Research programme
Colonial and Global History
Colonial and Global History combines a deep curiosity of transcultural processes such as imperialism, (de)colonization, and globalization with critical historical research on regional societies in Africa, Asia, and the Americas.
- Contact
- Bart Verheijen

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
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Colonial and Global History
- Colonialism Inside Out: Everyday Experience and Plural Practice in Dutch Institutions in Sri Lanka (c. 1700-1800)
- Covering the Ocean. Newspapers and Information Management in the Atlantic World, 1580-1820
- Paths through slavery: urban slave agency and empowerment in Suriname, 1700-1863
- The Hirado Project
- Cosmopolis
- Photographic traditions in black popular modernities: towards a socio-historical analysis of the visual economy in and beyond South Africa
- Connecting in times of duress: understanding communication and conflict in Middle Africa’s mobile margins
- Cosmopolis Advanced
- Dutch Shipping and the Environment, 1621-1939
- Digital warfare in the Sahel: popular networks of war and Cultural Violence
- Southern Crossings: Indian activists and the Afro-Asian movement in the early Cold War era
- Institutional memory in the making of colonial culture: history, experience and ideas in Dutch colonialism in Asia, 1700 – 1870.
- COMET. Human Subject Research and Medical Ethics in Colonial Southeast Asia
- Cosmos Malabaricus
- Who did all the work? The hidden labour of colonial science
- Epistemic actors. The role of Indonesians in the making of knowledge in the colonial era
- International Coalitions for Peace in the Era of Decolonization, 1918-1970
- Preliminary Research into the Colonial and Slavery History of the City of Leiden and Leiden University