Projects

On this page you can find a list of the most important research projects in which I’ve been involved as a researcher or principal investigator. Don’t hesitate to contact me if you want to know more.

Economies of trust? A new digital infrastructure on the urban poor in the Cape Colony

Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen, Universiteit Gent, Bonn University
2026-2030
Who could be trusted in a deeply unequal, cosmopolitan society? This project looks beyond colonial paper realities to reconstruct bottom-up social networks in the 18th-century Cape Colony and how these were performed vis-a-vis formal institutions. “A friend in the court is better than a penny in the purse” was a common proverb in the early modern period. But where did people with small purses find trustworthy friends to vouch for them in times of need? What role did gender, religion or kinship play in crafting support networks within highly asymmetrical colonial societies? And how did their inhabitants strategically deploy these ties of trust before courts of law, church councils and notaries? By scrutinizing the roles, interactions, and in/exclusion of witnesses in court, church and credit records of the Dutch Cape Colony, Economies of Trust aims to identify the social bonds that shaped society from below, and how these were performed vis-à-vis colonial institutions. Ultimately we will determine if and how these horizontal systems of support intersected with the vertical social categorizations propagated by colonial legislation.
Funding body: Gerda Henkel Stiftung
Supervisor team: Dries Lyna, Eva Lehner, Wouter Ryckbosch

An Ancestor’s Tale

VUB - UA - KUL
2023-2026
Social positions of children are not fully explained by talents and effort, but also by the social position of parents, grandparents, and even earlier generations. The role of income and education in explaining patterns of social mobility has often been studied, but those factors no longer seem able to sufficiently explain the remarkably low level of intergenerational social mobility attested by recent studies. The role of wealth has too often been neglected in this regard. In this project we address this issue from a historical perspective, while at the same time applying the results to policymaking today. This consortium will (1) reconstruct patterns of wealth and intergenerational wealth transmission over a period of 200 years in Belgium; (2) test the validity of potential mechanisms explaining the reproduction of wealth inequality; and (3) examine how public opinion, redistributive policies and wealth inequality are interlinked both in historical perspective and today.
Funding body: OZR VUB, UA, KUL.
Supervisor team: Wouter Ryckbosch, Oscar Gelderblom, Tim Soens, Gerlinde Verbist, Vincent Ginis, Jan Van Bavel, Cecile Meeusen, and Wim Van Lancker.
Data team: Dennis De Vriese, Tessa Ridder.
Research team: Daan Van Den Bussche, Julie Winters, Ingrid Schepers, Nicolas Brenninkmeijer, Ellen Roelandts, Seorin Kim.

Contesting fiscal fairness. Explaining fiscal reform in the 18th-century Austrian Netherlands (1749-1794)

VUB
2020-2023
When and how do societies adopt equitable systems of taxation? In modern societies taxation is considered indispensable: it is not only the foundation of state power, but also of economic institutions that allow markets to prosper. Therefore, fiscal historians studying the 19th and 20th centuries have argued that winning over the trust of taxpayers was instrumental in the establishment of modern, prosperous states. For this trust to be established, taxes had to be perceived as the equal responsibility of all citizens, destined for a justifiable purpose, and distributed in a fair rather than arbitrary way. It is often assumed that these conditions of equitable taxation were not yet met in the early modern period: prior to the 19th century taxation was generally regressive, arbitrary, and levied without any commitment towards social redistribution. Taxation is thus thought to have spurred inequality. This project will challenge this understanding of pre-modern fiscal history for the 18th-century Southern Low Countries by (1) examining the social distribution of taxation, (2) explaining the variety in fiscal systems through comparative analysis, and (3) tracing the intellectual context in which tax reform was shaped at different political levels. In order to achieve this objective, the project builds on exceptionally rich archives produced by a government commission tasked with the supervision and reform of subordinate financial administrations in the Austrian Netherlands.
Funding body: FWO Vlaanderen.
Supervisor team: Wouter Ryckbosch.
Research team: Yannis Skalli-Housseini.

