Conducts research and collects data on the global history of labour, workers, and labour relations

Research Projects

  • Global Migration History Programme

    To fully understand the causes and effects of migration and settlement processes in the current globalising world, a long timeframe and a global perspective are essential. Historical migration studies have long focused primarily on the European and Atlantic worlds. In this programmatic and long term project, we aim to broaden the perspective to include the full migration experience of the non-Western world while proposing both a short and long term series of studies to further this goal.

  • HISCO - History of Work

    Central to social, economic and labour history is the world of work, as known by occupational activities and titles. Yet research, especially comparative research, is severely hampered by confusion regarding occupational terminology across time and space, within as well as between languages.

  • History of Labour Relations 1500-2000

    The International Institute of Social History is working on a Global Collaboratory on the History of Labour Relations in the period 1500-2000. In this project we want to make an inventory of all types of labour relations worldwide, varying from slavery, indentured labour and share cropping, to free wage labour and self-employment from 1500 up until today.

  • Labour Camps

    Four Centuries of Labour Camps. War, Rehabilitation, Ethnicity

    This project aims to bring about the first integrated, worldwide history of labour camps. Diachronic and comparative research will be used to trace the socio-political, ideological and economic conditions that led to the emergence of labour camps and remain conducive to their existence. All too often, labour camps, both within scholarship and in public perceptions, are associated mainly with the Nazi Lagers and Soviet gulags.

  • Labour Conflicts

    Labour conflicts are an important phenomenon in the history of capitalism, but also in other societies in which unequal labour relations exist. Through labour conflicts, social, economic, political and legal relations have been greatly altered. Researchers concerned with social and economic history but also those involved with institutional or political history cannot ignore labour conflicts.

  • Labour in the Iranian Oil Industry

    As the world's most important source of energy, the Middle East has emerged as the key to the stability of global economy. With over 9% of the globe's oil reserves and 15%-17% of worldwide reserves of natural gas, the hydrocarbons resources of the Persian Gulf's most populous state are crucial to future world energy supply. Iran claims to hold the world's second-largest proven reserves (131bn barrels) after Saudi Arabia (264.2bn barrels). Iran's geopolitical importance in the region and its strategic contribution to the global energy markets can by no means be underestimated.

  • Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe

    The Internationale Marx-Engels-Stiftung (IMES) was established in 1990 in Amsterdam. The IMES is an international network of the International Intitute of Social History,  the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften (BBAW), the Karl-Marx-Haus (KMH) of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation in Trier and the Russian State Archive for Social/Political History (RGA) and the Russian Independent Institute for the Study of Social and National Problems (RNI), both in Moscow. The main task of the IMES is to continue the publication of the Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe (MEGA-2).

  • Russian Historical Statistics

    The aim of the project is to create an on-line electronic repository of Russian historical statistics. The repository operates on the principle of a historical data-hub, bringing together data extracted from various published and unpublished sources in one place. Its principal focus is Russian economic and social history of the last three centuries (18th-21st).

Pages

See also the past projects page.