Posthumus Conference 2025 (Nijmegen, 27-28 May)

Detailed Programme – Tuesday 27 May 2025

Please note: this is a preliminary schedule and may be subject to change

Tuesday 27 May
10:30-12:15
 
Session 1A – Energy multinationals: between the national, colonial, and global perspectives
Organised by Research Network ‘Globalisation, Inequality, and Sustainability in Long-Term Perspective’

Lexy Remy (Erasmus University Rotterdam) – Historical tensions between international business and national taxation

Marin Kuyt (University of Amsterdam) – Colonial carbon: how empire shaped the Dutch fossil fuel sector

Marten Boon (Utrecht University) – Title tba

10:30-12:15 Session 5B – Highs and lows: Income and living standards in the Low Countries (1750-1950)
Organised jointly by Research Networks ‘Life-courses, Family, and Labour’ and ‘Economy and Society of the Pre-industrial Low Countries in Comparative Perspective’

Matthias van Laer (University of Antwerp) – Seasons of stability. Seasonal wages, unemployment and the stability of labour income in the Netherlands, 1910-1950

Paul Puschmann (Radboud University), Auke Rijpma (Utrecht University), and Rick Schouten (Utrecht Universit – Migrant inclusion in the 19th-20th century labor market: comparing migrant and native earnings using the Historical Income Panel of the Netherlands (HIP-NL)

Wout Saelens (University of Antwerp) – Cheap coal, poor people: energy and working-class living standards in Belgium during the bicentenary age of coal (c. 1750-1950)

10:30-12:15 Session 1C – Social capital and education in Central and East Africa
Organised by Research Network ‘Routes and Roots in Colonial and Global History’

Margot Luyckfasseel (University of Antwerp) – Title tba

Ivana Zecevic (University of Groningen) – Title tba

Mesfin Ali (Wageningen UR; tbc) – Title tba

14:15-16:00 Session 2A – Justice and the law
Organised by Research Network ‘Inclusion, Exclusion and Mobility’

Dave De Ruysscher (Tilburg University) – Justice eroded: appeals against judgments of the Cloth Hall (Antwerp, c. 1490-c. 1560)

Sherilyn Bouyer  (University of Groningen) – Murder in Saverdun (1666): the bipartisan court of Castres and the Protestant litigants of the Languedoc seventy years after the French Wars of Religion

Matteo De Vuyst (Ghent University) – Paths to justice. Crime, prosecution and punishment in Bruges (1870-1910)
peer commentator: Yowali Kabamba

14:15-16:00 Session 2B  – Food provisioning in western Europe in the 16th to 19th centuries
Organised by Research Network ‘Societies in Context: Interactions between Humans and Rural-Urban Environment’

Cécile Bruyet (University of Antwerp) – From garden to table – Urban and peri-urban agriculture in late medieval Antwerp

Jessica Dijkman (Utrecht University) and Rogier van Kooten (Utrecht University / University of Antwerp) – War, harvest failure, and dearth: inequality and grain shortages in 16th-century Antwerp

Dennis de Vriese (Vrije Universiteit Brussel) – Fostering competition through competitions. The Boeuf Gras cattle contest as a means of steering a free market for meat in Brussels, 1830-1860

14:15-16:00 Session 2C – Coping with crisis
Organised by Research Network ‘Economy and Society of the Pre-industrial Low Countries in Comparative Perspective’

Nelleke Tanis (University of Antwerp) – ‘The Social History of Finance: coping with crisis’
peer commentator: tba

Maite de Sola Perea (University of Antwerp) – ‘Business finance and development of financial markets in Belgium in the 19th century’
peer commentator: tba

Speaker 3 tba