Getuigenissen

VUB
2018-2023
Getuigenissen or ‘DH-CoDe’ is a digital collection of witness depositions and suspect interrogations preserved at criminal courts in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Belgium, as well as the infrastructure through which this collection is realised, managed and exploited. Depositions and interrogations offer rare insight into quotidian historical practices missing in other sources, and into the speech ordinary witnesses and suspects used to describe those practices. Such sources are not only of great interest to historians, but also provide a wealth of information to linguists, legal historians, sociologists, and other social scientists. The resulting corpus of 13.000 texts allows for innovative approaches to the social, economic, legal, and linguistic history of Belgium in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Funding body: OZR VUB.
Supervisor team: Wouter Ryckbosch, Anne Winter, Rik Vosters, Wim Vandenbussche, Margo De Koster.
Data team: Ans Vervaeke, Tom Bervoets, Jan Wijffels, Ward Leloup.
Output: The resulting dataset is available here.

Re-building Brussels (1695-2025)

VUB
2021-2026
Re-building Brussels: the construction sector as an engine for social inclusion and circularity builds upon the ongoing IRP programme (2016-2021) Building Brussels. Brussels City Builders and the Production of Space, 1794-2015 in which research teams Architectural Engineering (AELA), Historical Research into Urban Transformation Processes (HOST) and Cosmopolis – Centre for Urban Research (COSM) joined forces to investigate the viability of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in the construction sector in Brussels, an understudied yet essential sector in economic history, and an important one for the foundational economy and the productive city. The first phase of the programme delivered a detailed inventory of the sector from material suppliers over builders to finishers over the past 200 years and yielded important insights on changing networks, infrastructural needs, hotspots, types of workspaces and their integration in urban space. As such, it identified urbanist and planning strategies to safeguard space for production in dense and mixed urban areas today (Degraeve, De Boeck, Van Dyck 2018). In this second programme, we aim to improve our understanding of the long-term dynamics that shaped the relationship between urban construction and its ecological and social impact. This project will therefore examine the ways in which - and the reasons why - material reuse and the labour market have evolved in Brussels since the beginning of modern urban growth in the eighteenth century until today. This research will at the same time tackle contemporary urban challenges of the circular economy and the labour market as a stepping-stone for social mobility, reducing intra-urban inequalities.
Supervisor team: Ine Wouters, Stephanie Van de Voorde, Niels De Temmerman, Heidi Deneweth, Wouter Ryckbosch, Michael Ryckewaert, David Bassens.
Research team: Karoline da Silva Rodrigues, Jasmin Baumgartner, Louise Houba, Lara Reyniers, Matthijs Degraeve.

Plumbing the City. The regulation of sanitary installers in urban Europe (1850-1940)

VUB
2022-2026
Between 1850 and 1940, governments were heavily concerned with improving the hygienic conditions in many European cities, intervening both in the provision of public utilities of water supply and sewage and in the construction of private sanitary installations. In contrast to ample business-historical studies on the relation between the state and distribution companies, it is unclear how sanitary regulations affected the supply side of the urban market for private sanitary installations. By connecting public utilities to bathrooms and water-closets, plumbers catered to the city’s essential needs. Analysing how their organisation and know-how were affected by regulation allows to contribute to debates in economic history that, following Polanyi, are centred on the impact of governments and the level of (de)regulation in the market economy of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. London, Paris and Brussels present interesting cases to study how common urban problems could lead to different paths adopted in tackling them. They needed the same resources of drinking water and sewage disposal to sustain their growth, but they developed different urban-morphological contexts and different levels of sanitary government intervention. By using policy sources, censuses, trade directories and archives of trade associations, this project will increase our understanding of how governments were able to impact the supply side of the market in order to create healthier urban environments.
Funding body: FWO Vlaanderen.
Supervisor team: Wouter Ryckbosch, Ine Wouters.
Research team: Matthijs Degraeve.

