Navigating History: Economy, Society, Knowledge, and Nature

Pepijn Brandon is Assistant Professor in Social and Economic History at VU Amsterdam and Senior Researcher at the International Institute of Social History. He obtained his PhD from the University of Amsterdam in 2013. His research focuses on connections between capitalist development, war, and slavery. He is author of War, capital, and the Dutch state (1588-1795) (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2015), and a member of the editorial committee of the International Review of Social History.Sabine Go is Assistant Professor of Accounting at the School of Business and Economics of VU Amsterdam. She is particularly interested in the emergence and development of economic institutions during early modern and modern times in the Low Countries. Her current research focuses on contract enforcement and governance issues. She collaborates as Senior Visiting Fellow in an ERC Consolidator Grant Project on General Average, Transaction Costs and Risk Management during the First Globalization.Wybren Verstegen is Assistant Professor in Economic and Social History at VU Amsterdam. He teaches Global History, the History of the United States and the US South. His dissertation about nobility and society in the revolutionary era in Veluwe-district (in the east of the Netherlands) was published in 1989. He has written many scientific and newspaper articles concerning environmental history and sustainability. Recently he published the book Vrije wandeling. Het parlement, de fiscus en de bescherming van het particuliere Nederlandse natuurschoon tussen 1924-1995 (Groningen: Historia Agriculturae, 2017) as well as several articles about nature protection on estates in the Netherlands in the twentieth century.

• PrefacePepijn Brandon, Sabine Go, and Wybren VerstegenList of IllustrationsList of ContributorsIntroduction: Davids and Goliath: How Books Helped to Combat Historians’ AdversariesMarjolein Hart’t and Jan LucassenSection 1: Resources of Knowledge, Cultures of Learning1 Religion, Culture and the Great EnrichmentJoel Mokyr2 Wandering about the Learning Market: Early Modern Apprenticeship in Antwerp Gold- and Silversmith AteliersBert De Munck and Raoul De Kerf3 Educating World Citizens: The Rise of International Education in the Twenty-first CenturyPál NyiriSection 2: Institutions for a Global Economy4 A Changing Landscape: Institutions and Institutional Change in the Dutch EconomyJeroen Touwen5 Social Partnership in the Northern Netherlands (1985-?)Marijn MolemaSection 3: Chasing Whales, Crossing Oceans5 Zaanse Jonas: Zaan Whaling and Shipbuilding in the Seventeenth CenturyVictor Enthoven7 Keeping Risk at Bay: Risk Management and Insurance in Eighteenth-century Dutch WhalingSabine Go and Jaap Bruijn8 Figuring Out Global and Local Relations: Cantonese Face-makers and their Sitters in the 18th CenturyJoost C.A. SchokkenbroekSection 4: Chains of Profit, Chains of Labour9 Chasing the Delfland: Slave Revolts, Enslavement, and (Private) voc Networks in Early Modern AsiaMatthias van Rossum10 “With the Power of Language and the Force of Reason”: An Amsterdam Banker’s Fight for Slave Owners’ CompensationPepijn Brandon and Karin Lurvink11 Up and Down the Chain: Sugar Refiners’ Responses to Changing Food RegimesUlbe BosmaSection 5: Humans and their Natural Environment12 Enlightened Ideas in Commemoration Books of the 1825 Zuiderzee Flood in the NetherlandsPetra J.E.M. van Dam and Harm Pieters13 Secret and Stillborn: A Dutch Fiscal Bill from 1947 to Protect Both Nature and Monuments on Dutch EstatesWybren Verstegen14 Birds in Texel in 1910 and the Shifting Baseline SyndromeJan Luiten van ZandenList of Publications of Karel Davids 1973–2017List of Doctoral Theses Supervised by Karel Davids (1997-May 2018)Index of Names and Geographic Locations