When we think of unethical medical experiments, we tend to think first of Nazi Germany. What is less well known is that experiments were also carried out in colonised areas without the explicit consent of the test subject. University lecturer Fenneke Sysling has received a European grant to research…

In the late 19th century, the Dutch government introduced a tax system in the Dutch East Indies, with the intention of transforming the colony into a modern state. PhD student Maarten Manse wrote his thesis on this development and discovered how grandiloquent colonial ideals became bogged down in daily…

This research cluster centres on regional, national, and global intersections and interactions between a variety of artistic expressions and society. It focuses not only on objects (artistic, literary, cinematic, and medial), but also on practices (aesthetic, political, and cultural).

The modern-day Caribbean is a stunningly diverse but also intricately interconnected geo-cultural region, resulting partly from the islands’ shared colonial histories and an increasingly globalizing economy.

What is the difference between a minister saying that something is possible or that it is not impossible ?

Since the emergence of humankind people have maintained social contacts and traveled widely, establishing interaction networks in which goods are traded and ideas are transmitted, increasingly on a global scale.

The linguistic project constitutes the connection between the two other subprojects. It consists of two parts.

How did science relate to politics and colonialism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? Assistant Professor Lauren Lauret has been awarded an NWO XS grant to map the colonial and political activities of nineteenth-century scientists.

In the late 19th and early 20th century, hundreds of thousands of Chinese labor migrants crossed the seas to the Dutch East Indies. On the tobacco plantations of northeastern Sumatra and in the tin mines of Bangka and Belitung, they endured long hours and harsh conditions. Their journeys formed part…

This month, the volume Reading Russian Literature, 1980-2024, edited by Otto Boele and Dorine Schellens, was published at Palgrave Macmillan.

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the pressing question is how this global health emergency impacted the research agendas of the field of crisis and disaster science. This article reviewed contributions in ten important crisis and disaster journals in the two and a half years following the COVID-19…

New publication reviews Dutch colonial sources on the Indigenous Brazilian Tapuia people: ‘For them the Dutch were another piece on the political chess board’

Leiden University and the Dutch Royal Family maintain ties that go back to 1575, when William of Orange founded the University. Many members of the Royal Family have studied in Leiden and several have received an honorary doctorate.

What does it mean to perceive smell? This question fascinated poets and playwrights of the early modern period (ca. 1500–1700): their work abounds in references to and evocations of smell sensation and of specific scents. POEM maps the ways in which early modern writers put the language of smell – or…

This book reveals how one publishing firm's editorial strategy helped to legitimate European colonialism in the early modern era.

What development pathways support teaching faculty members in research-intensive universities in becoming informal educational leaders?

This book explores the intellectual history of the Dutch empire from the sixteenth century to the postcolonial era, going beyond systemic thinkers to understand how empire was perceived in day-to-day life. It takes a transnational and transimperial approach to the Dutch empire, connecting European,…

Using enslaved people as servants, becoming an administrator in the Dutch West India Company or making uniforms for the colonial army. Many people from Leiden played a role in colonialism and slavery. Historians are conducting preliminary research and finding striking examples.

French title: Communication et violences dans le Guéra et le Moyen-Chari (Tchad) de 1940 à 2010. This research investigates the relationship between the introduction of new means of communication and violence experienced by the local populations in the Moyen-Chari and the Guéra regions in Chad from…

Four years of protracted negotiations and bitter warfare passed between the declaration of Indonesian independence on 17 August, 1945, and the official transfer of sovereignty on 27 December, 1949.

This dissertation takes a technological approach to ceramic production and provides a fine-grained view of the circum-Caribbean region.

This article provides a list of the concepts and key elements that should be considered when creating effective communication messages.

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This article aims to provide a coherent foundation for empirical studies of interpersonal discussion on risk.

Historian Karwan Fatah-Black researches the Dutch colonial past, and regularly joins in the public debate about this. He has been admitted to The Young Academy for his dedication to academia and society.

This study offers a new approach to the history of sites, archaeology, and heritage formation in Asia, at both the local and the trans-regional levels.

Having mostly ignored the gains Dutch traders, investors and firms attained from serving the French, English and Iberian empires, debate in the Netherlands now demands a re-evaluation of Dutch colonial responsibilities. By recovering knowledge of these gains, this project will measure the wealth obtained…

This project analyzes to what extent hodegetical textbooks relied on each other in warning their readers against vicious habits, how much continuity their catalogs of vice displayed, and to what extent vices that persisted throughout the 18th and 19th centuries were associated with easy-to-remember…

In the logic and aesthetics of a republican baroque the existing world is the result of a moment in which for a split second two or more realities are equally real and after which only a singular one becomes actualized.

The Caribbean as we know it today is fundamentally a product of colonial activity and globalisation. Practically everyone that inhabits the Caribbean has ancestors from different continents due to colonial activity, which profoundly affects the area to this day. Caribbean writers, both in the Caribbean…

When we think of the history of Dutch slavery, the areas that spring to mind are primarily the Antilles and Suriname. However, until the end of the eighteenth century there were also Dutch plantation colonies in neighbouring Guyana. Bram Hoonhout’s book ‘Borderless Empire’ describes this forgotten h…

In this publication, May Tamimova and Tahir Abbas researched the existing literature about violence and hatred against places of worship.

Nuran Buket Cengiz defended her thesis on 13 June 2017

Leiden University contributed to colonialism and slavery through its research and teaching. And governors and residents of Leiden had an active role in colonial networks. These are the findings of two explorative studies presented on 3 April.

Anyone who wanted to get an impression of the Dutch East Indies between 1800 and 1945 quickly turned to travel literature. Large groups of readers devoured non-fiction accounts of the island empire on the other side of the world – and were given a one-sided picture. Most of the sources that reached…

French title: Entre la “détresse’’ et l’inter-connectivite : le case de Mbororo réfugies sur les frontières Cameroun-Centrafrique. This research project investigates the meaning of duress in the lives of nomadic refugees in Cameroon and investigates if and how the accessibility of new ICT’s allow them…

Our team is committed to the study of knowledge in its broadest sense, encompassing both ideas and practices in all its historical variety. We look at what people regarded as knowledge, how they created, collected, circulated and used it, also why it mattered to them, and how all this was embedded in…

Archaeologist Corinne Hofman wins the Distinguished Lorentz Fellowship 2018/19 for research into the changing world of indigenous peoples as a result of colonialism. “The perspective of indigenous communities is still lacking in most history books.

This project will study the influence of Arabic, Iberian, and Italian representations of Africa, as well as the impact of local African knowledge, on Dutch imaginations which were public in nature, and thus affected a shared European understanding of African alterity.

This book offers a historical and historiographical analysis of the Spanish asiento de negros, a contract between the Spanish Monarchy and private parties to introduce specific number of enslaved Africans to Spanish America.