The central theme of the 2025 Posthumus Conference will be ‘The People vs Structures’.

The impact of global history on the lived experiences of people, as well as the impact of everyday people on historical events take centre stage at this year’s Posthumus Conference. What does it mean for someone to be enslaved, to live in an early-modern empire, to have property rights, to do business surrounded by uncertainty, to experience environmental change, to move from the countryside to the city, or to work in a coal mine that is closed down?

Economic and social historians often try answer these questions by telling stories that move beyond the particular without reducing individual experiences to one instance in a set of numbers. Moreover, when seeking answers their questions, economic, social, and demographic historians might use a wide corpus of sources and borrow methodologies from other disciplines. One such discipline, that will receive extra attention in this years’ conference, is legal history and judicial sources.

The relationship between law, and social and economic structures over time is an important pillar of social and economic history because legal systems simultaneously create the conditions for interactions as well as limiting (some) of the interactions. It can for example define what interactions were illegal. The theme of the conferences allows a reflection on how legal systems, institutions, and practices have influenced social and economic conditions, as well as how people have influenced these legal regimes.