Climate change poses a challenge to human health, as unusual weather fluctuations influence the spread of infectious diseases. One example is cholera, often associated with weather conditions. However, our understanding of its link with climate remains limited, as prior research focuses on recent epidemics, often overlooking the role of human mobility. This project uses interdisciplinary techniques –from history, demography and epidemiology— to study how climate and human mobility shaped cholera diffusion in Europe before 1914, when major epidemics occurred. The project informs debates on how climate affected people’s health in history, and how it may influence future diarrheal disease outbreaks.

Why did the rise of global colonial trade since 1850 cause massive deforestation in some areas of the “Global South”, but not in others? Southeast Asia suffered some of the highest deforestation rates in the world and offers a rich area for study due to its political and social-economic diversity. In this project, long-run deforestation rates in insular Southeast Asia are reconstructed from colonial-era vegetation and topographic maps and statistical materials. To explain the observed patterns of spatial environmental change, researchers examine the interaction of global commodity trade with colonial policies, local land rights, and socio-economic and political inequalities.

This project analyzed how trade globalization affected the development of social-economic inequality across Southeast Asia between ca. 1830 and 1940. On the basis of a large amount of newly collected primary quantitative and qualitative materials it is concluded that local political power constellations and property rights regimes mitigated the effects of global trade on inequality. Large estates were mainly found in regions with private property rights and a powerful local nobility. Plantation agriculture generally resulted in greater inequality, whereas if export-production was in the hands of smallholders this link was absent.

Sub-Saharan Africa is the poorest region of the world today. An important strand of recent literature argues that African economies suffer from structural geographical and institutional impediments to growth. Western public opinion is deeply influenced by recurrent media reports on endemic African civil wars, famine and corruption, feeding a growing scepticism about the use of development aid. However, there exists no solid empirical evidence for a "persistent poverty" view. Has Africa always been poorer than the rest of the world? Or is current African poverty mainly the result of the severe economic and political crisis of the late 20th century? While there is consensus that African economies, to various degrees, expanded in response to international market integration during the colonial era (c.1880-1960), there is widespread disagreement on the question to which degree ordinary Africans actually benefitted. What is missing is a systematic account of long term welfare development in which the entire colonial era is connected to the post-colonial era on the basis of temporally consistent and internationally comparable indicators. Building on new developments in the living standards methodology this project aims to: 1. measure African living standards from the 1880s onwards using largely unexploited colonial archival sources; 2. assess long term changes in African welfare development in a global comparative perspective, using the available datasets on historical living standards in other world regions; 3. test theoretical hypotheses regarding the relationship between international market integration, income distribution and long term African welfare development. The research will be conducted by a principle investigator, 2 PhD-students and 2 research-assistants at the Centre for Global Economic History (Utrecht University). The project contains a strategy to disseminate its results to non-academic audiences and seeks to support the development of African research capacity in collaboration with international partners united in the African Economic History Network.

In 1901 the Dutch colonial government started the “Ethical Policy”, which included a programme of political decentralization and aimed to expand public infrastructure, education and health care in order to improve living conditions in the Netherlands East Indies. Both underlying motives and the extent to which this succeeded are the subject of academic debate. This project entails the collection and publication of a large body of primary data that will shed light on the following question: how was public spending distributed across localities in the Netherlands East Indies between 1892 and 1942 and how was this affected by decentralization.