Our approach is profoundly empirical and includes the study of diverse primary sources – textual, visual, oral, material, and environmental. Our aim is to examine and understand the interactions between the ‘global’ and the ‘local’ and vice versa in the period between 1450 and 2000. We work in close partnership with various institutions in the Global South: together we hope to produce fresh historical and societal knowledge and generate a more inclusive understanding of the postcolonial present. Exploring the circulation of people, commodities, values, and ideas, and their significance in the foundations of modernity, we scrutinize how transcontinental and transoceanic connections were established, and why violent conflicts ensued that still affect the world we inhabit today.

Related research

• Colonial and Global History
  • Colonialism Inside Out: Everyday Experience and Plural Practice in Dutch Institutions in Sri Lanka (c. 1700-1800)
  • Paths through slavery: urban slave agency and empowerment in Suriname, 1700-1863
  • Covering the Ocean. Newspapers and Information Management in the Atlantic World, 1580-1820
  • Institutional memory in the making of colonial culture: history, experience and ideas in Dutch colonialism in Asia, 1700 – 1870.
  • Cosmopolis Advanced
  • The Hirado Project
  • Connecting in times of duress: understanding communication and conflict in Middle Africa’s mobile margins
  • Cosmopolis
  • Photographic traditions in black popular modernities: towards a socio-historical analysis of the visual economy in and beyond South Africa
  • COMET. Human Subject Research and Medical Ethics in Colonial Southeast Asia
  • Cosmos Malabaricus
  • Dutch Shipping and the Environment, 1621-1939
  • Digital warfare in the Sahel: popular networks of war and Cultural Violence
  • Who did all the work? The hidden labour of colonial science

• colonial history
• colonization
• decolonization
• global history
• globalization
• imperialism
• maritime history