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…

Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Augustan Rome: Greek culture in the Roman world.

This book investigates how the rulers of the Habsburg world empire developed and implemented a central maritime policy for the Netherlands and appointed an admiral of the sea or admiral-general for that purpose.

This book argues that the combined literary, epigraphic and archaeological evidence supports the theory that early-imperial Italy had about six million inhabitants.

Barbarism: from the 18th century to the present.

The Effects of the 1881 Liquor Act on the Leiden Alcohol Trade

The death of George Floyd at the hands of the police may have sparked the Black Lives Matter protests in the United States and here in the Netherlands, but they are about more than that alone. We asked Karwan Fatah-Black, a historian who specialises in the Dutch colonial history, for his analysis. ‘We…

How have British cities changed in the years since the Second World War? And what drove this transformation? This innovative new history traces the development of the post-war British city, from the 1940s era of reconstruction, through the rise and fall of modernist urban renewal, up to the present-day…

This book provides an overview of critical scholarly reflections on the history of Dutch slavery and colonization, as well as how this translates into critical cultural practices.

Prof. dr. Iain Gardner (University of Sydney) will be a visiting scholar at Leiden University Centre for the study of Religion (LUCSoR) in September-November 2015

Few people would associate the name Anton de Kom with Leiden. Yet the Surinamese freedom fighter is the subject of an exhibition at Museum De Lakenhal.

How can you learn about women’s history if they are under-represented in historical sources? Look at news coverage of crime, says Clare Wilkinson, PhD candidate in gender and history. ‘Historical crime reporting offers a glimpse into forgotten groups.’ The doctoral defence will take place on 23 Apri…

History lecturer Giles Scott-Smith is enthusiastic about the new pitch-to-peer programme (P2P), for which students have to make an original, creative assignment and evaluate one another’s work. This is part five in a series of articles about lecturers and innovation in teaching and learning.

This book examines the critical role of information and knowledge in early modern Europe's global pursuits, exploring challenges in trusting distant information, the development of doubt in intercultural encounters, and the impact of misinformation.

PhD defence

Multi-objective optimization is an effective technique for finding optimal solutions that balance several conflicting objectives. It has been applied in many fields of our world, because practical problems usually have more than one desired goal. For example, developing a new vehicle component might…

This book on Alba is edited by Maurits Ebben, Margriet Lacy-Bruijn and Rolof van Hövell tot Westerflier. Each of its fifteen chapters are dedicated to developing a new understanding of a sometimes misunderstood figure in European history.

The faculty of Humanities scores well in the anual QS World Universities Ranking By Subject list. This year we have placed sixth in the category Classics and Ancient History.

Every month a member of the Institute for History tells about a book that inspired him or her. Afterwards, the pen is passed on to another colleague. This month dr. Meike de Goede tells about the book 'Between Tides' by Valentin Mudimbe. The novel, little known beyond the circles of Africanists and…

How did parties as political organizations emerge?

Lecture, Sociolinguistics & Discourse Studies Series

In Reframing the Diplomat Albertine Bloemendal offers a unique window onto the unofficial dimension of Cold War transatlantic relations by analyzing the diplomatic role of the Dutch Atlanticist Ernst van der Beugel as a government official and as a private diplomat.

Combining approaches from intellectual history, philology and the study of Arabic manuscripts, this study places the Bornu scholar Muḥammad al-Wālī within his intellectual environment on the one hand, and it portrays him as someone who responded to the concerns of ordinary Muslims around him on the…

On 1 January Minna Valjakka was appointed Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory from a Global Perspective. Valjakka sees her appointment as 'extremely topical' because of the discussions about the decolonisation of the arts: 'Art teaches us not just about art, but also about contemporary…

This volume, featuring sixteen contributions from leading Roman historians and archaeologists, sheds new light on approaches to the economic history of urban craftsmen and traders in the Roman world, with a particular emphasis on the imperial period.

This programme aims to make the digitized archival sources of the Kerala and Tamil Nadu Archives more accessible to Indian and international scholars and to the widest possible audience, in particular to the people of Kerala.

Where did the new generation of antislavery activists get their inspiration to organize in large-scale pressure groups?

D.P. Kok defended his thesis on 10 October 2017

The thesis reconstructs Carl Schmitt's 1956 monography on 'Hamlet'. By scanning and unearthing books, essays, think-pieces, articles, personal diaries and private correspondence, this investigation fully addresses the unwritten philosophy of history -partially developed- in Schmitt's late thought. The…

This series of publications brings together new material on wellconsidered themes within the wide area of Early Modern Studies.

The central aims of this project are to establish the shapes of the various urban hierarchies existing in the provinces of the Roman Empire and (especially) to use the quantitative properties of these hierarchies to shed new light on levels of economic integration.

Since my master's thesis on the landed property of the Frisian monasteries in the Middle Ages I am highly interested in the do ut des-aspects of the relation between religious houses and the lay world. Key words here are: property, power, patronage and the role of religious institutions in the 'salvation…

Anneleen van der Meer discusses Russia's alleged use of chemical weapons in Ukraine in an article for The Conversation.

The Encyclopedia of Global Human Migration provides a complete exploration of the prominent themes, events, and theoretical underpinnings of the movements of human populations from prehistory to the present day.

Pursuing Whiteness in the Colonies offers a new comprehension of colonial history from below by taking remnants of individual agencies from a whiteness studies perspective. It highlights the experiences and perceptions of colonisers and how they portrayed and re-interpreted their identities in Afric…

The excuses for the slavery past? It would have been better if the cabinet had taken some more time on that, thinks university lecturer and Atlantic slavery expert Karwan Fatah-Black. 'Too bad they didn’t wait for the results of the study.'

This project sets out to map, document and analyze instances of squatting in Leiden from 1970 to 1990, in order to set up an online Digital Archive of Squatting in Leiden. This archive will function as an online resource for academic research, as well as a starting point for public activities such as…

This project investigates how early print media covered distant but urgent geopolitical conflicts, using newspapers from the Low Countries, north and south.

Cosmopolis seeks to explore the transnational and cultural dimensions of intra-Eurasian encounters through Dutch sources.