here I include ...
Seminar paper: Entrepreneurs and unicorns
Today our very own Selin Dilli presented in the seminar. Selin completed her PhD within the project “Agency, Gender, and Economic Development in the ...
Piketty and the Charter of the Forest
With the recent publication of the Paradise papers yet another glimpse has been given into the ways the financially blessed avoid paying their fair dues ...
History of the Red Cross
A recent history of the Dutch Red Cross during WWII, for which Keetie Sluyterman of our department was on the supervisory committee, was published on the ...
Age Heaping
Sometimes economic and social historians have to get creative when trying to answer interesting questions using historical data. One of the things we would ...
Measuring Welfare Broadly
On Friday the 27th of October, our very own Bas van Bavel and Auke Rijpma presented their collaborative work with Rabobank on a broad measure of welfare, ...
Seminar paper: Planted towns
Seminar paper Kerstin Enflo and Alexandra López-Cermeno (Lund University), presented on the 2nd of November in our Autumnal seminar series. The modern ...
New CGEH WP – Benchmarking the Middle Ages – 15th century Tuscany in European Perspective
A new working paper just went up on our sister site the CGEH (Centre for Global Economic History). Written by Jan Luiten van Zanden, of our own group, ...
The cash book of the Netherlands
Guest post written by Dr. Corinne Boter: Most research on the financial history of the Netherlands tells the story from above, looking at the ...
Hive-mind: Best Economic History articles for Bachelors students
Recently we did a hive mind exercise with the group of scholars who work in the Economic and Social history group at Utrecht University. I had been asked ...
Book of Hywel Dda
The original inhabitants of the British Isles were, by successive waves of invasion by Anglo-Saxons and Vikings, pushed slowly into what became the Welsh ...
Agency book
Jan Luiten van Zanden, Auke Rijpma and Jan Kok (eds.) recently released the book Agency, Gender and Economic Development in the World Economy 1850-2000, ...
Position of women 1: Child brides
For some marriage is seen as the ultimate rite of passage for young women, an indication of reaching adulthood. In America, and countries heavily ...
History of (un)happiness
By Jan Luiten van Zanden Someone who commits suicide is extremely unhappy. The happiness industry has also made abundantly clear that people are unhappy ...
Best books for teaching quantitative methods to historians?
I have been looking into books for teaching quantitative historical methods to undergraduate students. In general the experience with exposing history ...
December 2016 – First integrated Dutch well-being indicator launched
One from the archives: Economic growth not translating into well-being of Dutch households The prosperity and well-being of Dutch households has hardly ...
Mills, Cranes and the Great Divergence
Watermills, windmills, building cranes and harbour cranes were the high-tech inventions of the Middle Ages: expensive, but labour-saving machines that ...
Start of a new year
The start of the new academic year is drawing ever closer and slowly Utrecht is filling up with students and university employees again. The absence of ...
Trump and the end of globalisation
After the upheaval of the American presidential election Jan Luiten van Zanden provides his interpretation of events. Towards the end of the 19th century ...