Research Projects

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Ongoing research

Past research

Ongoing research

Shape and structure of taxation in the Congo Free State (1885-1908)

Researcher: Bas De Roo

Supervisor: Baz Lecocq

Research description: Departing from the diverse range of theories on the role of colonial institutions in shaping African societies and based on literature about the factors that affect the nature of these governmental structures, my PhD focuses on the evolution of the fiscal system in the Congo Free State (CFS). I examine how and why the CFS levied taxes and study the extent to which fiscal objectives were achieved or had to be adjusted to the circumstances faced by the colonial administration. My research devotes particular attention to the fiscal interaction between the colonial state and the African taxpayer. On the one hand I attempt to point out how the CFS’s tax structure changed the local population’s way of life. On the other hand my research aims to show to what degree the colonial regime had to adapt its modes of taxation to the reaction of the Congolese taxpayers to its fiscal policies.

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The end of peasantries? Trajectories of peasant transformation in a comparative and global perspective

Researchers: Eric Vanhaute, Hanne Cottyn, Yang Wang, Yu Xiao and Sven Van Melkebeke

Research description: In this collaborative project we seek to make a comparative and global analysis of the position of peasant societies within the expanding capitalist world-system from 1500 to 2000, addressing the global questions of de-agrarianization, de-ruralization, and de-peasantization. We try to understand the different roads of transition via a comparative research design, looking for similar or divergent processes of (de)peasantization, both in space (zoning within the world-economy) and over time (phases of incorporation). We focus on four cases: Northwestern Europe (North Sea Basin), the East coast of China (Yangzi River Delta), Latin America (Central Andean Highlands) and Central Africa.
Project funded by the Flemish Research Council and  Ghent University, in collaboration with the Research Network ‘Polarizations and upward trends in the world-system (1500-2000)’, directed by I. Wallerstein (Yale University, co-funded by the Gulbenkian Commission).
The main hypothesis underlying this research project is that the well-known 'English road' of transition out of the ‘traditional’ peasant society is the exception in world history, and that what sometimes is called the 'Flemish road' (the survival, growth and eventually dismantling of a peasant economy within the expanding capitalist labour division) is much more normal. The focus of the research project is comparative and global. This research is structured in three steps. First we reconstruct the process of disintegration of peasant societies in a global context. Secondly we analyse the causes of this process, general causes (related to the global process of transformation) and specific (related to time and place). Thirdly we ask what the impact was of (huge) differences in space (zoning within the world-economy) and time (phase of incorporation). This project focuses on three cases: Western Europe (North Sea Area), East China (Yangtze Delta) and South America (Andes Region). Within this project we will sample five time periods: (about) 1600, 1800, 1900, 1950, 2000. This way we can work out a perspective that is long-term, comparative, and global.

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The Indian Ocean World: The Making of the First Global Economy in the Context of Human-Environment Interaction

Researcher: Angela Schottenhammer

Research description: Funded by the Canadian government as a MCRI (Major Collaborative Research Initiative) with 2,000,000 CAD, in cooperation with the Indian Ocean World Centre (IOWC), McGill University, Montreal.

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The Mamlukisation of the Mamluk Sultanate. Political Traditions and State Formation in 15th-century Egypt and Syria.

Researchers: Jo Van Steenbergen

Research description: Research funded with an ERC-Starting Grant, 1 October 2009 - 30 September 2014. In this research I aim to radically reconsider standard views of late medieval Islamic history. Positing that prosopographical research will allow for a welcome reconstruction of the political traditions that dominated the Syro-Egyptian Mamluk sultanate in the 15th century, I endeavour to show how new traditions emerged that were constructed around the criterion of military slavery, and how this actually reflects a process of state formation, which puts this regime on a par with emerging European states. Mamluk history (1250-1517) tends to be approached through a decline prism, as almost all studies presuppose that a static ‘mamluk’/‘military slavery’ system was the backbone of the political economy that came under increasing pressures from the 14th century onwards. In my research, I have demonstrated  how this view of the 14th century, in particular, is totally incorrect, suggesting that it was only in the 15th century that crucial political transformations took place in the region. The proposed research now aims to qualify the latter hypothesis and to reconstruct the dynamics of these transformations, via a thorough examination of the interplay between individuals, institutions, and social interactions in the course of 15th-century political events, as detailed in the massive corpus of contemporary source material. In the longer term, validation of this hypothesis will enable me to address fundamental new questions in pre-modern (Islamic) history, as part of trans-cultural processes common to all Euro-Mediterranean core regions.

