European Research Council project CAPASIA – The Asian Origins of Global Capitalism is organising a series of online/hybrid lectures dedicated to the connected histories of capitalism. The series is jointly organised with the European Research Council project ECOINT – a Twentieth-Century International Economic Thinking, and the Complex History of Globalization and the EUI Conversations on…

On 26 May 2023 at 15:45 Professor Pepijn Brandon delivered his inaugural lecture as Professor of Global Economic and Social History in the Aula of the VU Amsterdam. The title of the inaugural lecture was: Elements of original accumulation: Dispossession, war, and slavery in the history of capitalism. You can find recordings of the inaugural…

We are happy to inform you the recent Posthumus Conference in Antwerp also marked the completion of the Basic PhD Training Programme of the N.W. Posthumus Institute for most PhD students of cohort 2021. Those attending the conference were handed their certificate during the conference dinner, those who completed the programme at another event, will…

Recently, the CAPASIA (The Asian Origins of Global Capitalism) project has launched its new Research Website where you will find updates and highlights on the project’s activities. CAPASIA is a five-year ERC-funded project hosted at the European University Institute in Florence from 2022 to 2027. The project aspires to provide a polycentric history of early…

On 24 and 25 May 2023, the Posthumus Conference 2023 was held at the University of Antwerp. This year’s central theme was ‘Food Inequalities’, a thema that was also the main topic of two highly interesting keynote lectures, delivered by Dr Susan Flavin (Trinity College Dublin, The University of Dublin and Principal Investigator of the…

The European Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST) has chosen the Great Leap Network, an ambitious research initiative led by Radboud University with Posthumus fellows Professor Angelique Janssens and Dr Tim Riswick as main proposers, as a COST-Action. Over the next four years, the network aims to unravel the historical origins and driving factors behind…

On 24 May 2023, Posthumus alumnus and fellow Stef Espeel was awarded a FWO Research Grant for junior postdoc researchers. Stef Espeel, having obtained his PhD from the University of Antwerp in 2021 with a dissertation entitled “Prices and Crises. The Grain Economy in Fourteenth-Century Flanders”, currently works as a postdoctoral senior researcher with the…

We are sad to have received the notice that Josef Peter Ehmer, emeritus university professor at the University of Vienna and former member of the ESTER network, passed away on 10 May 2023 at the age of 74. Born on 7 November 1948 in Gschwandt near Gmunden, Upper-Austria already became a devoted reader at a…

Posthumus students Bram Hilkens (PhD candidate at Erasmus University Rotterdam) and Sam Miske (PhD candidate at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam), with support by the Posthumus Institute research network ‘Economy and Society of the Pre-Industrial Low Countries in Comparative Perspective’, the NWO-funded VIDI projects ‘Positively Shocking! The Redistributive Impact of Mass Mortality through Epidemic Diseases and Violent…

On 11-13 December 2023, UCSIA, the Urban Studies Institute (University of Antwerp) and Centre Pieter Gillis (University of Antwerp) organise an academic workshop at the University of Antwerp on interdisciplinary perspectives on the role of religiously inspired solidarity in modernising and post-secular contexts. The organisers of this workshop aim to discuss the role of faith…