Product quality and governance in the making of the consumer society: selling meat in late- and post-corporative Brussels (1770-1860)

VUB
2019-2024
The origins of the consumer society have long been hotly debated. Recent approaches emphasize the role of governance in providing the necessary context for a consumer society to take shape. This study contributes to this debate by examining the regulation of a highly degradable, insecure, and potentially dangerous commodity such as meat in the 1770-1860 period of rapid economic, political and urban transition. Examining governance in Brussels, a city consistently in the vanguard of important political, economic and social transformations – within and beyond the market for meat – will allow us to deepen our understanding of the role of governance in the emergence of modern consumerism, the main actors involved and the underlying ideas and principles motivating this change. Such principles include crucial elements of modern-day consumer society as the primacy of consumer interest, the rise of a welfare state concerned with its citizens’ interests, and the establishment of a (regulated) free market as the pre-eminent means of defending these. Thus the analysis will not only elucidate shifts in economic thought and practice but also allow an empirical approach to assumed 19th-century evolutions as the expansion of state power and competences and the rise of consumer interest. Tracing such key aspects of the consumer society in late- and post-corporative Brussels will contribute to determining the role of governance in bringing about a modern consumer society in the 19th century.
Funding body: FWO Vlaanderen.
Supervisor team: Wouter Ryckbosch
Research team: Dennis De Vriese

Living with capitalism: comparative histories of inequality (1200-2000)

VUB
2024-2029
A growing body of literature on recent changes in inequality strikingly draws on terminology from the pre-modern past to describe new and often alarming trends. Modern society has been described as ‘neo-feudal’, ‘patrimonial’, ‘oligarchic’, ‘plutocratic’, and ‘dynastic’ - thus invoking clear parallels with pre-modern worlds of stark inequality (McGoey and Thiel 2018; Piketty 2013; Winters 2011; Freeland 2012; Savage 2021; Beckert 2022). Although drawing parallels to distant historical eras can be evocative, their superficial application usually offers little insight in the underlying processes of social change. In this project we aim to contribute to the growing literature on the long-term dynamics of inequality during the emergence and global expansion of capitalism, from the 13th century until today. The proposed research programme aims to move the current state of the art forward by approaching the issue of historical inequality a) in a comparative framework, b) from the perspective of entangled history, and c) with attention for bottom-up agency in determining the outcome of capitalist development. Taking the history of inequality in a comparative global context as an object of study, allows our research group to contribute to wider debates on the historical consequences and responses to capitalism. In a time when the social and ecological consequences of continued capitalist expansion are increasingly questioned, this research programme aims to contribute empirically grounded historical insight into the ways in which global challenges can be expected, avoided and mitigated.
Funding body: OZR VUB.
Supervisor team: Wouter Ryckbosch, Anne Winter, Bart Lambert, Benoît Henriet, Klaas Van Gelder.

CLARIAH-VL+

UGent, UA, KUL, VUB
2025-2028
CLARIAH-VL+ focuses on boosting research in the Humanities and Social Sciences using digital tools and services and fostering collaborations to create an accessible cloud platform for researchers. It unifies disciplines, which share the challenge of utilising a wide range of sources and heritage from ancient manuscripts to modern digital data. The project acts as a bridge, connecting researchers in Flanders with broader European research communities. It addresses three major societal issues: environmental change, social inequality, and the complexities of migration and cultural diversity. By integrating insights from Social Sciences with a detailed analysis typical of the Humanities, and linking these to other fields like ecology and geography, CLARIAH-VL+ aims to provide comprehensive new understandings. A key aspect of CLARIAH-VL+ is its focus on transforming old and often neglected data — like weather records and population statistics — into useful information. This data is crucial for tackling pressing societal challenges. CLARIAH-VL+ commits to providing the infrastructure to use these data in practice by harnessing the capabilities of large language models and generative AI and securing the sustainability of essential research components. Through these efforts, CLARIAH-VL+ not only makes research easier, but also Humanities and Social Sciences research more relevant and impactful for society.
Funding body: FWO IRI