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Past research

Chemical Compounds in the Congo: Pharmaceuticals and the 'Crossed History' of Public Health in Belgian Africa

Researcher: Myriam Mertens

Supervisor: Baz Lecocq

Pharmaceuticals, and especially their movements between different social and/or geographic settings, have become increasingly popular objects of study in medical anthropology and history. Overall, the colonial dimensions of such pharmaceutical mobilities have not received ample attention, explaining the often ahistorical accounts of pharmaceutical globalization, Eurocentric histories of drug development, or studies of colonial medicine in which the use of pharmaceuticals is not sufficiently problematized and contextualized. This research project builds on the emerging scholarship on pharmaceuticals and modern colonialism by examining the drug trajectories and pharmaceutical circulations implicated in Congo’s trypanocidal therapeutics between 1900 and 1945 and by looking at how these shaped and were shaped by the local circumstances of the Leopoldian and later Belgian colonial project. It considers the chemotherapeutic knowledge and substances constitutive of the pharmaceutical fight against sleeping sickness in Congo as entities moving across territorial borders as well as between different actors such as medical researchers, drug manufacturers, pharmacists, doctors, medical auxiliaries and patients, although not in any linear and diffusionist way, nor as part of simple top-down processes. As such, the project aspires to shed light on the complex networks of health care pertaining to colonial Congo.

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Renegotiating communal autonomy. Communal land rights and liberal land reform on the Bolivian altiplano. Carangas, 1860-1930

Researcher: Hanne Cottyn

Supervisor: Eric Vanhaute

This research was part of the project "The end of peasantries? Trajectories of peasant transformation in a comparative and global perspective", which is still partly ongoing (see above).

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Migration from a borderlands-perspective. Migration and settlement of Rwandophone migrants in the Kivu during the colonial period: cases-study and analysis

Researcher: Gillian Mathys

Supervisor: Baz Lecocq

Research description: My research is the historical analysis of the migration of 'Banyarwanda' from Rwanda towards the Kivu which was facilitated through the 'Banyarwandan' transplantation and settlement scheme. It was designed by the Belgian colonial government in the 1930s and aimed at solving the labour shortage which hindered the development of a (European) plantation economy in the Kivu region. The solution for this labour scarcity was the relocation of Kinyarwanda speakers from Rwanda to the Kivu. It is estimated that from the official start of this migration until independence, in the wake of this organized migration, 200 000 people migrated towards the Kivu.
 In the scope of this migration, Africans were incorporated and subordinated in the colonial/settler political economy by planned, or forced migration. However, it seems that this migration also opened the door to other opportunities for Africans. The colonial state was incapable to claim complete control over migratory flows in the region and was unable to force every migrant into this form of waged labour. The question is why they were unable to exert complete control over these migrants? How did Africans challenge colonial structures and policies and used this migration to meet their own ends?
 Initial research -executed as part of an MA-thesis on the migration of 'Banyarwanda' at SOAS (September 2005) only partly answers the question. Results indicate that colonial migration flows were grafted upon a stratum of pre-colonial migratory patterns. Some actors dealt with borders as if they were inexistent and continued pre-colonial patterns of mobility, others straddled different territories created by this partition and benefited from social, economic and political opportunities this partition brought about. The colonial state and African elites had their prerogatives depending on the context for stressing either the permeability or rigid nature of boundaries. 
The research in the scope of my doctoral research (start date February 1st 2007) builds on these initial results. The thesis is that the colonial state was unable to restructure migratory flows completely because of multi-layered triangular power-relations in the borderlands area: the colonial state, African elites and African peasants had their own stakes in this migration and in creating, safeguarding or challenging borders. To get a full grasp of these dynamics thorough research on the historical, economic, social and political nature of borders is necessary. More insight in migrant's motives and in the motives of the colonial state and African elites to either impede/encourage cross-border migration is required. All these questions ensure that the role and meaning of borders is not divided from the political, cultural and social economy in which they are embedded. 

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Leo H. Baekeland (1863-1944) as Scientific Entrepreneur. A Transatlantic History of Innovation and Knowledge Management

Researcher: Joris Mercelis

Supervisor: Christophe Verbruggen

Research description: This Ph.D. project studies the Belgian-American chemist-entrepreneur Leo H. Baekeland (1863-1944), inventor of Bakelite, so as to 1) cast new light on the emergence of science-based industry in the United States and 2) gain a better understanding of entrepreneurial scientists. With respect to the first research goal, the project’s reflexive, transnational approach allows to highlight connections and interactions that have remained underexplored thus far (e.g., transatlantic technoscientific networks). As regards the second, special attention is paid to scientists’ motivations for entering industry and the economic institutions that influenced their careers (e.g., intellectual property right regimes). Born in Ghent and trained at the local university, Baekeland moved to the United States in 1889, foregoing a career in European academia and abandoning an ill-fated photographic firm that he had co-founded less than two years before. In America, Baekeland would become an exceptionally successful chemical industrialist, especially after the invention of Bakelite, a synthetic resin, in 1907. While the dissertation’s first part focuses on Baekeland’s career prior to that year, the second pays special attention to Baekeland’s intellectual property strategies regarding ‘Bakelite’ on both sides of the Atlantic and highlights how Baekeland’s technological choices and preferences were influential in the development of the synthetic resin industry. The dissertation’s third and final part examines to what degree that industry and the Bakelite companies were science-based. By also investigating executive decision-making and the technical advice offered by Bakelite’s ‘service engineers’, the analysis extends beyond the traditional focus on in-house research & development work.

Finished on: on 21 May 2013, Joris Mercelis concluded this research by succesfully defending it in order to obtain his PhD degree in History.

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h: Cross-border connections in the production and circulation of knowledge pertaining to Congo: the case of trypanosomiasis (1900-1960) (Myriam Mertens, supervisor: prof. dr. Jan Art)

This research project deals with the production of medical-scientific knowledge concerning Congo during the colonial period. Rather than aiming at a monograph of the Prince Leopold Institute of Tropical Medicine, it takes on a relational approach to the history of 'Belgian' tropical medicine. More specifically, this project examines the role and importance of cross-border connections in the production and circulation of medical-scientific knowledge pertaining to the Belgian Congo. The basic underlying assumption is that the local context of scientific knowledge production is embedded in a larger network of communication and exchange. The particular case under investigation is the scientific knowledge production that was part of the fight against African trypanosomiasis, a human and animal disease that constituted a serious obstacle to colonial regimes and economies in sub-Saharan Africa. This research project aims to contribute to historiographical knowledge in a number of fields, especially the history of Belgian colonialism in its cultural-scientific dimensions, and of tropical (veterinary) medicine in connection with sub-Sahara Africa. It mainly wants to complement the historiography in these fields by proposing a more dynamic approach to the production of medical-scientific knowledge, one that takes into account the interactions across geographic, territorial, political, cultural, institutional, ethical... borders that influence the development of medical science. It investigates how and to what extent the production of knowledge pertaining to Congo was not simply an activity based in the Belgian metropole, but one in which exchanges between metropole and colony, between European scientists and indigenous inhabitants, as well as with other empires, were significant. Therefore, this research also contributes to the debate about cross-border science.



“The Fur Worlds” : a history of the transformation of the fur industry from a global perspective (1880-1950)

Researcher: Robrecht Declercq

Co-supervisor: Eric Vanhaute

Drawing on existing literature on global commodity chains, which links the world of production to the one of consumption, this Phd project makes an effort to understand the transformation of the commodity fur from a luxury product in to mass-product. More in particular, the project will draw attention to the ‘survival politics’ of several actors in both the Canadian and the Russian commodity chains, respectively, the Hudson’s Bay Company and the community of traders in Leipzig. Both actors, via subordinate institutions like the ‘development department’ and the ‘Reichszenstrale für Pelztierforschung’ initiated specific projects which enabled their governors to re-claim a central role in the commodity chains. Different levels to fully grasp the reach of the ‘modernisation’ of the fur trade need to be analysed: the level of the political economy, the concrete projects and their implications to natural resources but also on the level of consumption. I hope to show that the emergence of this new consumption culture in the interwar period was linked with an intensified commodification of nature which, in its turn, burdened future developments in the fur trade.

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The "Awad el Djouh Affair": Slave trade, Human Rights and the Shaping of the Postcolonial World (1948-1962)

Researcher: Baz Lecocq

This project takes mediatised micro histories of the slave trade to Saudi Arabia in the mid twentieth century as a focus to analyse the discursive construction of the postcolonial world in the North Atlantic, Africa and the Middle East.  This discursive history will be set in an analysis of the impact of this slave trade on Cold War "Questions" in wider national and international politics: Labour issues, decolonisation and changing geopolitics. It will address methodological and epistemic issues that rise from writing translocal and institutional world history: combining relational histories across polities and legal systems, with global structures and processes. Part of this research is carried out as Alexander von Humboldt Fellow in collaboration with researchers at the Zentrum Moderner Orient Berlin.

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The Impact of Motorised Transport on the Hajj from West Africa

Researcher: Baz Lecocq

Research description: Research carried out in collaboration with the African Studies Centre Leiden, theme group "Connections and Transformations", project I.C.E. in Africa: the relationship between people and the Internal Combustion Engine in Africa.
This research inquires into the history of the Hajj in the 20th century, departing from West Africa. In this period, the pilgrimage has undergone important changes of technical, economical, social, cultural, theological, and human geographical nature. The changes described are all intimately connected to the introduction of motorised transport in Africa and the Middle East. The consequences of the introduction of motorised transport to the Hajj will therefore be central in this study. Until the 20th century, the main roads taken by West African pilgrims were the trans-Saharan trade roads to North Africa, from whence the journey continued by sailing boats to Jeddah and then by road to Mecca. After the colonial conquest of Africa, the main roads shifted. On the one hand, the colonial authorities introduced a state organised pilgrimage by steamships from the ports of West Africa. On the other hand, the overland roads changed from a North-South trans-Saharan axis to a West-East trans-Sahel axis, leading to the Red Sea and across to Djeddah and then on to Mecca. This research will explore the main reasons for these notable shifts: colonial policy and the availability of new means of transport.

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